What a difference a day makes! This time last night, I was hanging on for dear life in the cockpit while my seat lifted and rolled and lurched in 3.8m seas and 25-30 kts of wind. Tonight I am eking out every last knot of boat speed that I can in 9-12 kts of wind and what seems like a flat sea (although we apparently still have 2m). Before too many more hours go by, the wind is expected to have dropped completely, and we will be motoring again (which will be nice from a cabin warmth perspective).
The seas were not so calm this morning when we felt a sudden jarring under the hull. It was followed in quick succession by two more 'bumps'. We are pretty sure we hit something, but with the sea state, we never did see what it might have been, despite having a good look at our wake. We still had the 3m waves and mixed swell from overnight. We did a quick check below, and didn't seem to be taking on water at the shaft, and didn't have water pouring into the bilge from somewhere up forward, the steering is fine but we will still have someone (Max) looking in the shaft compartment when we next start the engine [Note: The wind died and we gingerly started the engine at the end of my watch with Max looking into the steering compartment (familiar from his day spent removing the lift pump in Rongerik) and me on the helm, and the engine/propeller seem fine].
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| Comforting to have a solid, conservative designed hull shape to withstand bumps. You can see how big the keel is in this photo from our last haulout. |
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| And a beefy, skeg hung rudder. |
After Max's off-watch ended abruptly with things going bump under the hull, he was right into the thick of things in the cockpit. I had two Japanese fishing boats on AIS, and a third boat (cargo ship) passing by. We were set to have a CPA (closest point of approach) with one of the fishing boats of anywhere from 2nm to 0.1nm, depending on how we were pointing in the waves. This was disconcerting, to say the least, especially as I hadn't been able to contact the boat via VHF. Since the 'what's for lunch' question was surfacing, I left Max to play chicken with the fishing fleet and headed to the galley. As time went on, more and more contacts came into view. Soon we were in the middle of a triangle of boats; the next thing I knew there were six contacts, and if we turned downwind to avoid one of them, we would be closer to one of the others. Victoria joined Max with the binos, and although we could eventually see one of the boats, we never did manage to reach them on the radio, even by calling direct using DSC. If they were fishing, we were the give-way vessel, so we simply gave way and carried on with our day. We all remarked at how much harder the encounter would have been before the days of AIS, because we would have hardly seen them; even with a bearing and distance, it was hard to pick the ships out of the swell.
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| Threading my way through the Japanese fishing fleet. |
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| and then as I got closer even more ships in the formation appeared. |
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| They are hard to see even in these good conditions and never responded to hails on the VHF either by voice or DSC. |
When we were in Mexico, our sailmaker asked why we didn't have a gas strut in our boom vang. The gas strut would have made the vang put positive pressure on the boom, keeping it well up in the air and off the bimini without the use of a line called a topping lift. At that stage, it just hadn't made it to the top of our list to investigate, and we had just gotten used to using the topping lift as we had done with all the other boats we had sailed. For the five years since then, we have enjoyed the ease of having a gas strut in our boom vang - until today. At one point this morning, we realized that there was slack in the preventer/main sheet combination that hadn't been there before. When Max went on deck to investigate, he found that the boom vang was totally slack. I guess we have been cruising a long time when the 'new' gear that we installed has begun to fail! We will go back to using our topping lift for the rest of this passage, and see whether we can re-fill or replace our gas strut when we get to Alaska. The original strut was a heap of rust when Max took apart the vang in Mexico, but we are hopeful that the new strut will be in decent shape, and that we might even be able to re-fill it with gas in Alaska.
When my mom and dad visited us in Fiji last October, all the Fijians were fascinated by the 'stokini' my mom was knitting. Invariably, she had a crowd gathered around her watching in fascination as her fingers flew with fine yarn and four tiny needles. She had a pair of woolen socks in the works for each grandchild, two of which she left with us and one which came in a care package sent to Majuro. Now that the sea temperature has dropped again, and the cabin warmth provided by the engine is a distant memory, those socks have come out of the cupboard, and those grand-feet are toasty warm. Thanks Grammy!
We generally expect to run our engine or generator every few days at sea if the sun has not been shining. With all the wind we have had, our wind generator has been whirring away and keeping our batteries pretty happy, so we haven't had to turn to fossil fuel for charging for quite some time. Our wind generator has a tough time when we are close hauled on starboard tack (as we have been for much of this trip) because turbulent air off the sail gets directed to it, but now that we have been broad reaching in 20 kts, it has had plenty of clean wind. Given that it is providing power through a $20US rectifier, that we included in our spare parts order as an after-thought, we are pretty content! We ended up mailing back both of the expensive charge controllers that were sent when our original one overheated as they would not work with our wind generator.
The 'what's for dinner' question was answered with the least preparation time and the most oven heat today - we had some of the meat pies on which we stocked up leaving Fiji. We ordered several dozen pies as part of our frozen meat order from the butcher, and at the time I wasn't sure that they would even all fit in the freezer (they did, but I couldn't have added one more pie to the list!). Now we are down to an almost-empty freezer and the last couple of meals of meat pies. We will plan to have the last of them when the seas pick up again later in the week.
Love to all,
Elizabeth
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At 2019-07-01 2:18 AM (utc) SV Fluenta's position was 43°13.14'N 175°32.40'W
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