Princ Christian Sund to ? - Day 11 - 3/9/25

We didn't see the Northern Lights but we did catch a Rainbow!

Would you believe it? After days of gales our challenge far from more gales as we suspected, is now not enough wind, until that is the next gale😂.

It's 0800 and I've just finished re-working our predicted progress given the lighter winds we've had and those forecast ahead of us and the result is not a good one. We will of course go slower which is to be expected and not such a calamity on its own,  but not only will we go slower, we would get caught by headwinds in the Western Approaches which would slow our progress further, which would mean, yes you guessed it, we'd get clobbered by another gale puffing in from the west! 

To avoid that we need to be in a port by Saturday evening. The candidates, are, Penzance, Falmouth or Plymouth. Which one, depends on how much progress we make. Plymouth would be best for both of us. It's close to home for George and is the nearest to the Medway for me and therefore improves my chances of getting home for my 38th wedding anniversary on the 12th.

So we turn the engine on again at 0900 in order to maintain a speed of around 5 knots.

By 1530 the wind has increased sufficiently for us to sail at 5 knots and so the engine goes off again. By now we've motored for a total of about 48 hours since topping the tank up in Aappilattoq. 72 hours is roughly equivalent to the maximum capacity of the tank and we suspect we will need to motor for perhaps another 24 hours in a couple of days if we're to avoid that gale. Given the recent blocked fuel pipe we don't want to run the tank low especially as it's been churned around a lot in the rough weather and so we are going to have to top the tank up from the jerry cans whilst at sea which may be a precarious operation!

Around the time we turn off the engine we detect a fishing fleet of 4 boats about 12 miles in front of us. We go through them without having to change course finally spot one on the horizon only a mile and a half away. It's bloody difficult to see things out here even in good visibility like we have today.

In the afternoon the sun almost comes out - it can be seen through the clouds - time for our next round of Astro Nav practice. After an initial struggle we both manage to pull the sun down to the horizon and get fairly similar angles - 35° 5' I think it was.

Afterwards I try to revise the method for working out the time of local noon, because as I think I may already have mentioned, a sun sight at local noon will, with some calculations, give the navigator his latitude. With the help of special tables and plotting sheets (or trigonometry if you're clever) it's relatively straightforward. 

The time of noon at Greenwich (when the sun crosses the Greenwich Meridian) is shown in the tables for every day of the year. Then you need to estimate your Longitude - how far east or west you are of the Greenwich Meridian. Because 15° of Longtitude = 1 hour, 4 minutes of time = 1° Longtitude (there are 60 mins of Longitude in 1°, thus 60/15 = 4) and therefore 1 minute of time = 1/4 of 1° of Longtitude = 15 mins of Longitude. You're unlikely to be travelling directly east or west and so to work that out, you use a plotting sheet to plot your estimated position relative to lines of latitude and longitude that you draw on the sheet. The sheet includes a compass rose and a scale that enables you to plot your last known position and your estimated position by plotting the distance and the angle (your course) at which you have travelled. That gives you your estimated Longitude. You compare that with 0° at Greenwich and you then know how many hours or minutes east or west you are from the Greenwich Meridian. So, if you are 1 hour to the west, local noon will be 1 hour later than at Greenwich!

Dolphins join us for a while after our practice with the sextant, perhaps as a reward. 

Then at 1600 we discover the bilge full of water! There's water sloshing over the cabin sole. Once we notice that we both recall that we've heard a sloshing noise but failed to put 2 and 2 together! We've sprung a leak! Both hands to both bilge pumps and we empty it in about half an hour. 

I've been pumping the bilge once a day - roughly a hundred strokes - I assume in rough weather it gets in through the anchor locker and some through the stern gland. A little will also get in via the cockpit lockers. For the bilge to be full within 24 hours something else is going on. The question of course is where's it coming from?

On a plastic boat, unless the hull's cracked, the only places other than those just mentioned are the various skin fittings or their pipes and connections. We check the skin fittings in the Loo, and the Galley, including the engine water inlet. They're not leaking. The only others are underneath the cockpit floor and in the stern locker and are for the cockpit drains and the cockpit bilge pump and electric bilge pump and also the above waterline one for the internal bulge pump.

On checking the engine inlet we do notice a modest flow of water running down the inside of the hull from behind the fridge box. This is also the location of the above waterline skin fitting for the internal bilge pump.

I fitted it a couple of years ago and used cheap plastic hose, the same stuff I used to run from the pump into the bilge. This section has split a couple of times and we replaced it in St John's. It's possible that the section from the pump to the skin fitting (which is inaccessible without dismantling the fridge) has also split. If so some of the water being pumped out would simply run back into the bilge and when the skin fitting goes under water - which it does frequently in the sort of conditions we have been experiencing - water would enter the boat. Currently that's my best guess as to what's happening. It's entirely manageable through frequent pumping and so there's no danger of us sinking!

Dinner is the left over chilli with Naan bread and then as a special treat I heat some some blueberry breakfast bars in the oven and make custard to cover them with. It works surprisingly well!

George lets me go to bed early!

Sleep however is difficult to come by because of the rising wind and an increasingly bumpy ride.

Our midnight to midnight straight line run is 127 nautical miles. The distance to Lands End is 291 which means we are 125 miles closer than we were the previous midnight.

It's a beautiful starry night - the first of the passage.

Will we get in somewhere by Saturday night, 3 days from now? Remember we have to go past Lands End and so will have at least another 20 miles before our nearest port of Penzance, 43 to Falmouth and 80 miles to Plymouth.