Distance sailed in last 24 hours: 100 nm
Distance to Hilo, Hawaii: 2540 nm
Latitude: 13 23.31 N
Longitude: 111 28.50 W
COG: 260 M
SOG: 3.6 kts under sail
Wind: 5 kts N (unreliable because of nearby squalls)
Seas: 1 ft swell, 1 ft wind waves
Weather: 95% Cloud Cover
Barometric Pressure: 1009.3, steady
Sea Temperature: 84 F
Yesterday was a quieter day aboard Samadhi. The seas were placid, gently rocking us as they helped push us towards Hawaii. The winds were on the light side, but we kept moving all day long. We were under fairly clear skies, with scattered, high altitude, cirrus clouds. There are the usual puffy cumulus clouds floating down by the water, which occasionally turn into squalls. The high altitude clouds were showing evidence of some serious wind up high!
Since conditions were so quiet, we decided to catch up on laundry. We managed to process three loads through the machine by mid-afternoon. We do our laundry aboard in a small, front-loading washer/dryer, much like one you would use at home. When we were preparing to go cruising, lots of people said that taking a washing machine along was a silly idea. Most cruising sailboats don't have washing machines, so laundry is done by hand or ashore when the boat reaches port. For us, we simply put the clothing into the machine, add detergent and fabric softener, and let it run! We don't typically use the dryer function unless it's raining continuously as it uses a fair bit of power. In any case, clothing hung outside dries faster here in tropical conditions than the dryer can dry it. Our washing machine is one of the better choices we made when we were setting up Samadhi to leave. It has made our lives much easier as we cruise!
We sailed through the day with the genoa and main, then added the staysail in the afternoon. Finally, we set the spinnaker and sailed with the chute up until evening squalls appeared. Once we were within a few miles of the squalls, we doused the spinnaker and stowed it below decks. With only one of us on watch, we don't generally sail with the spinnaker through the night.
Once again the wind calmed in the night, with the exception of the squalls going by overhead. The adverse current meant that at times we were completely stopped even though we were still moving through the water. The slatting, as previously described, is a big problem for the whole rig. This time the lowest batten managed to escape entirely.* Everything else seems to have survived until the wind came back about 1200Z (5 a.m. Samadhi Time).
We still aren't catching fish. We don't have a shortage of food, but fresh caught fish is always a welcome bonus in our diet. We see lots of flying fish, and certainly something is down there that chases and eats them!
* Losing our lowest batten has the least effect on sail shape, so this won't impact our performance noticeably. The reason that we are having issues with the battens is the horrible batten tensioning system on our main. Our main is made by UK Sails, and is a good quality sail with the notable exception of the batten ends. The system that UK chose for the batten tension is based on a velcro strip that is impossible to tension effectively and won't hold whatever small amount of tension you manage to apply! We were already planning on retrofitting it with a more effective batten tensioning system once we reached Hawaii, even before we started having issues with the lowest batten loosening. We attempted to have it looked at in Latin America, but south of Mexico, competent sail lofts are hard to come by.
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