A truly wonderful experience this morning. We were accompanied for a couple of hours by a large pod - multiple scores of- these beautiful creatures, which, I think, are Pilot Whales. Fortunately, they travel at a more sedate pace than their Dolphin cousins and so it was possible to get some half decent pictures...
Despite their more restrained manners, they were just as inquisitive as Dolphins. Many times, groups of them were almost rubbing against the boat rather like a cat rubs against your leg when asking for food. The biggest ones were about 4 meters long. I spotted at least one baby amongst them, who, under supervision, came right alongside, only inches from the boat. He, or she, was about a 1.5 metres long. They were jet black, as can be seen, with sizeable dorsal fins and large rounded heads.
It's nearly 1700 BST, the sun is out and we are running directly for the Lizard, 190 miles off at 5+ knots. This morning, progress was very slow at a measly 1.5-3 knots, but we finally broke through into slightly fresher winds at around midday and at about 1500 put in the course change from our previous Northerly heading on which we had been in pursuit of more wind.
Given the forecast (we are now able to pick up the shipping forecast on LW - the Navtex, our only other on-board source of weather info, with a range of about 270 miles, sadly seems to have expired) is for these winds to hold over the next day or so; it therefore doesn't seem too unreasonable to expect tha we'll be in Falmouth sometime on Monday.
This afternoon I re-organised the mainsail preventer system (the rope that goes forward from the end of the boom to a block (pulley) forward and then back to the cockpit. It's used to stop the boom from uncontrollably slamming from one side of the boat to the other when changing direction with the wind behind (gybing), so that it blows from the other side of the boat
A stanchion (the short upright poles you can see in the photos above) had got bent through careless use of the preventer (my fault). I therefore moved the block forward and whilst I was at it added a second preventer attached to the boom at the same place but rigged on the other side of the boat so that once the gybe has been completed we can just tighten that rather than having to move the single preventer acrosd the boat.
Once I had done that, I realised that all moving the blocks would achieve - unless the preventer was fully slackened before the gybe - would be to put the strain on a different stanchion!
Still, at least I had hopefully, made it a little easier to manage the gybing process.
I then tried to straighten the bent stanchion. I couldn't, it was too strong - that repair will require heat to soften the stainless steel. However, in the process of trying, the eye at the end of the guard rail wire, got stuck in the plastic anti- chafe tube through which it ran (see last but one photo above). I tried for two hours unsuccessfully to get it out. Finally, I followed Agustin's suggestion to pull it right out, attach a line to it, apply some grease and then pull it back through the tube. It worked!
Three hours after starting the job to straighten the the stanchion, things were no better, but now at least no worse, than when I started!
My turn to cook. The last of the beef burgers were still fine despite turning off the fridge the previous night and so they were delivered along with braised red cabbage (still fine) and oven chips. Desert, was the last sweet pineapple (one had to be consigned to the deep).
The wind got up just before I went off watch and so with the possibility of more to come (up to Force 6) we put 2 reefs in. That slowed us down more than I expected from 6+ knots to around 4 knots. I had a sneaking suspicion that someone was playing tricks and turned the fan down as soon as we had reefed but I was too lazy ro stay up and monitor the situation and so went ro bed. I woke a number of times and each time it felt like we were only making 3 or so knots and sometimes the rolling was as a consequence, severe.
At 0400 when i took over from Agustin it was clear that we were indeed down to crawling speed once again and so I shook out the two reefs in the mainsail. That improved matters a little, taking us back up to around 4.5 knots.
But by dawn, that was back down to around 3 knots. Now, what was that about arriving on Monday!?
The swell was still dominating the wind and so we continued to rock and roll and slap and crash.
Power continues to be a problem. Despite a good day yesterday for both sun and wind which got the domestic batteries back up to 12.9 volts, by the evening they were back down to 12.2. It's beginning to look as if they will need replacing.
The mystery as to why the engine/alternator is not charging the domestic batteries continues and will probably require the equivalent of open heart surgery on the boat's electrical system, which given our proximity to Falmouth - now (0530) will be put off until then. Unfortunately, we didn't think to check that aspect of the charging system when we replaced the engine battery in Funchal.
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