Day 12 – Out of the Doldrums and into the NE Trades 11-2-24

Well, my wish for a less eventful day today did not work out so well. The boat and crew are all doing fine, we just had a lot of work to do fixing broken parts. But we got it done!

About midnight last night the wind began to increase, and turned toward the northeast.  This signaled the end of the doldrums, so we shut off the engine and began sailing again.  There were a lot of squalls all around the boat, but we managed to stay out of their way. That is the nice thing about radar, the rain shows up as bright red on the screen, sometimes 10 miles out from us, so we can change our course so they slip on by us.

The wind stayed around 10 to 12 knots through most of the morning, but we were in some very confused seas with waves come from the north, and from the east. Then around 1 in the afternoon, the wind began to increase into the high teens, and then into the low 20 knot range.  We decided to put our third reef in the main sail.  The crew is now very good at getting this done, and we were sailing much more nicely with less heeling.

It was then that Luke noticed a part of the main sail that connects it to the mast had broken free.  The main sail is attached to sliding cars that go up and down the mast that are about 2 feet apart. With one broken this put even more load on the car above it and below it.  In this kind of wind it was just a question of time before more of them broke, so we needed to repair the busted one.

But how do you do a repair like this in 20 knots of wind and 8 foot waves with the boat bouncing everywhere?  You do what is called “heaving to”.  This maneuver is done by tacking the boat (turning it into the wind) so the wind is now coming from the opposite side of the boat.  But instead of releasing the jib and pulling it in on the other side as you do in a tack, you leave the jib so that it gets backwinded.  This forces the bow of the boat to turn away from the wind.  then We then ease the mainsail so there is very little wind pushing on it, and we turn the steering wheel to turn the boat back into the wind.  So the opposing forces of the backwinded jib trying to force the boat away from the wind is counter acted by the rudder trying to turn the boat back into the wind.  When you get it balanced just right, magic happens! The boat almost stops all movement and gently glides up and down the waves.  It is literally like a rest stop in the middle of the ocean!

In the photo below you can see the backwinded jib at the green arrow.  The broken mainsail slide on the red arrow, and the broken zipper on the sail bag at the blue arrow.

Once we were hove to we were able to get up on deck and start working on the repair to the main sail.  First we had to figure out why the sail pulled free. Once we did that it was then a fairly easy fix to put it back together.  We then fixed the zipper on the sail bag and got it secured.

I then did a check around the boat for any other problems and found this chafed line.  See below:

This was the line that controls the furler for our jib.  It was ready to break!  If it had broken we would have had a real mess on our hands, with the jib coming unfurled in strong winds and no way to contain it.  We were able to find the chafe point, fix it and run a brand new line.  We should be good to go!

We spent nearly 3 hours hove to doing on the repairs. Tomorrow will be a tough day as well with even more wind.  Then after that it should get lighter.  I hope.