Saturday 14th January 2017
With our main 365 litre water tank almost empty now we thought it a good idea to transfer some water from the 170 litre tank in the forepeak. We also had seven separate 25 litre containers of water on board as well as a manual reverse osmosis water maker that could produce fresh water from sea water at a rate of 4l an hour. Emptying two of the 25 litre containers into the main tank we proceeded to pump the water out of the forepeak tank into these containers to replenish them, only to discover that the 170 litres we thought we had was more like only 35 litres. We clearly had a leak in the forepeak tank. Although we should still have plenty of water for the anticipated next 6 days of sailing that we would need to do we thought it a good time to try out the manual water maker. The device worked a treat and in minutes we had half a cupful of good tasting fresh water that had been reclaimed from the sea water. The big advantage of having a manual water maker is that it can be taken with you if you ever have to abandon to a life raft as one can survive at sea for a couple of weeks with very little food but only a couple of days without water.
Something else we started running out of was electricity as out battery voltages drifted lower and lower with each day that we had overcast weather and squalls passing over which prevented the two 200W solar panels from charging them. We were only getting about 20W of power from the panels on these days and the batteries dropped to 69% at only 11 volts. Turning off the fridge and FM radio we were using for playing music the next day and making sure that we didn’t charge any accessories such as the laptop, cell phones, tablets and cameras using the inverter and other charging points we managed to get the voltage back up to 12 volts. At night we still had to keep our tricolor navigation lights at the top of our mast on but we turned off all the other cabin lights and everyone had to use their own head torches to find their way around and don their PFDs to come on watch etc. It was always necessary to only use the red light option on the head torches as any person inadvertently shining the bright white light on the head torches in someone’s face at night severely affected their night vision which was especially detrimental to the person on the helm trying to keep the boat on the right heading by monitoring the chart plotter’s bulkhead compass lubber line. We could of course have run the engine for half an hour or so in neutral to charge up the batteries with the alternator but thought we would prefer to try and cut our power consumption rather until we had more sunshine. The sun did shine the next day and the solar panels did their trick, charging both the bank of two house deep cycle batteries and the motor battery up to 13 volts and 82% full again.
We had noticed that every time were hit by a squall the wind increased briefly from an average of 15 knots to gusts of about 25 knots for roughly 15 minutes, during which it typically drenched us with rain. If we were flying the spinnaker, as soon as the wind speed went over 20 knots we had to drop it quickly and very often then needed to furl a reef in the genoa and possibly one or two reefs in the main in order to control the boat safely. The wind then always dropped right off to between 5 and 10 knots immediately after the squall had passed and could remain like this for up to a couple of hours afterwards if there was no other squall coming through behind the previous one. It was as if the fast moving wind at the leading edge of the squall sucked the air out from the area behind it as it passed. The fast racing boats would typically be able to take advantage of squalls by sailing with them for as long as possible since they could very often sail faster than the speed of the wind. In our slow boat to Brazil this wasn’t an option, but it got us thinking that surely we could sail a bit smarter to avoid these holes left behind squalls as they slowed us down terribly. So the next time a squall came we tried a new strategy to try and stay on the wind. With the squall approaching we dropped the spinnaker and without reefing the sails sailed south of the westward moving squall. We didn’t need to reef our sails as we caught the bottom edge of the squall in 15 knot winds which was already a big plus. Then when the squall had passed off our starboard side we altered direction back to our preferred westerly heading. It seemed to work as the wind only dropped to 12 knots on average for about half an hour and then picked up again to 15 knots soon thereafter. We had also not travelled all that far south and had a reasonable amount of latitude to play with to allow some sailing south.
In the early hours of the morning we experienced a squall that crept up on us seemingly from nowhere as it was difficult to see it coming with the overcast skies at night. The graveyard shift crew on watch needed to put two reefs into the main sail and furled the genoa right in until the squall passed, dumping a sizeable quantity of water on them in the process.
