Pacific Cup Day 8 Recap – Wild Nights, Tradewinds, & Halfway

Ha, whoever hoped for 20-30 knots for us please stop! We have plenty of breeze now, thank you very much. Haven’t seen less than 20 knots for about 27 hours. The thing is Shearwater doesn’t really go any faster above 20 knots, but the loads get higher, the waves get bigger and it just gets more difficult with no real return. Plus we have to fly our smaller A4. We would be much more competitive in 15 knots with our bigger A2. More horsepower compared to the other boats and the lighter boats wouldn’t be able to plane. A bit disheartening to see two of the 30 footers in our division put up >200 miles two days in a row. We rate faster than both of those boats and getting 200 miles without any problems is still very hard. I suspect we could put 20 miles on them per day in 15 knots. Perhaps we’ll get that in the last few days?

The good news is that we’ve had no real issues for the last 24 hours. We had some lighter winds yesterday during the day and flew our A2 which was really nice and seemed fast for the wind speed, but it is obvious the boats to the north had more breeze. The sun made it’s first appearance and all it was quite pleasant. Around 8pm we were officially greeted by the tradewinds with our first squall. Fortunately, it was a softy. Only 25 knots and a spittles or rain. That gave us the queue to switch down to the A4 for the night and we’ve been rolling along in 20+ ever since. It is a wild ride though. The boat feels like it is on the ragged edge of wiping out all the time. Good thing we got a lot rest early on because we haven’t slept much the last 2 days. That may change though as we made a change to the autopilot this morning that has made a big difference. Apologies in advance for all the sailor speak in this one today, but… We changed the pilot mode from apparent wind to true wind and the motion is much, much better. It became obvious this morning as the swells have increased and we’ve started to surf how much our heading changes as we surf down a wave, the apparent wind goes forward, the boat bears off, the boat slows down, the apparent wind swings aft, and often the chute collapses. This was happening a lot the last two days even with small seas, I just didn’t realize why. The bigger swells made it obvious, so we switched to True Wind mode and the boat steers much straighter, the motion is much better, the chute is more stable, and life is much better. Hopefully we are faster too. Every day we learn something new. Before the autopilot it was the twingers for the spinnaker sheet. Long story, short; more twinger good, less twinger bad. This would have solved a lot of our issues during Harvest Moon last Fall. From uncontrollable to manageable. I feel like by the time we get to Hawaii we might actually know what the heck we are doing. As it is I feel more like a monkey sitting on top of a rocket. “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I think I’m going on a very fast ride…”

One last thing. Our cockpit setup. We’ve got it going pretty good now I think. We are cross-sheeting the spinnaker from one primary to the other. Originally this was to make it easier to see the chute while trimming. In reality we don’t only make small trim adjustments on occasion now that we figured out the right twinger position, but cross-sheeting runs the sheet across the cockpit that gives us a great banjo string or jumper line. When the chute collapses it is super easy to grab the banjo string and yank like you jump a halyard ahandful of sheet, refilling the kite, and then it can be eased right back to same trim position. Goodly! Hopefully we won’t be need the banjo string as much now with the True Wind setting. We are also still flying our staysail. We haven’t stopped reaching yet, but I think the real benefits of the staysail are it keeps the bow down, it adds additional deterrent to the spinnaker wrapping, and it provides a nice wind blanket when hoisting and dousing the spinnakers. It may stay up the rest of way just for those points. Cross-sheeting the spinnaker sheet and flying the staysail means we have run out of winches in the cockpit. We can’t use the halyard winches for any of this because of our nice, I would never ever give up, dodger. The solution to winch problem though is that since our mainsheet uses two winches and we have been on the same starboard tack for about 5 days, is to take the port side mainsheet off the winch and let it run until the stopper knot hits the turning block and we just use the starboard winch for trimming the mainsheet. That frees up a winch for the staysail. It also brings us to our one minor issue last night. The stopper knot pulled through, the boom swung out 90 degrees to the boat and the sheet ran out of the boom block leaving us with no way to bring the boom back in. Couldn’t head up with the chute up so we took a piece of line and tied it around the boom behind the vang. Coerced it out closer to the end of the boom, which for some reason was easier than it sounds, then ran the line to the port stern cleat, over to the starboard stern cleat and forward to the starboard mainsheet winch was was no not in use given the mainsheet problem. Wound in the boom, led the mainsheet back through the boom block and problem solved. Our McGyver class concluded.

Lots more sunshine today. Shorts and tee-shirt weather now.

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