Having launched myself into a new day with yet another sail change and some coffee, here goes with some reality. its been a slow old night – sorry Roger – we’ve spent the first few days discovering what happens out here and – for me at least – it needs a bit of a rethink. slow night becos we got the EGC forecast yest. evening offering 30-40 and (now upgraded to 50) but still some distance away, and didn’t want to be caught out in the dark with twin poles set and 40 – 60+kts and 10 metre waves up our collective chuff like the previous night so we took them off and set the storm jib. easy in the harbour, but about 20 minutes of hard yakka on a pitching and rolling foredeck for two people and very tiring.
lesson one – we won’t be able to cope with sail changes every few hours to keep the boat at close to max speed. problem is to work out the best compromise. thinking of various combos to give more variation with less effort.
lesson 2 – the wind patterns at least at this latitude have been less consistent than i expected. may change as we go south. We don’t seem to need to eat – have done almost no cooking and cant find a lot of the gear anyway, but that will improve as we get time to poke around in the stacks.
lesson 3 – no really a lesson but more an axiom – wet sails stuffed into bags take up a lot more room than when they are neatly flaked by willing or even recalcitrant foredeck unionists so the front end of the boat is stuffed tightly with fat sails, the barber-surgeon’s two chests, spuds, oranges plywood, the sushi board (an in joke for those who have sailed in the boat) and all the misc junk we couldn’t find space for down the back. will improve, but not easy to manage for the moment.
The logs ramblings can be cryptic, so we have added: