It was an interesting day! If you look at our track, you can
probably see some nice, straight lines and crisp turns when we had wind and
then, around 4 to 10 pm, more meandering s-curves with a defined c where our
spinnaker lost a battle with a small but fierce squall.
We were in the middle of a calm patch of wind but confused seas and the
spinnaker was difficult to manage. I heard John tell Sunil, “Well, now you
have plenty of wind” and then I heard flapping and the winch spinning and
saw John on the trampoline, gathering in piles of yellow sail that was trailing
in the water. I ran to wake up Joe and, well, we picked up the pieces and
pulled out the gennaker.
Conveniently, after that point, the wind shifted forward so we wouldn’t have
been able to use our spinnaker anyway. But we will miss big old Mellow Yellow
in the days to come. We still have our rainbow pride sail but it was nice to
have options!
I was trying to think of an analogy for why the sail split. The best I can come
up with is that it’s like when you (or maybe your kid) takes a plastic straw
(which you would never use, right? Because it’s bad for the environment) and
rolls it at both ends until there’s just a fat bubble of trapped air in the
middle. Then someone flicks it and it pops. I think that’s what happened to our
spinnaker. Except instead of someone flicking it, a gust of wind hit it just
right (or wrong for us) and it popped.
Moving on from destruction to death, it was rather a gory day on Charm. Apart
from the usual mosquito and gnat losses. we also caught and killed a small
yellowfin tuna. Once again, Joe refused to let me conduct science experiments
on the fish, but I did get to try fileting it with moderate success.
More mysterious was the death scene by the mast. As you can see from the photo,
there appears to be a “chalk outline” (OK, maybe it’s ink) of a small
body. We think it might have been the squishy thing Joe stepped on this
morning. Sure looks like a case of dead squid.
Lastly, and sordiidly, there is Sunnil’s self-admitted “special
relationship with the sea.” He came up in the afternoon and asked for
stain remover for an oily substance on his sheets. Next, he had stripped the
bed after saying he had discovered the remnants of a flying fish in the sheets.
Nothing like this happened when his wife Swagata was with us. Strange things
happen at sea but flying fish in your bed? We are going to have to keep a
closer eye on Sunil.
I discovered two small squid bodies in the toe rail on the port side and Joe
tried to feed a small dead flying fish to our tuna. Why is there so much death
on this boat? I have no answers.
Sailing strategy – Jaja (my mother) has been asking for insight. Basically, we
try to make the boat go as fast as possible with the wind we have and we try to
go where the wind is most likely to blow.
Right now, in consulting our PredictWind forecast models, we think the wind is
to the south of us. However, the Marquesas are at 254 degrees. So we are trying
to stay close to
The rhumb line while working our way south when the wind angle allows. Tonight,
on my watch, we were mostly going at 240 degrees which was a good compromise
between speed and progress towards our destination.
Off to sleep, perchance to dream!
Tengo alas para volar