I've been awake mostly since midnight listening to the rising sound of the wind and the boat rushing through the water at increasing speed and to the rising frequency of the pistil shot noises from the genoa as it backs and resets on the pole. Speed is of the essence if we're to avoid nasty headwinds in a couple of days and then a nasty gale we need to press on, but there's no point in breaking something, so at 0100 I get up and advise George that we need to reef.
It really is pretty blowy, although the sea is still reasonably flat which has made for good sailing. Reefing takes quite a while because a batten gets caught behind the upper starboard shroud. Eventually we get two reefs in and the genoa smaller by about 60%.
Shortly after reefing I realise we also need to gybe because the wind has backed over the last few hours forcing us to head 5-10° north of east whereas we want to steer about 115-120° for the Isles of Scilly.
I make a bit of a pigs ear of the gybe and don't control the boom properly which goes slamming across the cockpit (I don't put the preventer on a winch and the force of the wind in the sail as it backs is too much for me to control).
After being unceremoniously ejected from his bunk by the force of the gybe, George notices the skipper is not quite as calm and collected as one would prefer a skipper to be and so he comes up to the cockpit in his underwear (and gets a good soaking) to help quell the chaos and complete the gybe. This requires furling in the genoa so that its small enough to avoid getting snagged on the emergency forestay when its hauled across; hauling it across to the other pole, unfurling it an appropriate amount and making it secure. We notice the genoa gets jammed at about 1/3 size which is OK (the size that is not the jam) so we leave it for now. Unfortunately, George hurts his back in the process and has to retire to bed, hurt, dosed up with painkillers!
At around 2100 we go on high alert when we see navigation lights ahead. There's nothing on the AIS nor anything obvious on the Radar and we curse the bloody boat out here without AIS. We suspect another yacht because I glimpse a green (starboard) light in addition to the white light we both saw. There is no very bright white light which one would expect if it was a fishing boat. It's all a bit nerve wracking because of the difficulty of judging how close it really is. Given we could barely see a large fishing boat a mile away yesterday, this boat might only be a half mile ahead of us. We'd be surprised if it was a smallish yacht without AIS out here in these conditions. These days most yachts crossing oceans have AIS transponders. It's possible this one might be an Irish boat just out for a sail in the Atlantic, but even the Irish aren't usually quite so gung-ho as to seek out trouble just for the hell of it. We remain puzzled and keep our eyes peeled, but the lights gradually disappear into the night ahead of us.
At 0400 it's light enough for me to discover the cause of the jammed genoa. The storm jib halyard has wrapped itself around the top part of the furled sail.
At 0420 I empty the bilge with 110 strokes of the pump.
At 0500 I tackle the halyard wrap. Fortunately, after furling the genoa a bit more the halyard unwraps itself and I am able to unfurl the sail fully.
0616 The bilge requires just 18 strokes of the pump to empty.
At 0741 a message comes in from fellow OCC member, Hugh Clay on Brown Bear. They were in Nanortalik very briefly when we were there but the other side of the harbour when we were up to our elbows (George was in reality up to his armpit) with the engine and so we never actually met. The message was....
"It looks like we passed pretty close to Bonny on Saturday night, but our AIS has stopped working"
So that explains our earlier close encounter. We swap messages and discover Brown Bear is heading for Falmouth, so we may meet up after all which would be fun.
The sailing is very uncomfortable. We have the wind on the quarter and a significant swell overlaid with short steep seas. This makes for some very unpleasant jerky rolling, a little reminiscent of the worst I have ever experienced and that was on Arctic Smoke in December 2016 as Mick and I were in the last third of our crossing from Cape Verde to Martinique and experiencing the Caribbean's 'Christmas Winds'. On one occasion then, I was standing in the galley on the port side of the boat and had just finished making a cup of coffee which was grasped firmly in my hands to avoid spillage when the boat gave the most violent lurch to port - she must have fallen off a wave - the space I occupied was suddenly on the opposite side of the boat and I was sitting on the chart table and my coffee was all over the ceiling! It wasn't as bad as that but two pots of coffee did empty themselves all over the galley micro seconds before I was due to poor the liquid into my mug! I'm afraid I probably shocked George with my stream of vulgarities that spewed out of my mouth!
The sun is out and therefore even though the boat is still rolling like crazy, we feel obliged to grab a noon site to make sure we know where we are 😂. We work out the time of local noon and I take the sight as best I can - which is little better than a wild guess with all the wild rolling going on.
We then go below and work out our Latitude. Clearly some malign force is at work because it turns out that we 'are' 8° or 480 miles further north than our modern technology thinks we are. Thank goodness we took the sight otherwise we would be completely lost!
Things get even worse when we take and calculate our PM Sight. The resulting position line is clearly so far off that we'd need a plotting sheet the size of a football field to plot it. It would intercept our latitude hundreds of miles from our estimated position, probably somewhere in the high Arctic! We'll try again tomorrow!
It's late afternoon and the wind has eased so we shake out the reefs from the mainsail. The sea is still very lumpy and uncomfortable - the motion is actually worse because there's not enough pressure on the sails to dampen the rolling.
By 1910 the wind is so light we have to turn the engine on to maintain a speed of around 5 knots.
I'm pumping around 70-100 strokes every six hours to clear the bilges.
Between 1900 and 2100 we pass through another fishing fleet. George is on lookout while I'm cooking the supper, and has to alter course significantly to avoid one of the boats.
Supper is pasta Carbonara. It's ok but not my best.
I go to bed at 2200 and go out like a light despite the noise of the engine.
Our midnight to midnight run is 129 miles and Lands End is 162 miles off and so we are also 129 miles closer than 24 hours ago! Not bad. 🤞
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