Miles traveled day 9: 144
Miles traveled day 10: 159
Miles traveled total : 1,320
Miles to Port Angeles: 3,411
The forecasters keep changing their minds about whether the next set of lows north of us are developing into gales or storms. Either way, we’re stuck here between them and the high south of us. We’d really like to start turning north, but the lows just seem to be getting worse. Rob joked this morning that we may end up in San Francisco if this keeps up, but we know eventually we’ll get a break (won’t we?). The barometer tell us we’re sailing directly into the high right now, because it’s going up pretty quick, but the wind has shifted to the northeast and we’re sailing as hard to weather as we can. And of the two choices, becalmed is better than a storm.
With the high pressure we get relief from the rain and some nice sunshine, though, so that’s all good. And since the wind hasn’t been blowing from this direction very long the seas are relatively flat and we’re not pounding too much. The wind is forecast to turn the rest of the way back to the southwest this evening, so we’ll need to tack sometime tonight and turn back north.
Rob discovered yesterday right before dark that the top slug that attaches the mainsail to the mast has lost its webbing, so I had some sewing repairs to do before we could hoist the mainsail again. We thought we could just pull the pin out and resew the webbing without pulling down the entire sail. But, that was not meant to be. Once the webbing was sewn and the pin pulled back out to put back into the slug on the track we couldn’t get it back into the webbing. I had sewn it too tight. So we decided to just pull down the sail afterall and resew with the slug so we didn’t have to get the pin out or back in. What might have been a 5 minute job in Hasse’s sail loft took us well over 2 hours by the time we got the sail hoisted back up. But the wind has eased and we need the power of the mains’l once again.
Not much else to report. We haven’t tried fishing yet, but now with the improved weather maybe I can convince the captain to drop out some lures when the wind turns back behind us tomorrow. The water has cooled to the low 70’s, so I think we’ll be setting lures for tuna now instead of dorado.
Teresa
