Feeling knotty

What a difference a day and a few knots more of wind makes. We caught up to the wind, or the wind caught up to us, whichever way, and we are sailing again! It feels and sounds incredible. Instead of listening to sloshing water and banging sails because we’re going so slow, now we’re surfing down the waves. The wind is still shifty which requires a lot of monitoring but at least we are moving, and more or less in a southwesterly direction. Thank you rainbows for putting wind in the pot of gold.

The four days of light winds taught us a lot. Amidst the rolliness of the boat and the general banging around of things as we bobbed and/or drifted along, we tried every sail plan, which are different configurations and combinations of sails, to see what might work. While you can sail in light air and smooth seas, the sea state with 6-8 foot waves meant that there wasn’t enough wind to hold air in sails, so they end up flogging about which is not good for either the sails or for the boat or for your ears and general well-being. We tried everything — poling out our jib, poling out half our jib, flying our jib and our staysail together to see if they behaved better, flying just the staysail, putting up the main for about a half hour until it banged around and we put it away immediately, learning a light air heave-to with our staysail alone and our steering wheel bungee corded, we tried it all! It was really good practice and unfortunately the boat just can’t go fast or in the direction we wanted to in 8 knots of wind in these seas.

Yesterday, we flew our spinnaker thanks to Conor who found a fix for the part that had broken. Flying this light air kite, especially with the sea state having pretty big waves but no wind, involves hand steering the boat, which was a ton of fun but also still only resulted in a 50 mile day. It was Conor’s birthday yesterday and we had a nice apero together, but morale was low after four days of going very little mileage.

Instead, this morning, after a night of going 2 knots an hour in 6-8 knot wind, the wind picked up to 12 knots and and we got the mainsail up and all of the jib and we are flying along now at 5-7 knots. While we still can’t go directly on our course yet as the sails still flog a bit when we do that, the wind should back around and we’ll be able to go more and more that way. Also, we found our backup plan — if we’d rather go to the Iles Gambiers as our starting point in French Polynesia rather than the Marquesas, we can sail that angle right from here 🙂 what’s another 600 miles anyhow?

We’re at the same latitude now as Puerto Vallarta! And we crossed a major milestone in that we’re under 2,000 miles to go now. The wind is so energizing that I made Conor’s birthday brunch I wanted to yesterday but was flying a spinnaker instead — a delicious sweet potato, soyrizo and kale taquito. YUM!