Are we having fun yet???????
Most yachts do this passage in 21 days. We have 3 days to go!!! All yachts that left Galapagos have experienced extensive squalls in addition to the yachts heading down from Mexico. Strange season!!
Although we find ourselves sailing along in shades of grey again, we have had mostly clear skies for the last week, with some nice sailing. We have been poled out for the last 5 days; not our favourite point of sail.
Our morning has been spent sailing the boat (a novelty as cruising is a little like point and press...get the sails up, point in the general direction of destination and away you go!!) which has been quite tiring. The wind has come from different directions and we have gybed countless times to stick to the rhumb line as best we can. It takes us 15 min to gybe the boat, and we do the mainsail first, then the pole. Peter has to run the topper around the headsail each gybe. We can only pole out the jib as opposed to the #1 heady. Now we have little wind but maybe some squalls tonight.
Chafe has been a problem with the headsail sheets. Peter has rigged up pegs off the forward shrouds and clips the lazy sheets in the peg.
We feel(and Peter has seen!) we have a little collection of marine growth (gooseneck barnacles) on our hull and have lost about a knot in boat speed. However, after the Marquesas, another 4 day passage to Apatiki Atoll in the Tuamotos is our haul out.
Peter has been baking some wonderful foccacia and I have been doing the cakes. We are eating well (but lost weight!) and now are on tins as our fresh food has run out. Having a side galley has been good in the rolly seas.
There have been a few great days of 170 miles, 2 sail reaching which was a lot of fun, albeit that we should have been keeping our height and making more west than south. We are paying for that now.
We think we will have wind right through to the finish, so we will have enough fuel for a few days. We get duty free fuel in the Marquesas, however our check in port has fuel shortages. The fuel pump Sam organised for us does indeed pump efficiently. We lost track of time and the putting the return fuel into the other tank caused a brief moment of overflow!!! We now know we can polish our fuel from one tank into another. When it calms down a bit, we are going to empty the saloon tank by hand and give it more of a clean. We should have done it when Peter and Terry had the tank out, but we just wanted to get it all back together quickly.
According to Bob McDavitt in NZ, we could be in for an El Nino year this year. Translates into light trades, if not reversed!!! Joy! Who knows what the weather will be like????????? Back to the dart board!!
Peter worked out yesterday that this passage is the equivalent of 7 years of Saturday afternoon sailing on the river..so our new mainsail will have had a bit of a workout by the time we get there. Must mean that Teddy has circumnavigated the globe at least once!!!
Advice from the ships master is that this has presented a wonderful opportunity for me to learn patience, if I chose to accept the challenge!!!!!!!! Although a frustrating sail, it has not been overly difficult.
So at the end of the day we will have just under 300 miles to go and look forward to getting the hook down!
The hunt for the perfect sail continues!!!!!!!!
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