We have reclaimed our 300 mile lead after 24 hours with solid breeze and either the Code 3 or little Code 5 reaching gennaker up. Last night was spectacular with sustained periods at 18kts and a whole sched where our slowest speed was 11kts. It was extremely wet on deck with a constant deluge of spray and when the sun came up this morning we found that the boat was festooned with sprigs of Sargasso weed all along the lifelines and up into the rigging.
We are close to changing back to our big spinnaker and will keep it up almost all the way to Charleston. After hourding our Pringles supply for all the leg, and celebrating our passing the 1000 mile mark with a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, we now have enough to have a whole snack sized packet EACH DAY! Nice to know that speed has its rewards although its the fresh food on the horizon that’s keeping us going.
We finally have a fully functioning boat again! Even as we have been averaging 11-12 knots and blasting over the ocean with our small reaching gennaker our mind has been on other things. First, after having been totally reliant on the engine to charge while we worked on a problem with our Hydrogenerator, we then came to depend solely on that when we discovered that a mounting bolt for the alternator had sheered off, leaving our main charging alternator dangling with inconsistent output. We were able to lash the alternator, but then found that the engine wouldn’t start. We then launched into dissasembling switches, polishing contacts, replacing fuses etc all through the electrial loom of the engine but to no avail.
Thanks to Andrew at A R Peachment Ltd in Norwich, we discovered that a tiny spade connector had come off a part of the starter motor at the very bottom of the engine, at the furthest point from our access hatch as possible. Now we have an engine that works, but this wasn’t the critical issue as we have other means to charge the batteries. With the sun beating down out of a white hot sky, our attention was galvinized by our dwindling fresh water supply as we use the engine to prime the watermaker. We were down to one 6 litre bottle left when the engine fired up again, saving us from some creative plumbing to feed the watermaker from another source.
Mechanics aside, our routing software told me that last night we topped out with a run of 307 nautical miles in 24hrs, a far cry from our smashing 360 in leg two, but not bad given the clement conditions. The wind has now turn to the right until its blowing nearly from due east, putting us in range for our big Cessna Citation spinnaker as we head for Charleston.
Last night we passed the border between Brazil and French Guiana and later today we will pass the most norther latitude of South America, leaving just the Caribbean to go. With 2100 miles to go, we now have less than 10 days sailing between us refreshing cool drinks and decent coffee or just a Starbucks Frappecino if I want complete hedonism in a single cup. I can’t wait
Ok, now its seriously hot. Not “pleasantly warm” not “toasty” not “cosy”. No, we’ve travelled far and now we’ve arrived in a world of Dante and are struggling with the associated sulfurous superheated blasts of air. We have set up a shrine to Watt and Sea as its endless trickle of power feeds Knut the pilot and allows the weak sailors to languish in the shade of the cuddy.
Having passed our potential stopover point of Recife without stopping, we have gradually born away from the wind and have just now hoisted our big spinnaker and are making a break for it to the North. The Celox scoring gate is 100 miles away and then we will be lining up for the doldrums. After conquering some computer issues thanks to the marine electrician David Minors, we can again view isobaric charts and satellite images. Thankfully our doldrums crossing looks to be relatively mild and we should be in solid breeze again just after reentering the northern hemisphere.
Now that we have energy again, all is well aboard Cessna Citation. We take bucket showers on the aft deck in the afternoons and rinse with a precious litre of fresh water. As we also deal with our ablutions in the “bucket and chuck it” manner, care has to be taken when choosing the impliment for one’s shower, but as we have two buckets we’ve so far avoided incident.
That is, except for Scotty. We have been seeing more and more flying fish this past week and many take it upon themselves to fly towards, rather than away, from the 40 foot intruder. When I was at the helm recently I saw a dark shaddow approach in the moonlight and ducked, only to have a fish strike the backstay block just behind my head at full speed. Scotty wasn’t so lucky and took a direct hit to his arm. The impact left a round bruise that looks suspiciously like a hickey. Perhaps he’s getting lonely on his moonlit watches! In any case, he has fish pie from Backcountry Cuisine today, so he at least gets a karmic comeback.
So far this trip we have had our minds on energy, and not just the oil field dinosaurs. Shortly after the start our hydrogenerator, from which we derive most our energy for the boat, stopped producing the critical amps that keep the boat humming along. We harness the wind for our locomotion, but today’s increasingly wired yachts need power for navigation computers, satellite communications and autopilots.
We’ve come along way since Sir Robin Knox Johnson first sailed non-stop around the world in 1969 on a wooden boat with wind vane self steering. He would have probably scoffed at our calamitous turn of events, but then he would have been screwed if he spilled his lamp oil! Each generation has its own Achilles heel.
For nearly a week now we have been handsteering almost all the time and turning off all electrical devices except the GPS and wind instruments. While the technicians at Watt and Sea rightly enjoyed their Easter weekend, I was chewing off my fingers nails while stressing about whether we would have enough diesel to run the engine to charge the batteries and make water with the desalinator.
After a couple of days of back and forth with Watt and Sea, our unit had failed all diagnostic tests and we’d given up hope of producing green energy on the ocean blue and had resigned ourselves to diesel pitstop and the associated penalty from the race committee. However, last night while helming, I had a flash of inspiratinon and discovered that we had made some assumptions during the tests that had given us a false negative. The generator still works and we are charging again. Our mood has lifted, the sun is shining (it actually never stopped, but the power from the solar panels wasn’t enough on its own to keep us going) and all is well in the world.
Greetings from off the coast of Brazil. Its no Carnival however, we’ve long since missed that party. Instead we have been chasing gentle zephyrs of wind with the demonic enthusiasm of the storm hunters in the oh so terrible mid-90’s film “Twister”. At least the special effects were good!
In wriggling through a ridge of high pressure we have been blessed with perfectly clear skies both during the day and at night, leaving us to enjoy the most spectacular watercolour sunsets and sail the boat without head lamps at night thanks to the lunar light left on high beam for our convenience. We could watch the approach of the invisible ridge because the clouds were slowly eaten from above by their fluffy tops to their flat bottoms until there was nothing but a perfectly clear sky. It was spooky to be able to watch the silent transition of one transparent air mass to another.
Given the light conditions and the virginal white moonlight it was a shock to be presented by the hustle and bustle of the New Jersey Turnpike in the middle of the ocean. Buring gas flares, hulking drilling platforms and bright lights make up the Campos Oil Field just off the Brazilian coast and for an entire night our passage was illuminated by flickering towers of light. Slightly nauseated, I felt like I had stepped onto the killing floor of Upton Sinclair’s slaughterhouse for the modern petrochemical age. Sadly I had to check my indignation, for the shiny white race boat that I now steer, pushed by the wind though it is, is laminated from tendrils teased from the black filth they peddle.
Now that we have escaped the clutches of the ridge we have light easterlies from the St Helena High to waft us north wards on a beam reach. There is energy in the atmosphere again and the wind that comes blasting from the towering cumulus clouds are keeping us on our toes. At the end of the day, these thunderheads create a grey sawtooth profile on the pink horizon, their bottoms lost from view thanks to the curvature of the earth. Over the pink is yellow then green then blue, all washed together until, with a crick in my neck, I’m left with the pure blackness of the infinite overhead, not yet pricked by the first stars of the early night. I see your Apple retina display and raise you an oceanic sunset any day!
Onwards and up wards now, uphill to the equator!
There are lots of ships passing close by so we’ve clearly buried into the Latin American shipping lanes, or the road to El Dorado. We are currently slipping through a flat sparkling sea. Nice conditions for cruising but a little more puff would be appreciated after a night nursing flapping listless sails. After the slightly manic 36 hours before the start its actually been an idyllic start to the race as Scotty and I are still learning to sail with each other and slow speeds and light winds had have made our first miles pass easily. At daybreak we could clearly see Phesheya and Sec Hayai a few miles away, with Marco hiding somewhere. Despite stretching out during the afternoon we lost our advantage during the night as speeds approached zero and the wind became patchy. We could always see a masthead light behind or beside, and there’s nothing better to concentrate the mind to the task at hand! For the moment we like our offshore position, we’ll see if it pays.
Tell me this, why does the camera supposedly add ten pounds in the fashion world but lop off at least thee metres of the size of waves? Yesterday it felt we were surrounded by heaving himalayan sized walls of water but today when reviewing the photos they look like mere ripples on a duckpond! I feel ripped off!
We have now weathered the “latin low” that came surging off the Andes and out of the Rio de la Plata and our world has returned to calmness as we tick off the miles to the finish. It feels a little like walking on solid ground again after marching on the moving carpet transporters in an airport. You stagger a little and then settle in to the slower pace of life. With 48 hours where the wind didn’t drop below 30 kts and a solid 40 was constant fact of life, having to trim to accelerate the boat rather than slow it down is a novel feeling.
By skirting the worst of the southerlies of the stormy latin low we ended up in quite shallow water off the Argentine coast and this created massive waves very shortly after the gale began. Sliding down these endless inclines with 45 kts at your back and a hole in the ocean ahead for hour after hour was exhilarating, up until the point where we had to dodge a fishing fleet with their nets down. Being in the lead with a healthy buffer led me to make a pretty conservative choice on sails and while I fantasized of spearing the ocean from a cloud of spray with the Code 5 up we very quickly reduced to double reefed main and staysail. So humbly attired we were still almost blown out of the water by a 50 kt gust that provided the motivation to put in yet another reef. Even so, we hit 24 kts of boatspeed coming down a wave and it would have been stupid to push harder with an established lead already in our pockets.
After such a manic rounding of the Horn and then working hard to catch, and then survive, our latin lover, its nice to have a tranquil moment to reflect on the leg and the race to date while tootling along up the coast with the Code 0 up. I’ll breathe out my sigh of relief in 346 miles but for now its just a nice day to be on the water.
Water water everywhere, and that’s just on the inside!
The return of higher speeds onboard Cessna Citation means that we can get a solid charge from our trusty hydrogenerator (pictured earlier) and that means that we are living by the wilderness maxim “take nothing but photos and leave nothing but footprints”. Our passage is marked only by a short skreech from the generator and our foamy footprint fades in seconds. However, the downside to this green travel on the ocean blue is that we don’t have an excuse to run the engine to warm ourselves up!
As we only have a tiny camping stove for boiling cupfuls at a time, our bodies are the primary source of heat on board. As such, in an effort to conserve our meagre supply of BTUs (British Thermal Units, the measure of heat pumps and heaters the world over) we keep the companion way doors closed except when one has to rush out to ease the sheets in a gust. In a small closed environment our breath condenses on the inner surface of the hull and deck, leaving them constantly dripping until pools form in the crevices in the structure of the boat. At least we’re not sinking, but the rate of accumulation is staggering!
The good news is that the wind is moving ever more to the south, allowing our boat to shift from a walk to a trot with a gallop forecasted soon. After we tacked north looking for extra pressure a couple of days ago the north-south separation between us and Financial Crisis has been worryingly large. Thankfully we have been able to maintain quite a high reaching angle with the boat’s favorite sail and as they have come north on the new breeze our north-south leverage has been decreasing along with their lead. Being closer together reduces the risks that they will find a favorable shift and leave us for dead, as they almost did by burying into the high pressure zone yesterday.
Currently 717 miles to the Horn and 14 miles to take back. I’m thankful that we only have a 2% disadvantage to overcome as we must sail prudently in these cold and unforgiving conditions. The wind blows harder here for a given wind speed, so sail settings that worked in the warmer Atlantic climes need to be adjusted to avoid wipeouts. The new routing has confirmed my earlier ETA of an early Tuesday morning rounding of the Horn. However the race doesn’t stop at this mythical landmark, especially as a low pressure system also has the same forecasted arrival time!
“The high whistle of the wind through the halyards, and above all the pale blue illimitable sky, cold and serene, made me deeply afraid and conscious of my insignificance. / Far below, the ship was an impressive sight. For a time the whole of the after deck would disappear, hatches, winches, everything, as the solid water hit it, and then like an animal pulled down by the hounds, she would rise and shake them from her, would come lifting out of the sea with her scuppers pouring.”
So wrote Eric Newby in “The Last Grain Race” during his passage to the Horn when sailing from Australia to England in 1939 with a cargo of grain and square sails overhead. His epic tale of life before the foremast in the last days of sail is but one thread of the myth of the south, woven by generations of hardy mariners getting blown off their feet in the Furious Fifties.
Instead I am presented with the Fickle Fifties, totally becalmed and spinning listlessly on an oily sea totally bereft of a ripple of wind, to say nothing of spindrift and storm tossed peaks. We currently have everything on board stacked as far forward as we can get it in order to push the bow down and help lift the draggy stern out of the water. We are very gently shooshing along upwind with Code 0 and just a gentle tinkling ripple down the side of the boat tells me we are still moving. I had expected to be stacking everything in the back of the boat lest we trip over the bows while surfing the raging seas but its not to be, this time.
Its frustrating to have worked for years to get here on a racing boat, all the time hoping to satisfy my curious thirst for the ultimate thrill ride only to come up against the evil triple zero. 0.00 knots of boat speed. It would like making a pilgrimage to Monte Carlo to play dice on the highest tables in Europe only to roll snake eyes all night long unrelenting green felt of the Craps table.
Aboard Cessna Citation, our lives continue as normal with 3 hour watches. If we are lucky enough to have a few moments of stable wind from the right direction we can put on the automatic pilot and watch the bubbles pass serenely in the inspection windows in the hull. However, the bubbles soon stop and the siren song of the pilot alarm breaks the reverie and we are called again to stupidly hang onto the tiller as the boat wallows listlessly. Normally after 3 hours on watch one is glad for the break after been pummelled and abused by the ocean, but here one needs a break lest one go mad from being impotently powerless to make headway.
In this sense our conditions are worse than the fearsome doldrums because of the overbearing calms. The doldrums are a battleground of competing weather zones and with patience and strategy (go south!) there is always a goal ahead and a cloud to chase. Here we don’t have the luxury of an approaching squall line because the air is squeaky clean and silently still, the only sound is the wrenching mainsheet and the ringing in your ears. I’m as yet unsure of whether its better to edge along the side of the ridge to the south or whether to plow on toward the east as the system moves on. In fact, its easy, because such choice is illusory and currently we have no more choice as to our own course as we do over where, and whether, the wind blows.
Whenever a teenager responds to “where have you been?” with “oh, nowhere” he must have been my neighbor because I am now in the middle of no where. The dead center of zip, the capital of nada.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest open expanse on earth and we are now close to the middle of it at point Nemo, named after Jules Verne’s reclusive captain Nemo in “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”. In front, Chile at 1.700 nautical miles east, behind, the Chatham islands at 2,200 miles. To the north lies Pitcairn islands at 1,600 to the south a icy headland of Antarctica at 1,300 miles. We are so far away from land right now that flight commander Dan Burbank and his five crew on the International Space Station are closer to solid ground right now that we are!
For all the talk of the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties, we are currently tootling along at 8 knots in light breezes and sunshine and the remaining miles to Cape Horn are forecast to be reasonably pleasant. We are trying desperately not to be caught by a ridge of high pressure that has been chasing us otherwise we’ll grind to a halt.
The approach to the Bluqube scoring gate was another story entirely as Adrian and I were finally able to crack off from the tight angles we had been sailing and make tracks under spinnaker. As the wind built we shifted from the big “Citation” spinnaker to the smaller, tougher “Caravan” high wind spinnaker. Hunkered down in truck mode, it was fantastic to have Cessna back up to cruising speed if only for a few position reports. I saw that we would have a few more hours of favourable wind than Marco and Hugo on Financial Crisis, so with coffee in hand I pulled some long hours on the helm to help push home our advantage.
For that invested effort we have now got our interest back as they have now been caught by the chasing ridge and the elastic that connects us continues to stretch. If it continues to do so is now down to whether we can secure some solid wind and make tracks somewhere, from the capital of nowhere.
