This ain't no Pequod

 Sailing Wing and Wing with Victor Steering

07/23/02

    Yesterday was a remarkably uneventful day.  The day ended with the same wind conditions that began it, and between the two there were no changes to be found.  The motion of the boat has seemed to become gentler.  As I write this, I am being rocked slowly from 15 degrees to 15 degrees.  It is much more pleasant to be rocked to sleep than to be pounded, as was my experience on the previous leg.  I have been reading Moby Dick during the day, and during this time the style which I use in the writing of this log may seem a bit different, so as to emulate the profound style of the poetic Mr. Melville.  It is quite a good book, filled as it is with numerous ruminations on the seafaring life in general and whaling in particular.  The omnipresent thought in my head as I read about sailing life in the nineteenth century is that I have it very good on my voyage.  The sailing men of those years regularly performed duties that would render me paralyzed with terror, such as climbing to the masthead and standing on a platform so small that Melville compared it to “standing on a ram’s horns”.  This was done in two hour shifts to keep a lookout for whales.  This is nothing compared to the risks involved in manning the whale boat, leaving the mother ship to row after the whales, sometimes in gales and high seas.

    Later today we will have passed 4000 miles total that we have traveled since leaving Patchogue.  This is but one sixth of the total trip.  I am still not able to fathom what the trip after Cape Town will be like.  Eric often mentions when we are doing work on deck, “Think of doing this when the water temperature is 32”.  He also says we can be reasonably sure that there will be times when we will experience 30 foot swells with accompanying high winds.  We will for the most part be running with these winds and seas.  We will prepare in Cape Town by replacing the main and jib with smaller storm sails.  Another thing Eric is considering is to remove the staysail  boom and instead use a small whisker pole to hold out the staysail so we can run wing-and-wing with the staysail and the jib alone.  We did an experiment the other day with rigging the main preventer on the end of the staysail boom, but we couldn’t get enough leverage to hold it out properly.