Distance sailed in last 25 hours: 130 nm
Distance to Hilo, Hawaii: 2778 nm
Latitude: 13 02.32 N
Longitude: 107 27.55 W
COG: 271 M
SOG: 7.0 kts under sail
Wind: 9 kts NNE
Seas: 3 ft swell, 3 ft wind waves
Weather: 60% Cloud Cover
Barometric Pressure: 1009.9, rising
Sea Temperature: 85 F
We are trying to catch up on our sleep in the morning, so our updates may come out later than they used to. Please bear with us while we tweak our schedules.
Yesterday morning while making our rounds, Phillip found three flying fish on the deck. These are the first who've ever made the jump successfully. Sadly, they did not survive the trip, and Phillip committed their bodies to the deep.
While we were eating breakfast we heard a loud *pop*! The tack attachment point webbing on 155% Tape Drive genoa had failed due to chafe and UV damage. We rolled it up on the furler to the reef point to keep the tack from flogging and resolved to look out for a lull to swap the sail out for our high-cut 135% genoa.
The mast and boom fittings are having a hard time with the motion from the slatting at night. The vang and the gooseneck are bearing the brunt of the forces and their bushings are basically shot at this point. On the morning rounds we found laying on the deck two of the eight screws that secure the vang to the mast. The remainder were quite loose. We've got them all in and tight again, but they will bear constant watching.
Just as we were about to serve Krabby patties for lunch, the latch on the fridge door decided to come apart. The screw that holds the latch together was stripped. We held it shut with our favorite weapon, the bungee cord. After lunch, Phillip made new screw from one of those in our stores in Samadhi's workshop. That should hold for at least the remainder of the voyage and then some.
We're making progress on getting our AIS receiver wired. It's now mounted and connected to power. All that remains is to put a connector on the antenna cable in the lazarette (a rather uncomfortable job because of the confined space) and then to program the Garmin GPSMap 5212 chartplotter to read its data.
We put up the spinnaker in the afternoon and sailed under it for a time. Our lull finally came just as Kelly was starting to make dinner at 0000Z (5 p.m. Samadhi Time). She set things so that they would stay put on the galley counter while she and Phillip wrestled with the big sail.
Getting 155% down and stowed was a real challenge. For those of you who've never folded a sail, I'm not sure how best to describe it. First, you probably have to have an idea of just how big the sail is. The "155%" part of the sail name describes how long the foot, or bottom edge, of the sail is relative to the distance from the base of the forestay where the tack, or bottom front corner, of the sail is attached back to the base of the mast. 155% means that it's more than half again that distance. On Samadhi, that puts it at about 34 feet. Then you have the luff, or leading edge, of the sail. Our mast is 76 feet off of the deck. The luff runs along the jib stay, the wire that is the hypotenuse of the triangle described by the vertical line of the mast and the horizontal line of deck running forward from it to the base of the stay. This makes it over 100 feet. I hope you're starting to get an idea of the magnitude involved.
Now, let's say you manage to get the sail all on deck with no problems--not a big deal, especially when there are two of you. On land, we'd just pull it off the boat, lay it out flat somewhere, flake it (fold it like an accordion), roll it up, and stuff it in a sail bag. On Samadhi, the largest clear space on the foredeck is about two feet wide and less than twenty feet long, curving along the shape of the hull. To say that we were cramped doesn't even begin to describe it.
Any sailcloth is very stiff. This particular sail is made from a proprietary kevlar-reinforced laminate called Tape Drive. Lucky for us, this means that it's not as heavy as if it were dacron, but it still tips the scales at over 100 pounds. I'm not sure I've encounted anything as thick and heavy as sailcloth elsewhere, but suffice to say, it would rather not be folded.
Now imagine two sailors trying to manipulate such a sail in the last hour of sunlight on a boat describing every variant of yaw, pitch, and roll available to it. Yeah, it was a bit of a mess. (As sailors, we have a different word for it, but this is a family show.) It took a long time, and it's not anywhere near the crisp neat burrito of sail that fits in its sail bag. That left us with figuring out where to store the thing.
Like many cruising boats, we carry a dinghy on our foredeck. Ours is a rigid Fatty Knees sailing dinghy. (The big RIB we keep secured to davits on Samadhi's transom.) Given that we'd been tripping over the dink and its tie-down strap during the adventure of flaking the genoa, it was the obvious choice for where to stow the thing. With some sail ties and a bit of brute force, we were able to make the sail fast under the dinghy and still have access to the all-important ventilation hatches in the forward cabins.
Then, all we had to do was rig and hoist our heavier, reaching genoa. As is occasionally the case, our initial attempt at reeving the lines wasn't exactly successful, but soon we were sailing with the new headsail, and dinner was on the table.
Just after we sat down to dinner of spaghetti and garlic bread, the satellite phone rang. Veronique and Chip were calling to chat with the boys. It had been a few days since they'd spoken, and the boys were very excited both to talk and that the mystery of being unable to call us was solved.
While we were happy that the wind had calmed long enough for us to swap headsails, we were less thrilled about the continued lull. Sails slatted through most of night. The noise of the rig destroying itself and our exhaustion from the work of the day and two weeks without an uninterrupted night's sleep combined to make what may have been the worst night underway ever. It's incredibly disturbing to sit helplessly while the sails slat above you. We leave them up because if we were to douse them, the boat would be completely at the mercy of the seas and without the stability gained from the sails.
The wind came up after one last squall passed in the morning. It's been blowing at 6 - 10 kts since and we're managing to sail comfortably. We're hoping that we'll have more consistent wind today.
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