Sometime around midnight last night the wind shifted and shortly after died. So after much flapping and fussing of sails they were furled away and on went the motor.
In very light winds you have a couple of options:
Keep on sailing, adjusting course and sails to make the best of it, but ultimately listen to the horrendously expensive (about the price of a small car) set of sails flap themselves to death. Good times.
Furl away the sails and put on the motor, burning about 3 litres and hour of fuel (3-5 USD an hour – or about 100 USD a day). Putting up with the noise and smell from the diesel engine (the same one they used to put in London Black Taxis).
Take down the sails and simply bob about in the ocean waiting for the wind to return. Super uncomfortable and soul destroying.
We pick option b most of the time – mostly because we value having sails that are currently in good condition and can’t bare to hear them get trashed. So we motored until the sun came up. When Tina came on watch, she and Jon managed to get itchy foot sailing again, albeit very slowly and in the wrong direction, but at least the sails were mostly happy.
After a cup of coffee we fixed the direction problem, gybing the spinnaker pole which is a job that should be easy but really never is. And after lunch we switched the genoa (big white flappy sail at the front) for a spinnaker (even bigger and colourful flappy sail at the front). This worked moderately well, except for the rally seas. Anyway, long story boring, in the afternoon we took down the sails and started motoring again into the night.
What else?
Oh it is a small world. As mentioned in an earlier blog post we are part of a couple of satellite email based fleets where we exchange our position and other details with other cruisers out crossing the Pacific. Well, Jon noticed a new boat joined the fleet today as it departs Panama. Victoria from New Zealand.
For those of you who haven’t been reading and memorising this blog for the last two year (why not?!) Itchy Foot met Jim and Karin from Victoria back in Port de Andrax in Mallorca over two years ago. They were intact the first real cruising couple that Itchy Foot ever met, being in their 70s and having been cruising on and off since the 80s. We could talk for hours about this amazing couple, but just go read the blog post from back then if you are interested (April/May 2016). Back then we didn’t have Atlantic crossing plans much less Pacific plans, but when we said goodbye we hoped we would see them downwind.
We also discovered a few weeks ago that Tina has a playmate onboard another boat in the fleet, Rogue. Tina, as I’m sure many of you know, has crossed the Pacific before, when she was five years old with her parents. Well, on that trip she her mom became good friends and stayed in contact with a couple from New Zealand who also had kids, playmates with Tina. Being a small world, it turns out that one of those playmates is now sailing across the Pacific with HIS five year old kids on a boat called Rogue who are currently a few hundred miles behind us.
I see play dates in our future; not just for Teo.
Oh and just to embarrass her I’ll upload a photo of Tina aged 5 crossing the Pacific and a recreation of the photo from a few days ago – hardly changed at all!.
