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December 11th, 2009 – At Sea, 14º 31′S, 037º 28′W
by Herb McCormick
Dave Logan and I came on watch today at 0300, and found ourselves in the middle of a rather interesting discussion between the outgoing watch – skipper Mark Schrader, David Thoreson and Michael Reynolds – regarding the spinnaker currently flying, and specifically, the wisdom of leaving it up or taking it down. There were good arguments for and against.
Actually, the minuses might’ve had it. The wind was going soft and fluky (dying and shifty), our boat speed was down to around 6 knots, and if we doused the kite and kicked over the engine we’d immediately be up over eight. Plus, we were currently attempting to skirt yet another Brazilian headland, albeit still a few hundred miles south, and our course at the precise moment had us aiming not for clear water but for the beach north of it, though that was still a good hundred miles away.
Ultimately, however, we decided for the moment not to decide. Here was the reasoning: Rather than drop it in the dark, and deal with the rather complicated network of lines involved, we’d leave it up until the next change of watch, at 0600, after the sun had risen and we could see what we were doing. Three hours wasn’t going to make much difference one way or the other. The skipper and his mates retired below and Logan and I had the con.
More than any other outdoor activity that I can think of, sailing is a numbers game. At any given moment, a sailor will be crunching a host of figures, and is, in effect, a living, breathing, waterborne microprocessor. Some of us are better at this than others, and the really great sailors don’t even think about the process at all. They look at the water, sniff the breeze, check the sails, and they have it. The boat is in perfect harmony with the elements. Or not.
In any event, here are a few of the things Logan and I were thinking about as blinked ourselves awake and wordlessly assessed the situation: boat speed (both through the water and over the ground, right there on the chartplotter on the GPS), true wind speed (6-7 knots), apparent wind speed (7-10 knots), apparent wind angle (roughly 90-degrees off the bow), course to the mark (where we wanted to go, i.e., around the headland), course made good (where we were actually going, i.e., the beach) and how the current was currently affecting all this (determined by calculating the speed through the water versus the speed over the ground).
And, though not entirely relevant to the matter immediately at hand, in the back of our mind we were also considering the mileage to Rio, the time it would take to get there if we continued sailing, the time it would take to get there if we started motoring, the amount of fuel we’d used to that point on this leg, the amount of fuel we had remaining, and what that would all mean if the breeze died in the next five minutes and we had no choice but to kick the engine over. Oh yes, there were clouds ahead and we were wondering about the barometer. Sailors always wonder about the barometer. Ours was where it had been the last 24 hours: 1015 millibars.
So, yes: Numbers.
Just for the record, Logan and I had yet to have a cup of coffee. Also, and in some regards this is very, very disturbing, we’ve sailed enough together now that we never actually discussed any of the above. Even so, we both came to a rather immediate and unanimous decision: We needed to “come up,” or change course, about 15 degrees towards the wind. This small act – quite literally, a spin of the autopilot control that took maybe a second, and a slight tweaking of sails, which took hardly longer – had immediate benefits.
First off, we now were clearing the headland. Second, the new heading forced the wind forward in the sail plan, which generated more apparent wind, which made us faster still – the very definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy and the fact that in certain conditions a sailboat is a very efficient perpetual-motion machine.
The boat was now perfectly balanced, with an apparent wind angle between 70 and 80 degrees, making anywhere from 9-10.5 knots. She felt bloody great. Every once in a while, we’d get a puff of extra breeze and the wind would scoot forward a bit, to an angle just 60 degrees off the bow. Whenever that happened, we could see the forward edge of the spinnaker curl just a little bit: we needed to “fall off” the breeze or turn the boat so the angle returned to the sweet spot, around 75 degrees. The sail was sending us a signal.
A related anecdote: A few years ago I delivered a sailboat from the British Virgin Islands to Bermuda with a rather legendary sailor named Don Street, at that time in his early 70s, who is nicknamed “Squeaky” for his distinctive voice, which sounds like a cat’s in the middle of a losing battle. Don has forgotten more about sailing than I’ll ever know and a few lessons were learned in the course of the voyage. For instance, whenever things weren’t perfectly – and I mean perfectly – trimmed, you might hear the tiniest clatter from the sail as it began to luff.
“Hear that!” squawked Squeaky. “That sail is talking to you!”
I thought of Squeaky a couple of times this morning when I eyed that curl. With another quick spin of the dial, the sail filled sweetly, and all again was right with the world.
Again, our speed was now averaging in the mid-nines, which was quite good, especially for a 64-foot, 44-ton steel cruising boat, loaded with guys and food and fuel and stuff. Theoretically, if we kept that rolling, we’d easily register a 200-mile day, as we did earlier in the voyage in the Labrador Sea. But here’s a little secret: Cruising sailors who tell you they regularly knock off 200-mile days are, to put it diplomatically, stretchers of the truth. There are too many variables that can go wrong: the lack of consistent breeze over a 24-hour period; too much upwind sailing (and tacking); contrary current and so on. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
Yes, race boats, even ones much smaller (and lighter) than Ocean Watch, are capable of much longer daily runs. But remember, they have a plethora of sails from which to choose, and a crew of highly motivated deck apes to throw them around. We on OW have engaged in such activity in the past – man, have we ever – but we are gentlemen now, entering a more genteel period of our earthly existence. In other words, we’re lazy.
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| Over the course of any given day, on any given ocean, wind conditions may range from zero to heaven knows what. |
More to the point, over the course of any given day, on any given ocean, again, wind conditions may range from zero to heaven knows what. Another related anecdote: a few years ago, a singlehanded sailor about to enter a round-the-world race commissioned a study from a weather expert to determine the average wind speed he’d encounter on this spin around the planet. Now we sailors are terrified of gales and such – and always a bit concerned about the Big Storm that might have our name on it – but, in truth, the answer to his question was completely shocking, especially considering his planned route was going to take him through the wild westerly winds in the Roaring Forties and the Screaming Fifties of the epic Southern Ocean.
The number (and remember, this is all about the numbers): 14 knots. That’s it.
He designed his boat accordingly, a good, conservative, all-rounder, and had himself a very good voyage.
So: 14 knots. That was more than we saw yesterday or today, except for very brief periods, even if you have a longish 64-footer with a beautiful new spinnaker and wind abaft the beam, as we did both days. (One more quick aside: Yesterday, in the hours after setting it, I liked our new North Sails spinnaker. Today, after basically staring at it for the majority of my waking moments the last 24 hours, I love it. Between the kite and our working canvas, from Port Townsend Sails, we have sails from an independent sail-maker and the Microsoft of the sail-making world, and the end result is one darn nice suit of sails. Thanks, guys.)
Anyway, at 0600 we changed watch again. It had been, quite honestly, from a pure sailing perspective, my favorite watch of the trip so far. The smashing sunrise, at 0500, had been icing on the cake.
“Really nice sailing,” I said to Logan.
“She finally got to use all 64-feet of waterline,” he replied.
However, in the final fifteen or twenty minutes, a couple of things happened. The wind went forward, rose to 14 knots apparent – the most we’d basically seen in two days – the curl was back, the leeward rail slipped beneath the seas, it was all very sporty for a moment or two. We spun our dials and got her back on her feet.
Fresh from his snooze, David Thoreson was already at the nav station when I went down below to wake him up, an unusual occurrence to say the least. I was explaining to him how wonderful the watch had been and I could see him eyeing me skeptically, and when I got to the part about the late wind shift, he cut me off.
“We know,” he said. “That’s why we’re up. We got rolled out of our bunks.”
“It’s a lot different on deck, mate,” was my only defense. But it was true.
As I went down below, I could hear David and Mark crunching their own numbers, much the same way Logan and I had. The breeze was now down, they needed to come up to 60 apparent to address the situation, and to do that, they needed to drop the tack line eight inches, trim the sheet a few more, and let the halyard down an inch or two as well, to prevent chafe in the line. The numbers game continued.
At 2 p.m. this afternoon, exactly 24 hours after setting the spinnaker, the skipper checked his log and reported that our “day’s run” for that period had been 191 miles, a figure that had probably suffered just a little with the early-morning lull and because we’d doused the chute about an hour and a half earlier when a squall came through. We hadn’t quite knocked off that magical two hundred, but they were pretty good numbers, just the same.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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