Day 6 or the events of Saturday.

Sailing fast through the night the wind came up so when Christine came up for her shift, we reduced sail, one reef in the main and a shortened jib. Was cruising along, all night long, heading towards an easy 200 mile day.

Off to sleep. Woke up to some big waves and some nice sunny skies.

What do Vera Cruz, Race to the Boarder and now the Atlantic crossing have in common? I’m a frayed knot you are not gonna guess it. So the Topping lift chafed through by the time I woke up. But we were still single reef’d, and doing 10kn in the correct direction. The topping lift had chafed along the rear edge of the main sail, 1/2 dangling behind the boat, and 1/2 still wrapped around the spin halyards and mast.

Now the topping lift holds up the boom to keep it off the solar panels, so when changing the main sail up and down the topping lift is quite necessary.

So we made breakfast @ 10kn – hoping for flatter seas in the afternoon. After breakfast I figured we should remedy the situation and go up there, we weren’t getting bounced around “that” much. Since the topping lift rope was rapped around both spin halyards, I couldn’t risk using both of those for the ride to the top of the mast. Chose to use one of those and a rolling hitch for the safety line on the spreaders/rigging on the way up. Meanwhile Christine is saying NO, you can’t go up there, finally agreed if I wore my PFD.

Fractional spin halyard tied to bosun’s chair. Safty line with rolling hitch on rigging, and PFD safty harness clipped to rigging as well. Expected the motion to be fun, but holy rag doll batman, and I was only going 3/4 of the way up the 70 foot mast. Christine has some video, and not sure we need to go to any more cirque du soliel shows when we can create our own.

I about cried when I got to the topping lift and I was already tired from holding on, that I couldn’t pull it down. There wasy no way I was coming down empty handed. Untangled the rope got thrown out around the jib, and finally was able to pull it down. Probably the longest its ever taken to tie a bowline knot when I tied that to the bosun’s chair. Now back down, feet wrapped around anything and everything to stabilize, did take a 5 minute break sitting on the speaders at least that was comfortable.

Cold beer was had back on deck. An hour to rest, then tied the two pieces together, we’ll wait of some smoother/slower day to re-rig the topping lift as there is plenty of spare line.

That turns out to be one of the better moves as we got 30kn of winds and 10+ foot seas yesterday evening, so being able to add the 2nd reef became necessary.

We saw the thunderstorm coming so we reduced to the 3rd reef, but somewhere the lazy jacks got untied to sailbag didn’t catch the entire main, tired from the earlier activities and not nearly tall enough to reach high enough the bag is there and also waiting on calmer weather to really secure. When we put in the 3rd reef, the main halyard was thumping the mast, so we just dropped it in favor of slow motoring to the storm.

Probably a good thing too. 45k of wind came bustling through with rain to accompany the 12foot seas, then back to 30kn of wind.

We have been in a thunderstorm so this update is a few hours late, but we are still trucking due west across. We had a spectacular lightning show that we motored right through, turning off all electronics and storing some in the oven in case the strike was closer than we wanted it to be.

Right now, making water, one engine running, partial jib out – biding time as the weather is supposed to go our way within 30hrs.

Crew is well rested with the slowing down and motoring through the high seas. Christine is doing well too, in this freakishly huge waves, over one and into the next.

Everyone is doing well, just had some yummy omelets with left over pork chops from last nights sammiches, too much wave action for a big dinner last night. Some typing, couple reading and one on watch, chugging along!

Course over ground: 273 Speed over ground: 4.9kn Total miles through water: 858 Miles to destination: 2168 kn if we were a bird.

So, THAT’S what that button is for!

I realized that my days are off, with regards to the subject of these posts, I’m writing about what happened n day 4 of the crossing but writing about it on day 5, so be it, off by one – typical programmers mistake, I’ll run with it.

Woke up this morning to a boat load of frenzied activities. Seemed something was going as planned, hauled my but up to listen come up to speed, as Christine’s translation on what was wrong with the charging of the brand new batteries we had installed was. As I said yesterday the little generator that could, wasn’t and was going to try and sort it out in the day light. Well, Marvin had beat me to it, because the starboard engine wasn’t charging the batteries fast enough. He had changed engines to use the port engine to charge the batteries and then tried the little honda and it overloaded. The 220volt shore power battery charger wasn’t charging! So by all accounts we were down to 1 charging source, the port engine. Solar doesn’t work at night. Checking the shore power, there were no light on it, and the switch was off. Last night when I ran the starboard engine, it put some 60amp hours back, would have thought that the 115amp alternator would do better than that but was still charging none the less. No lights on the charger, not a problem, no incoming power. Start the honda, ahh lights on the charger – all good there. Remembering that there was a green light on an un-marked switch that lights up when running shore power/honda generator – oh that button, yeah thats the hot water heaters, they draw much more than the generator can produce. While putting the “stuff” back in to the compartment with the charger, I accidentally hit the off button so charging ceased for about 5 mins, but that was an easy fix. Nothing was wrong, except a switch for water heaters was on, it is now off.

Some sammiches for lunch, with some really yummy cheddar cheese. Made a tortilla soup with the leftover turkey, came out okay but boiling in the pressure cooker seemed to take away alot of flavor – all tasted good, just needed some pepper or more cilantro.

We saw our first sailboat out here today, it was on the horizon. We were on a port tack, and they must have been on starboard tack, as they showed up on our starboard but were way behind our stern later in the day. Probably 6+ miles away. Ron has also spotted a mast head light that he is watching right now.

Weather continues to be a mystery. Every forecast we see or get, says the wind should be coming from someplace we could sail, but its coming from where we want to go. For example, right now the most recent forecast says it should be coming from 188 @ 13.2kn, but what we see is 220 @ 8kn, so I guess that’s a lot closer then the 180 degree difference earlier today. Hmmm, maybe we’ll get to trust these forecasts sooner than later.

Tonight after dinner the wind and seas had died down so much we decided to motor sail a bit, and head closer to the due west heading. So I started the engine oil/transmission check on the port engine and discovered the heating system repair that was done in turkey was leaking sea water into the engine compartment – no biggie, just a drip here and there. Tried to fix it, they had tighted a hose clamp where there was nothing to tighten it to, just splitting the aluminum hose. Cut a piece off and reattached it slowed the drip significantly, we’ll just keep an eye on it, as we aren’t using the heaters anyway.

It is definitely warming up, on tonight’s watch I will still have a jacket on, but gone are the multiple layers under the jacket. Cool but doesn’t bite through ya.

All it good, played “I’m on a boat” today – smiles on everyone’s faces even with the profanity in the “Lonely Island” version of that song, I love it. I replaced the outdoor speakers with cheapies but have been awesome to have on this trip. The old ones cones were shot, so they made no sound. The favorite thing about those, they were nice and silicone’d in to the boat to prevent leaks, except when the cone acted like a funnel.

Just turned off the noise makers (engine) and stared sailing in 13kn of wind, heading 273 @ 7kn – Lemke you would be proud, not always a beam reach! Using lots of dagger board to get 40degrees off the wind.

Course over ground: 254 Speed over ground: 6.3kn Total miles through water: 610 Miles to destination: 2353 kn if we were a bird.

Early post today, wide awake after my shift, and after having drug a fishing line for most of 470 miles it was the first time the reel had made a peep. Course only there was no fish to be landed, just the lure’s skirt was hiked up by the waves – and something did try to take a bit ouf the skirt, so back overboard for more dragging across the pond.

Lets see, we had quesidilas (I’ll figure out how to spell that later) for lunch with some left over turkey, think we are going to make some turkey noodle soup with the rest. Then we had a big ole batch of Carroll Shelby’s Chili, made with Turkish mystery meat, and corn bread – pretty yummy only a small portion of chili left for some late night snack.

Okay the weather has been delightful, sunny, brisk – when the sun is out its almost shorts and t-shirts, at night its still a bit cold – need jackets and long pants. This was supposed to be a trade winds run, meaning all the winds would push us to the islands, but so far we haven’t found the elusive trade winds. We were heading south to find the, but the forecast says they aren’t there, they also aren’t north, there are 2 low pressure zones on the forecast that says we should have no wind at all. I should love the forecast to be correct, because what we have here is 15-20kn right out of the west, of course that’s where we want to go. At this point its looking doubtful that we’ll be on time to St. Lucia to catch our flights – good thing they are fully changeable fares.

While everyone was asleep, I tacked the boat to head more north, with a little help from the autopilot as the jib sheets are about 20 feet apart, and you have to release one side before pulling the other back in. All in all pretty sucessful, the next one actually went smoother, told auto that I needed more time, and he slowed down – so it worked great, now heading back south of west-ish.

Too much sailing not enough electricity. On my shift, we were humming along quite nicely when I came up for my shift, the batteries were down 200ah, out of the 960 that we have on board, so we needed to put some back. Ron and I tried to get the little Honda generator plugged in and running, we were successful, but the electricity didn’t want to go in to the batteries that way, we’ll figure that out in the daylight. So we are motor sailing with one engine just to charge the batteries back to 4 dots on the link charge controller.

A little excitement, the crew on the other side of the boat got in a little heated discussion on the proper use of the toilet facilities, one liked the window open the other didn’t like the salt spray that sometimes made its way in to the latrine. Lasted only a few minutes and no feathers are ruffled.

Crew is good, everyone seems to be sleeping their fair share, as we bounce our way across the at Atlantic.

Course over ground: 235 Speed over ground: 6.4kn Total miles through water: 470 Miles to destination: 2434 kn if we were a bird.