Da y 15 - Pacific Croassing - 6th April

6th April: 15.00 (Add 7 for UTC)
Course needed: 263
Course steered: 263
Speed: average 4.4 knots
Miles sailed: 1698
Miles to go: 1329
Lat: 7° 52'S
Long: 116° 43'W
Wind: 7-15 apparent, 150 true?
Plan: Sail direct for Hiva Oa


An uneventful night (excellent). Quiet watches but slow progress.

This morning as it got light Gill, much the better swimmer, donned her togs, mask, knives and grappling hook to try and free our fishing line from the prop shaft which was making a screechy noise. We heaved to and dropped a long line with fenders (properly tied on) behind and a knotted line for her to hold onto. We were pretty concerned but down the steps into the ocean she went. 1.4 knots still and she could hang on to the rope. Good news. She reported nothing visible so even if there's a bit of line in the cutless bearing somewhere there's not much. We heaved her back on board and went to try the shaft. I could now turn it by hand although it was a bit stiffer than usual. Phew. Looks like that one's sorted.

The wind today is from the SE so we are pretty much on a beam reach. Slow though without the yankee. Could we risk it? Yes, we could. We flew the repaired sail with a reef in for almost an hour when the wind piped up to over 15 knots again and we no longer wanted to risk the repair. Another success!

Bread making followed with some 'interesting' coconut cakey things.

The day isn't totally without incident though. We use a brand new Samsung tablet with Navionics and OpenCPN as our day to day 'chartplotter'. This afternoon for no apparent reason the whole tablet lost its GPS location. Just like that. One minute it was reporting our location and plotting it on the chart, the next minute nothing. Nada. Good job we have plenty of backups. But very annoying never the less. [3 hours later. Just as magically it's started working again!!].

This passage has not been what we expected. Where are the endless fluffy clouds, consistent trade winds, gentle sailing without a sail change for weeks? OK, there's only the two of us but it's been much more challenging than we expected, and more so than either of the Atlantic crossings. Not helped by the fact that we damaged the yankee and we are not flying the parasail as much as we might in case we are unable to bring it down in a sudden squall. Twice now it has lifted me off the deck as I try to retrieve it. It is BIG. Peter, now we can basically get it launched we could do with another tweaking masterclass!


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