Miles traveled, day 6: 95
Miles traveled total: 741
Miles to Port Angeles: 3,871
After we hoisted the main and rolled out the jib we sailed along nicely for a few hours yesterday. Then the wind started to build again, and before we knew it the anemometer was over 40 once more. So back to the exercise of dropping the main and hoisting the storm sail. Funny thing is, the second time in two days sounded pretty horrible at first, but once we got into a groove and started fussing with things it was just kind of routine. Rob even took the time up on the bow to re-tie the dink so it won’t do any unauthorized traveling again. So hove to we were once more last night all night, but this time we weren’t trying to go anywhere and just sat through the worst of it. This morning the wind had eased back to the 30’s.
We’ve started sailing again, this time leaving the storm trysail up and rolling out some jib. We’ve still got quite a bit of wind and with the current we’re making over 7 knots east, which is just what we want. We’re looking at the weather faxes and see that we’ve almost accomplished what we were trying to do – the lows are going to start rolling north of us as the North Pacific high pushes west again. We might be done with the huge winds, as the next 3 lows coming off Japan are only 1007 MB, not the 996 that the gale was. As we approach the high we’ll turn north to keep from getting into the middle of it and becoming becalmed, hoping it doesn’t overtake us. At least that’s the plan right now.
While we were hove to this morning we had some time to clean up the inside of the boat, but now we just need some sunshine to dry things out.
Teresa
