… it could have been!

15 KN of a constant wind from E so we could run with 7 – 8 KN towards Penrhyn Island…

Dreams!

Instead, in my watch I had first winds of 4 – 9 KN TWS with very frequent changes in directions for quite a while, requiring always adjustments of the wind vane angle. At the end of this period the wind turned in circles and was almost zero. Not a sailor’s dream but a nightmare.

Then one of the dark clouds, a fully loaded nimbus cloud, could not hold back anymore and dumped a lot of water on us. But it also brought a lot of wind. I saw 17 KN of TWS indicated. Sails needed to be adjusted.

I mounted the barber hauler at the genoa to open it to it’s maximum. Next I trimmed the main. Fortunately, my gut feeling yesterday evening told me to “dress” MaRe on her normal pajama. This was the right decision for 2 reasons. First MaRe was prepared for strong winds, second she runs better on a broad reach course because the genoa doesn’t get so much lee effect from main reefed down to 2.

Both were needed. We got winds of 25 – 27 KN TWS and needed to run a broad reach course of 145 deg AWA STB for quite a while. I even reefed the genoa according to my reefing table.

MaRe was just running fine with the down wind direction pointing exactly to Penrhyn Island. But rain was pouring down on MaRe. Visibility maybe 200 m; maybe. The wind waves got rounded by the densely hitting off the water surface by the millions of rain drops. It gives a kind of surrealistic scenario.

Once in a while I had to reset the wind vane angle of the autopilot. But that was all.

However a feeling slowly creeped in side of me and become stronger and louder. Suddenly, Shigeo, who is a Japanese native speaker, heard and understood the “peko, peko, …” coming from my stomach. He prepared a standing breakfast at the bar of MaRe . (MaRe indeed has a place call in the design “bar”. It is convenient for many things but never used as a bar.)

The standing breakfast was good. It started with a left over of a kind of stew. The base was a Knorr Instand Soup pepped up with fried meat, onions, garlic, and noodles and made spicy with pepper. Excellent. Warming up my body.

Then, board baked bread, Emmentaler, sliced chorizo, a goat cheese, and sliced tomato and, especially the rest of a Roquefort for Shigeo and, how could it be differently, cabbage salad for Shigeo was placed on the “bar”. (Let me add here the comment that I like his excellent cabbage salad but ate the tomato today.)

While we had our breakfast the wind went down in the range of 10 – 15 KN. The rain also stopped. Decision: change the reef 2 in the main sail for reef 1. Once the main with the reef 1 was really fully up, the wind was down to 2 KN of TWS. The old game. Sail up, wind down, sail down, wind up…

For a while we were more of less drifting and I was busy keeping MaRe in a position that the tiny bit of wind left over filled somehow the sails.

Finally, after really quite a while, neglecting customer satisfaction completely, Mr Wind-ow started to work and shoveled some wind to us and MaRe started slowly too move in the right direction. It was just enough that at 1200 the day distance became exactly 100 NM. What a difference to our sail from Panama to the Gambiers where he had often more than 150 NM as day distance stuff top fun fun above 180 NM. (Day distance is the distanced made good in 24 h; typically calculated from noon to noon.)

Right now we sail with an AWA of 60 deg STB and an AWS of around 10 KN at SOG of around 5 KN. We deserve this nice sailing because we had to work for quite a while.

ETA at the 1st WPT of Penrhyn, I named “PenrhynSW, is 24-09-24. Let’s see what it is tomorrow.

At end, our night was not a wonderful dream night at all, but sailing presents a huge variation of experiences.