Day 4 – Much ado about nothing

Yesterday afternoon was some pretty amazing sailing.  We reached along all day with the gennaker, generally over 8 knots (new top speed of 9.95 kts – and of course I’ll let you know if we break that in the future!)  Last night the wind eased off, we’ve gone back to the genoa for some close reaching and continue to plod away to the east at 3-5 knots.  It’s pleasant, if a bit slow.  The seas have gotten much smoother this afternoon, but the weak low to our northeast continues to battle with the ground swell from the SW by producing smaller, shorter northerly swells and the effect at times is a bit rowdy.  The temperature has finally eased off too and we are able to sleep with a bit of cover and without the fan.  Right now it is 79F outside, 79F in the water, and 79F inside the boat.

We spend a lot of time just working on the little details of the rigging and playing with the sails to learn how best to make Shearwater go.  Should this line go under or over the jackline?  Should we ease the tack line a little or bring the pole in slightly for the gennaker?  Where should we cleat the preventer for the boom?  Which “gain” setting on the autopilot is the best compromise between using electricity and steering well?  (Answer:  Right now the autopilot is doing an amazing job and drawing very, very little power with the gain turned all the way down.  Really pleased with the NKE stuff so far.)  We are also figuring how (or how not to) to hoist and douse the gennaker with the roller furling.  It is trickier than it sounds and added some excitement to our day, but we are learning.  Not very exciting from afar, but it keeps us busy as we get to really know our boat under sail.

We did solve one frustrating thing yesterday morning.  For some reason the day before when we tried to send emails using our iPad to get our weather and routing information, both servers returned errors and no data.  It seemed the format was wrong even though it looked exactly like what we’d sent before.  After an aha moment I tried sending the same emails with the MacBook and it worked fine.  I think our email service (XGate) is adding some text to the email about keeping replies short and that is screwing up the format.  I can remove it on the MacBook, but that extra bit of text doesn’t actually show up on the iPad, but apparently it is still in the email.  Something to tinker with later.  I’m just glad it worked with the laptop.

Our electricity consumption has been quite pleasing.  In the first 38 hours we used 164 amps.  That seems to have improved as we’ve learned how best to set the autopilot and with the cooler temperatures the refrigerator is not drawing as much.  The last 22 hours we’ve used only 68 amps.  I don’t think we are getting the maximum out of our 140W solar panel yet either as with the northerly winds the sails block the panel for most of the morning.  It seems with about 1 hour of motoring each day we offset the consumption.  Not bad.

We are both starting to catch up on our sleep.  Sleep was in short supply in Annapolis and sailing down the Delaware Bay, but now there is plenty of time to relax or sleep.

No ship sightings today.  Only visits from our friends the shearwaters.  I had no idea they would be so common here, but I take it as a good omen our namesake keeps us company.

Current position:  38 08’ 45”N, 68 17’ 21”W
24 hour run:  142nm, Distance to go:  1865nm