Singlehanded Sailing Society
2002 TRANSPAC News and Position Reports | Home |
0900 hours radio check in
via SailMail from Steve Wilson on board Westerly
Yacht Latitude Longitude Notes Rusalka 36.00 125.21
Alchera 36.09 125.30
Tease 35.33 124.36 All is going well.
Endangered Species 35.46 124.33 Did not get on ssb but all was ok on vhf last night. [this 0900 position report relayed at 2100]
Seabird 36.11 125.26
Zapped 35.32 124.39
Westerly 35.35 124.24
Haulback 35.39 124.01
2100 hours radio check in
via SSB from Rob Macfarlane listening in
Yacht Latitude Longitude Notes Rusalka 35.10 126.44 Found flying fish on the foredeck this morning, but decided not to cook it up for breakfast.
Alchera 35.04 126.58 Likewise woke up to a fish on board, but as Mark already has 20 cans of fish, he sent it back overboard.
Tease Did not come up for position
Endangered Species 34.49 125.54 Having trouble with 4.009, using 4A as backup channel. Position courtesy of relay by Seabird
Seabird 35.04 126.37
Zapped 34.18 125.52 Also having problem with 4.009, position relay from Seabird
Westerly 34.26 125.19 Enjoying a wonderful lasagna dinner, followed up with coffee and reading up on interpreting 500 mb weather faxes.
Haulback 34.35 125.07
Day 2 of the SSS TransPac, from Alchera 6/16/02
Day begins at 4 in the morning when the autopilot fails and begins heading off in a random direction. Jump up quick and get to the helm to disengage. Surprise! It won't disengage! Run back down to the nav station to see if the other control head works. It does. Disengage autopilot. Run back to the helm to try and sort things out and get the boat tacked back over and going in the right direction. Control unit at helm is dead. Ok, now how do I turn the autopilot back on? Quick run back down to the nav station before the boat notices I'm gone and turn it on there. Whew! It works.
10 minutes later autopilot fails again. See previous paragraph.
Fortunately that's the last failure for awhile, the controller at the helm station seems to be totally dead, and during it's dying spasms was sending bad data into the system. Hopefully it will stay good and dead. I've got the controller at the nav station and a remote handheld unit I can get by with, so long as the bad unit doesn't spasm anymore.
Morning check-in. Seabird and Rusalka are hot on my tail. Got to put on some speed, we're getting into the high and it's time to use my high tech roller furling code one spinnaker that I brought along just for this situation. Get the spinnaker hooked up and hauled to the masthead. Top part of the spinnaker unwraps and then wraps again backwards before I can get it unfurled. This makes it impossible to unfurl. Drop it back down on deck to sort things out. Haul it up again. Does the same thing. There's no way I can get this thing up and ready to unfurl before it does it's little figure 8 twisty thingy. This worked OK on the test sail when there were three of us. Singlehanded is a different story. Wish I had a snuffer sock on it now.
Drop the sail back into the boat. Maybe I can unwrap the thing and steal a snuffer sock from my reaching spinnaker. Spend an hour trying to unroll the code one into some sort of shape that can be put in a snuffer sock. Not easy. In fact, I never manage to do it. By this time the wind has shifted anyway, which will allow me to use the reaching spinnaker I was just about to cannibalize. Give up on the code one.
Start hooking up the reaching spinnaker. Furl the jib. Haul up the spinnaker sock. Oops, you never fixed that snuffer line problem you were going to get to. Drop it back in the boat. Unfurl the jib again. Fix the snuffer line problem. Furl the jib again. Raise the spinnaker. Finally. Now we're cookin'. Unfortunately, it's now 4:00 in the afternoon - 6 hours spent working on problems of one sort or another.
All this time the weather has been beautiful. 10 to 15 knot winds, blue skies, warm breezes - almost like we're in the tropics already. Too bad I couldn't just sit back and enjoy it. But now, for now, all is well.
- Alchera
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