Saturday, October 16, 2011
UTC 1500 10/16, 0100 10/17
Latitude: S 25 54.329
Longitude: E 156 04.818
Ok, so today hasn't been so uneventful. We knew it was too good to last.
We woke up this morning to cloudy skies and rain off and on. By 1:30 p.m., it was time for the Pacific Sea Farer's Net, but we had no better luck hearing anything on the HAM band than we did on our marine side band earlier in the morning. Propagation either from solar flares or cloudy skies prevented us from checking in. As we were trying to connect, we could see a band of rain coming towards us. The wind started to pick up from a mild 15 to about 28 knots. We were engulfed in a white squall. The clouds reached down to the water dumping rain and roiling the seas. All we could see was white all around us.
We had our mainsail double reefed with a preventer as the wind was on our starboard beam and rear quarter, a small poled jib on the port side, and our mizzen. One of our main concerns when we have a poled jib is to not get back winded. Since we were motor-sailing and using our auto pilot rather than our wind vane, it meant we had to disconnect the auto pilot so that we could keep the wind where we wanted it and not get it in front of the pole or back wind it. Hydie does this automatically, steering with a set wind angle. Ray (marine) just knows how to stay on our course, and pays no attention to the wind angle.
We could see lightning ahead. I counted to 15 before we heard the thunder. Another strike, this time 11. We quickly disconnected our electronic gear, stowing the sattelite phone, hand held gps, navigation dongel, backup disk drive, and notebook computer in the microwave. We stowed the Mac and navigation computer in the oven to protect them from any lightning strikes. For about an hour while the squall blew through dumping rain, we did a white knuckle hand steer. At one point as we were keeping the wind angle on our beam, we were headed in the opposite direction from our course line. The winds were spinning around, and we with them!
When the winds hand blown themselves out and we were in their vacuum, we hustled outside in our rain gear, took down the mizzen and poled in the jib. If this was going to be a squally day, we wanted to reduce sail and just motor. Russ said, he wanted to pretend to be a trawler for awhile. The winds finally spun around in the direction we expected and the sun came out an hour. After reconnecting the electronics, we could relax. Exhausted, we took turns napping in the pilot house like two cats in the sunshine. Our lack of good sleeping is starting to catch up with us.
By late afternoon, the clouds were starting to form again on the horizon. I took a quick 1/2 hour power nap before my 8:00 p.m. watch started, and Russ went down for his sleep time. Since the moon is waning and coming up later each night, I didn't expect to see it until 8:30 or so. I could see a few stars, but really miss the friendly night light. The moon finally rose behind the boat illuminating the horizon, but I didn't like what I saw when it did. Inky black cloud fingers stretched across the sky obscuring the stars.
At 9:30, the sky started to light up, but not from the moon light. The inky fingers had arced from 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock on the horizon and were closing in on Worrall Wind. Lightning was dancing across the sky from cloud to cloud. I waited for each lightning flash to see what the cloud cover looked like. The clouds were still in the distance, but the wind was starting to pick up. Maybe this would just pass over us or we could steer around them. I recorded our longitude and latitude, then disconnected all of our electronic gear once again and stowed them in the ovens.
I woke Russ up at 10:00 to see if he wanted me to try and steer around the approaching squall. It looked like if we changed course from southwest to due north, the squall might pass us by. That seemed to work for a while. The clouds and lightning were moving past our port side, but then we could see the black mass starting to wrap on our right side. It was like that black cloud in Lost engulfing us. It sucked out the moonlight and then the lightning that had been horizontally jumping from cloud to cloud came down in a jagged streak a mile or so off our starboard side. The lightning and crack of thunder were almost simultaneous. Holy sh#!!
We couldn't see a thing. It was either pitch black or blindingly white as the lightening cracked around us. The wind was reaching 38 knots. We decided the best thing to do now was to resume our original course with the wind right on our nose, and see if we could just plow out of this malignant ugly thing. We were glad to have the jib and mizzen down. It gave us more latitude to stay on course. The rain was fierce. It was very scary!
By 11:30 (1 and 1/2 hours later), it seemed safe enough to retrieve one of the GPS units and get a position fix, and to see how fast we were moving. With the wind, wind waves, and perhaps a current on our nose we were only making forward progress of 2 nautical miles per hour. By 12:30 the black ugly had finally passed us by. By 1:00 p.m. we were back up and running, and Russ went to bed for another couple of hours. It's now almost 3:00 a.m., and I'm ready to switch places with Russ. We are both ready for our voyage to be ending. We still have 150 miles to go! The moon is shining through a veil of clouds on our starboard side. Goodnight moon.
All is well with the 2 Sail R's on SV Worrall Wind
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