Day 8 - Sunrise Magic
Today was an interesting day, beautiful sunrise, and I had the morning watch so I could witness and take it all in, in perfect solitude. French Kiwi Juice on my headphones, watching the clouds and the waves and the sails in the wind. In the distant there is a big cargo ship passing us by heading for New York. During the first light of the day I could still make out it's navigational lights but later the sun makes those invisible but by now the ship is near enough to see the silhouette against the morning sky. It's a nice morning, and as soon as the light allows for it I put out the fishing lines.
However there is tons of seagrass floating around in the water and that's pretty much all I catch for the entire morning. Let out the line, wait 5 mins, see how it catches onto a piece of floating seq grass, reel it back in, repeat. Surprisingly the seagrass doesn't taste too bad and I was thinking of making a salad or something out of it. But I am not sure if it's good to eat in bigger quantities and the last thing you want when you're this far out at sea is that you have a medical emergency because you ate some poisonous sea grass. Eventually Christian comes up from his sleep to release me from my morning watch, but by that point I am not even that tired anymore and we eat breakfast together. Müsli, with some dried fruits, oats and milk. Very simple in a way but really tasty nonetheless and I have a big grin on my face, while we are eating and enjoying the morning sun.
Afterwards I went to bed sleeping for a bit more.
Later that day we got quite heavy winds. 20 knots or more, the boat is soaring along at a crisp 7.8 knots and you can feel the force of wind on the sails. At some point the sails and mast start making noises and vibrating under the pressure and so we decide to reef the main sail by quite a bit. The maneuver is interesting, because we go more into the wind which makes the sails flap like mad for some time until the main sail is brought down and reefed nicely. Then we bring the main sail back out, steer back to our desired course and off we are again.
The only problem with the point of sail we have right now is that you don't want to sail through the wind.
The problem is that if you do this, the main sail would try to swing the beam around and slam itself into the mast quite heavily which could seriously break things. You even have a piece of rope there as a last resort to keep the sail from swinging around like that but it doesn't have enough strength to really hold the sail if it tries to go around forcefully.
So you have to keep a good watch on the wind at all times and adjust course to make sure that this doesn't happen.
This adjusting the course with the wind all the time more carefully than with the other sailing rigs we had so far, means a bit of stress during night watches. Even with the reefed and adjusted point of sail we're still cruising along with almost 7 knots. The waves are bigger with this wind today as well and you can feel how the boat is swung around by them, surfing up and down and sometimes sideways. This makes the sail flap because while surfing down the wave the boat turns into the wrong direction, making the sail lose the wind, deflate, only to then catch the wind again, with full force upon turning back, resulting in a immediate straightening, followed by a loud clap or cracking noise of the sail. It's not good for the sail to flail and flag like this but it can't be helped if the wind and waves are like that.
Eventually we even catch a fish instead of sea grass. It's a big Mahi Mahi again and a welcome sight.
Somehow fresh fish raises my morale and I love the feeling of reeling one in, and preparing it. By now I'm also quite good at making filets out Mahi Mahi. Slicing the fish while there are meter high waves throwing the boat around is still challenging because of the waves and like always I have to be very careful because the knife is ultra razor super sharp and can easily cut my flesh as it does that of the fish. It's kinda scary because every once in a while a wave almost sends me flying around the boat, knife in hand and all, but I have my grip onto something all the time and let go of the knife soon enough. After fileting the fish, I make myself one filet into Sashimi and eat it with Soy sauce. Christian also made some bread with cheese and jamón and we warmed up the pasta from the other day. All of this tasted amazing and the quality of the food here is amazing everyday.
After some more time reading I go back to bed for a nap before dinner and my evening night shift. I wake up just in time to see the beautiful sunset and begin preparing the potato wedges we want to cook for dinner: the fresh fish prepared as fish fries with some potato wedges and mayonnaise and some mojo Rojo and Verde. It's delicious although it feels a bit like frozen fast food even though everything is fresh. Now I am sitting outside, the wind constantly turning, throwing the sails around loosely and noisy while it's my night shift. The moon is out and gets fuller by the day and by now you can see the waves and the water because of it's reflecting light. If it were a bit more calm it would be amazingly beautiful but as it is now I am a bit worried for the sails. Correcting the course doesn't help too much because the motion comes from the combination of the wind and wave and is too quick for the autopilot to catch and correct for. Also our course now goes too far towards the North because the wind has changed direction too far as well. We might have to change the sails back to a different setup tomorrow morning or even in the night. Let's see when the shift changes in one hour and Christian is up and about. Right now it feels decent enough still to manage things so I am not too worried but still the noise that a flogging sail makes is a bit disturbing and keeps me wide awake.
Christian thinks that it's ok, and hence we continue in the same way as before. But we need to change the sails in the morning of the next day because we don't want to go further North if we can help it.