I had a great night Tuesday and into Wednesday morning, the wind was doing what I thought so I had sailed with the little A5 spinnaker all night and just took the header as I got it. This allowed me to keep speed on as the wind dropped and bought me down south a bit which I was happy to do. I’d like to get hooked into the leading pack so that was all fine.
About 7am Wednesday the wind finally dropped away so I went to the jib and had a few hours of cleaning and tidying and felt the boat was sorted. That included filling the fuel tank from my spare jerry cans while it was light and of course I spilt some diesel and then had an overwhelming smell of the stuff and no matter how hard I cleaned I couldn’t find the last of it, so had that all day…yukkk. I hate diesel!!!
I was then in the hole that had to be sailed through and that was a hard few hours as I couldn’t maintain any speed in the sloppy waves other than to sail at 90 degrees to the finish line, not what I wanted and it was odd to be parked, barely making any forward way after so many days of flying along straight at the US coast. I then had a bit of a period of looking at the chart plotter which is always a mistake. Best to sail in the bit of ocean you are on and not to look to far away….everything looks close when you get the scaling right, but when you look at the numbers its still 2 Fastnet races away….
Anyway, I managed to wriggle out of the hole about 1130 am and then we were back onto port and heeling over at 45 degrees, so life at an angle began again. I took in a reef mid afternoon (I wish I had a kept a better record of reefs in and out!) as the breeze built and am now sailing 260 degrees at 7 knots just cracked off for speed. Jib and a reef and the number 4 on the way if this breeze holds, which it isn’t meant to do but anyway, grib files 5 knots under reality, that’s not new news!
Cheers,
Osc
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