06/26/02
The winds are continuing to blow the same, 25-30 knots from SouthWest. We are making 7.5 knots over ground with double-reefed main and staysail, so our loss of the jib yesterday did not impede our performance appreciably. At this rate, we will be in Horta in five days, but after five more days of this, I will be a wreck.
The boat motion continues to go in every direction, as we hit these big waves that have been building up for the last 36 hours.
Sleep has been a real challenge. I find a lot of the time when I am laying down, I don’t quite make it to a sleep state. I just lay there and have incoherent dream-like thoughts. A lot of the time I am thinking like I am still home, of things I want to do and places to go, and I think about angles. I envision all kinds of angles, 15 degrees, 30 degrees, in relation to my position. It’s because the angles of my body’s orientation are so constantly and randomly changing, that is all I can think about. It is not unusual to be laying more against the wall than against the bunk itself. I have my pillows arranged so I have some padding against the wall. Thank God I brought a third pillow.
I am at a point where all I can do is think about making it through my watch, and when the next watch will be. I’m beginning to feel a distinct lack of energy, as it is more and more of an effort to move about the boat. As I near the end of my watch, at 0800, the wind seems to have moderated to 15-20 knots. Maybe I will be able to get some sleep..
When I awoke at 0900, it was raining hard outside, and if felt like conditions were worse. I thus decided to roll over and go back to sleep. When I got up again around 1000, the weather had moderated considerably.
Our next order of business, now that the howling winds and seas had subsided, was to do something about the dangling bobstay chains on the bow. We could see that the motion of the bowsprit was considerable as it crashed into the waves. We went forward, and I first replaced the wooden block that we had been using for the preventer with a more substantial snatch block from Eric’s deck hardware locker. Then David went out on the bowsprit and retrieved the length of bobstay chain hanging from the bowsprit. He handed me the end of the chain and I tied a line through it to hold while David secured the chain to the bowsprit with a short line.
That having been done, the next task was to retrieve the lower piece of chain that was attached at the waterline. We planned to use the boathook to retrieve it, but the ball on the end of the hook wouldn’t fit through the chain link (we tested this on the upper chain first). I suggested the gaff hook that was lashed to the radar mast on the stern, presumably for the rare occasion when someone decided to go fishing and brought in a big fish. The gaff hook had only a three foot handle, so Eric lashed the gaff hook handle to the boat hook handle, then lashed a safety line to the boat hook in case David dropped it. David then put down a boat cushion on deck and laid on top of this, boat/gaff hook in hand, while I held onto his leg.
He was able to retrieve the chain pretty easily, gave me the end of the chain, and I tied a line through the last link of the chain and held on to it. All this time it was very important to keep our heads as low as possible, as the foot of the staysail was flapping around, snapping like a Turkish towel, and could really do some damage if it caught someone’s head the right way. I had been caught on the back of my head once, luckily not at a high energy point in the snap, and it only served as a strong reminder to keep my head down.
Once I had secured the line to the chain, David got up and took the other end of the line up to the end of the bowsprit, carefully guiding it under the anchor and the dangling upper chain, so that it had a clear run to the snatch block we had attached earlier. He ran it through the block, and I tied the other end to a heavy duty block and tackle (the one we are using for the running backstay), secured this to a cleat and pulled down on this as tightly as possible.
This arrangement will take the place of the broken bobstay until we get to Horta. We will still not be able to use the jib, but hopefully this will at least relieve some of the strain on the bowsprit and prevent any more failures before we are able to get this fixed.
We had another serious problem with chafe on the jib sheets. Since we rolled in the jib, we have not been able to get the sheets tight enough to prevent them from rubbing up and down on the shrouds, and the port sheet had one spot where it was very frayed from rubbing against the screw threads on the turnbuckle.
At this point we are 680 miles from Horta, the same distance as Newport to Bermuda. I can’t wait to get there.
We shook out the two reefs in the mainsail, and now we are sailing with “maximum canvas” – full main and staysail.
The wind dwindled and changed direction. We gybed and Eric rigged a preventer for the staysail boom, to keep it from flogging around, and make it safer for us to go forward. The problem is that every time we gybe or tack (hopefully not very often) we will need to re-rig the preventer on the other side.
David and I took another sun sight today. We are hoping to be able to see Venus tonight so we can take a sight on that and produce a running fix.
Tonight we are planning to watch a movie, “12 O’Clock High” on the little TV.
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