Day 13 – Friday 17 January.

By Grant Chapman.

Daybreak greeted us with red skies and sure enough we had overcast skies and noticed various thunderstorms developing off our starboard beam and astern of us but managed to sail clear of them. Clouds became our friend as we discovered that there were always reasonable winds in the presence of clouds and the doldrums were associated with clear skies overhead.

As the wind started to back more and more in an easterly direction we realised that we were needing to sail a more westerly course to keep the boat on a broad reach to get the best speed out of her and we would need to gybe to put her on a starboard tack so that we could get back on our desired course. Gybing the sails, including the big spinnaker which required one of 3 methods: taking down the spinnaker and re-hoisting it on the other side of the boat once the spinnaker pole had been moved over to the other side as well (the most fool-proof and safest in stronger winds); switching the spinnaker pole end-to-end (the quickest but only easiest in light winds as the forces on the end of the pole against the mast – where the car had already been bent out of shape and was currently lashed and frapped on to the traveller – are substantial when the wind is strong and there is a high risk of injury to the foredeck person handling the pole); and doing a pole dip whereby the pole is dropped onto the deck and the windward spinnaker sheet released from the beak of the pole so that the leeward sheet can be put in the beak in its stead (also only suited to low wind speeds and a bit more complicated than the end-to-end pole method as the spinnaker is then left to fly freely during the operation and there are lots of other lines on the foredeck, such as the genoa sheets, that have to be re-arranged using this method. In all cases the boat needs to bear off the wind to allow the mainsail (which being on a run is secured to a cleat on the bow of the boat using a gybe preventer) to “blind” the spinnaker so that it is in the shadow of the mainsail and effectively depowered. Any wind shift though can make things go horribly wrong and the spinnaker can also get wrapped around the genoa if the helmsman allows the boat to be swung off course by the swell as apart from the collapsing and re-hoisting the spinnaker method the other two methods of gybing the spinnaker require that the spinnaker anti-wrap device be taken down, or at least de-tensioned, allowing a window of opportunity for the spinnaker to wrap. As the wind was moderately strong at just over 10 knots and smarting from our bitter experiences with a wrapped spinnaker in the middle of the night a couple of days earlier we opted for the safest method and dropped the spinnaker. Once down we gybed the mainsail and re-hoisted the spinnaker which had a spectacular twist in it – oops! We had neglected to arrange the spinnaker clews properly on switching the spinnaker to the other side of the boat and needed to then manually untwist the big bag by detaching the sheets and reattaching them once the twist was out. The most fool-proof method had made fools of us anyway. An hour later we gybed the spinnaker again back the other way and used the end-to-end method on the pole which went off without a hitch.

The rest of the day was spent relatively uneventfully with winds of about 10 knots. The fish seemed to have also taken the day off and all we caught was another Snake Mackerel with a very sharp, single prehensile-looking tooth in the front of its mouth. Lorraine gutted and sliced the fish into steaklets which we thought we would make into a green curry the following day, hoping to catch another to add to it. The atmospherics must have been up to some sort of hi jinx as we lost both the satphone and Sailor satellite modem link for a short while when we passed under some heavy storm clouds, both systems using the Inmarsat satellite network, but they came back up again shortly afterwards. We have been very fortunate to have the use of both of these excellent systems, thanks to Sat4Rent and Globcomm respectively and Mike Cox at CapeMaritime for installing all the equipment and showing us how it all worked, with all of these folk on standby during our passage to answer any questions that we might have. To have e-mail, sms and telephone communication throughout our voyage was fantastic and it was comforting having such additional layers of safety that not so long ago wouldn’t have been conceivable. Certainly the last time Rotary Scout sailed to Rio there were no such facilities and all she had on board was the HF radio.

For supper we had tinned meatballs with pasta in a Denny sauce served which went down very well. We also discovered that we had all become chocoholics as our Cadbury chocolate bar reserves were starting to run low so we resolved that we would ration ourselves to only two pieces of chocolate each per day.

Good 15+ knot winds stayed with us all through the night with the self-proclaimed “big wave riders”, aka Chris and Marcus, staying up late into the night to surf Rotary Scout down the faces of the waves generated by the big swell following us.