like sands.

18°48'45" N
49°55' W
0815 UT
28.2.08
__________________________
weather. we're in some weather. not serious weather, just kinda cool weather. since around sunset, we have been screaming along. i made better than 15 knots near the beginning of my watch, and our avg speed-over-groung has been better than the last couple days.

we're in the trade winds, which means that if we look is the ship's log, we find a couple pages of E 5 or ENE 5, ESE 5 and stuff a whole heckuva lot like that. we're essentially just getting the same thing since rounding that big right turn before capo verde. but right now, since just after dessert, we have been in this localized system. the VRM / EBL (the wwii-lookin' radar thingy) says that there is cloud cover about 1 nautical mile around us in nearly every direction and when i zoom out, it tells me that there is nada for better than 20 nautical miles in every direction. we're surfing.

there's this gust blowing at the low pressure system, the rain cloud. the lone rain cloud that's following us around like that character from Peanuts. it's making a wave, and we're on it. that's great, because it means that we make up for the draggy bits. like when the spinnaker blew up the second time. 2 extra knots meant (or would have meant) that we'd arrive better than a day earlier.

and the other spinnakers (there are two) are reserved for race week. the owner says no go. and since the new (giant pink one) spin sail was in the neighbourhood of 9000 Euros, we'll go along with what boat-owning dude wants. it is indeed a privelige and a luxury to be sailing in this magnificent craft. have i made that clear enough yet? the other spinnakers are bigger. but we're not using them.

___________________
more about sails.

yesterday we hourglassed the gennaker. this is a drag. a giant drag. this fish bit and so what happens when a fish bites is we take the power out of the sails, furl away, turn the boat upwind and reel in dinner / lunch / breakfast.

next what we do is reel it in, et cetera. i lost the fish. this one did not want to be brought in. we also lost the gen, temporarily. hourglass: this is when the wind takes the sail and wraps it up all inconvenient like in the shrouds and so forth. i think of this as a bit of a group effort, as i could have been less interested in getting another fishie and more on the make sure the sail is away part of the process.


matt had been awake and had given some direction about how to cleat thing off. perhaps not as clear in receiving as in the sending. the furling line (this is a rope that winds the sail around a sort of spool at the front of the boat) hadn't been cleated 100% and gave up a little. the explanation about how to cleat off the gen furling line was slightly unclear when i'd received it, and i am thinking it's just hard to explain.


we pulled the sail down. dunked it into the sea. that was a little unnerving, but we managed to haul the offending wet bits out again. dunking a sail in that situation is never a good idea. that's in the how-to-irreparably-damage file. anyway, we got the sail very aboard and onto the trampoline very quickly. pulled it off the halyard (a sailing rope, or 'line' that we use to get the sail up or down the mast), unwrapped the inconvenient bits, took off the sheets (more sailing ropes, these are what lets the sail in and out) and had a little unraveling party. as it was a big undertaking, we roused sarah, who was on the next watch a little early. she in turn woke up First Mate Jenny, inconveniently in the middle of the real sleep in her day.

jenny seems to do a nap and a sleep, whereas i have tended to do to equal parts. marilyn sleeps before her nocturnal watch, slightly afterward and sometimes naps in the afternoon. mostly people get one larger sleep and have minor ones. matt sleeps in fits and starts and wakes up for 15 minutes or half an hour at a time whenever whenever and also seems to get up in the morning and work all day on boaty things. that is why he gets the big bucks.

so we had a 'whole crew moment,' for a while everyone was working on one task all at the same time. perhaps the first time in the whole trip. everyone in harnesses, clipped in. when you launch a spinnaker sail, you often have 'woolies' which keep the thing bunched up at 6 foot intervals so it doesn't get away from you (and hourglass) as you're pulling up the halyard (see above). we tied up the gen sail with piles and piles of elastic bands, as there is no yarn aboard. and bits of saran wrap. we clingfilmed the sail shut. ha ha. so then we were all ready to boom! hoist that rag.

the operation went pretty smooth, though i had put an inconvenient twist in the gen halyard. oops. rather than undo the shackle, matt opted to tie the spin halard onto the furling mechanism and move it around my mistake, alas. more dynamic and did get more people involved. undoing the shackle and tying it off again would have taken probably better than 5 minutes and then we would have had the whole crew waiting around for me to fiddle with the stupid tiny knots again.

sail goes up. saran wrap and elastics go pop, sail billows out and gets some wind. mostly good and mostly without a hitch. we had to wind the sheet around the forestay by hand a little, as it did start to try and get away from us again, but we caught it. i ate an apple and everything was fine. oh. yeah. the fishing pole went off sometime during the process and matt said to put more drag on. this i did. and after the sail was furled away and everything was done, i reeled in a whole pile of line. there was a surprising amount of resistance. but it dind't feel like the fish was fighting. it wasn't running away. and there was a whole lot of line out there. reel reel. crank crank. my arm was getting tired. also somehow i had got up slightly early for watch to look at the sky. tired. still reeling.

no fish. saran wrap. at least two pieces on the hook.