Blog from Family Affair

by Paul Michael, July 10th, 2012

Day 3 - July 9, 2012

Lat/Long = 42 deg 11 min N x 126 deg 46 min W (125nm west of Crescent City, CA)
Last 24 hours distance traveled = 190.4 nautical miles
Total distance traveled = 497.3 nautical miles

Rhumb line distance to Lahaina, Maui =  1,970.2 nautical miles.

"Ah! A heading. Set sail in a... uh... a general... that way direction. "  - Captain Jack Sparrow

If you've been following our track on the yellowbrick website, I know what you're thinking.  Yes, we were heading southeast back to the mainland this morning.  No, we weren't in any trouble.  We were just avoiding a large stationary high pressure system to the southwest of us.   More about this later.

We saw our first sunfish of the trip today.  They're large disc shaped fish with a long matching dorsal and pectoral fin.  They are flat like a pancake and dive very deep for food.  They eat junk like jellyfish and aren't very tasty.  When they come up from a deep dive, they lay sideways on the water in the sun to warm up.  When I was bringing my sailboat up from San Francisco, I first saw them and thought they were dying sharks because of their dorsal fin seen bent and flapping on the surface.  The one we saw today was about 4 feet in diameter.

The water out here is a beautiful sapphire color.  In the foamy wake around our stern, it has a turquoise color, almost a glacial blue… it's much more pleasant than the algae and plankton rich brown and green waters of Puget Sound.  The water there was 45 deg F and since it has warmed up to 58 deg F.   We're all really looking forward to reaching the tropics in less than a week.

At 6:30pm, HST (right at dusk) we had some excitement on deck.  I had just finished roll call at the nav station and both shift crews were up and finishing dinner.  Suddenly we heard a pop and the call for all hand on deck.  Our guy on the spinnaker had broken.  The guy is a line that attaches to the windward corner of the spinnaker.  It was one of our older lines and was kinda stiff.  It parted right at the splice behind the shackle.  I took the helm and held us 150 degrees off the wind and was very careful not to jibe since everyone was on deck and I didn't want to take them out with the boom.  We had a preventer rigged to reduce this, but the boom still does some swinging around.  We wrestled the spinnaker down and got it down in the main cabin to be re-bagged for the launch and while it was down, it gave us a chance to patch up some small holes from last night's wrap.  We re-tied the guy with a bowline knot and got the spinnaker flying again.  When all was done, we were bare headed for only 21 minutes.  The crew did really well.  Our speed went from 7 back up to double digits again.

At roll call, I learned that the tight pack from last night is still very close to us.  This includes Anne Bonny, Turicum, and Bravo Zulu.  I do have the ability to pull in the race fleet's Yellowbrick position info at anytime, but have been so busy with navigating, radio comms, helming, eating, cleaning, blogging, a little sleep, and even carpentry (I blew the door off the bathroom hinges, don't ask).  Anyway, we're being squeezed between a rock and a soft spot so to speak.  High pressure to our west contains very little wind.  All the favorable northwest wind is stacked up along the coast.  The favorable heading with our northwest wind is to the southwest which works us into the lighter winds.  The solution is a costly gibe to the southeast.  It's a gamble to see if the risk is worth the reward.  We did a costly 40 mile gibe this morning and it seems to have paid off a bit as the recent Yellowbrick speeds I just pulled in show us with a 2 to 3 knot speed advantage.   We'll work out of the ridge of high pressure near 38 degrees North and will have more room to work to the west.  You'll see the race fleet begin to spread out starting there.

We were all really looking forward to beautiful starry nights offshore, but so far, we've had nothing but overcast skies.  We even have drizzle at night.  I downloaded an image from the GOES satellite and it shows cloud cover over thousands of miles out here.  We won't have clear skies until we hit the trade winds in the tropics.  A brief hole did open up over us about an hour ago and it was impressive.  It reminds me of the night skies in rural Northern Michigan where I grew up.

-Paul Michael
s/v Family Affair

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