Escaping rain at night. 9 April 2025
Due to its age and wear and tear it takes a long time and three people to raise and drop the main sail. Doing that at tricky situations at night, when everybody needs to be awoken first, is not an option. Rainclouds, and with them heavy winds, so far we had gusts up to 38 knots, reach us within minutes once we spotted them behind us. If we are doing 5 knots cruising speed westwards and the wind speed is 20 knots blowing from the East, the cloud basically „overtakes“ us with 4 times our speed. We can spot the formed clouds as large blue areas on the radar screen at night before we can see them, but sometimes they also just form quickly out of little spots making them a bit unpredictable. So every evening we take in the main sail and continue with the jib only at night. The furling roller of the Genua is broken, so we can not use the Genua either. Hopefully we can fix that in Samoa or Fiji.
In the meantime this means that our night cruising speed is much reduced, to 2-3.5 knots, so rain clouds approach even faster.
With the jib only it is also impossible to steer the boat close to the wind or to tack. It steers reasonably (the hydraulic steering system still needs checking and maybe bleeding – in a port – to improve it from “reasonably” to “good”) when running or on a broad reach, but becomes terribly weather helmly on any other course closer to the wind and then just stops quickly in a close reach position without moving further or reacting to the rudder. Only starting an engine gets it back on course in that case.
When I took over my watch this morning, Regis and Miriam had just come out of a big rain cloud. So I thought that was it and settled for an easy watch. But two large clouds were approaching fast from astern, one port quarter and one starboard quarter. There was a gap of around two miles in between, not big enough to not get affected by at least one of the clouds, but staying in this gap was much more appealing than going through the clouds.
The wind direction was favorable so I decided not to start the engine and try gybing from broad reach to broad reach with the jib furled in halfway to stay in the middle between the clouds. Deviating from the broad reaches, in case that happened, and heading up further would then require to start an engine and get some speed to get the rudders working to turn back or to tack.
But when I tried to furl in the jib it turned out that the sheet was messed up on the winch and and there was no way to get it out and stay on course single-handedly. „Karen!“ she was sleeping in the cockpit, „Can you please come up and help?“ she was up within a minute and took over the helm while I took care of the winch. Soon we had the jib reefed, with around 1/3 of its sail area left, and we were still doing more than 6 knots without motor. Wind speeds were between 25-35. We then managed to avoid getting into one of the clouds that quickly overtook us on port beam and on starboard beam (picture).
Wind speed dropped quickly and we then had to unfurl the jib to go back to around 3 knots. It required another two gybes assisted by Gael until the end of my watch.
I hope we can get everything working soon.
Bobbel