On the last days we had between 1200 – 1500 always a no wind at all situation for about an hour.

The same happened today.

After sailing with a nice speed in the morning, the wind went down and we pulled the gennaker up to get more speed out of the wind. Roughly half of the TWS can be turned into STW with the 123 m2 Big Blue.

Genoa furled, main sail down, boom stabilized, gennaker sheets prepared, pulling up the gennaker and attaching tack line, sheets and halyard, and pulling up the gennaker takes about 15 – 20 min. (Never measured only feeling.)

Once the gennaker was up and I started to trim it, the wind was down to below 4 KN TWS. This is basically a no wind situation which came pretty fast. I waited for 10 more minutes to see if the wind comes back. It didn’t do me this favor. Then we put the gennaker down and MaRe drifted. Unfortunately, the current in today’s position was not really in favor for us but it also didn’t push us back like it did once when we sailed from Panama to the Gambiers.

Shigeo started cooking. A curry with the last portion for two of the big wahoo we caught the other day.

The moment we sat down to eat, the wind came back powerful. We closed a the cockpit behind us to protect us and the food from the wind.

Immediately after the delicious lunch, I pulled out the genoa, the most suitable sail for a strong winds from S directions when need to head N to NW. We made pretty good speed for maybe an hour, then the wind slowed down again to 10 KN and less.

Right now we have only 7 – 8 KN and it seems the wind is turning towards E, which is his normal wind direction.
Once the AWA comes to 110 deg STB, we will set the main with reef 3, MaRe’s night gown.

Weather forecast indicates that we get late in the evening/night winds around 15 KN. Also did this wind reef 1 would be enough, reef 2 is for safety reasons. We do have a bunch of numbers clouds E of us and we need to consider they bring rain and a lot of wind. So I follow my old motto “Fail to prepare, is prepare to fail!”