Miles traveled Day 15: 140
Miles traveled to date: 1,978
Miles to Hiva Oa: 1,171
Well the typical wind-dies-at-night certainly didn’t hold last night. When I came on watch at 11:00 Rob had the jib rolled up and only a reefed main but we were rolling around like crazy. So I rolled out the jib to try and steady the boat so he could sleep a bit. It took me an hour and a half of fussing with it (turn up, turn down, roll in a little, roll out a little) to finally figure out there was just too much wind. So I rolled up the jib and the boat continued to wallow around.
As it still is today mid-day. The winds are 18-22 as forecast. But there are two huge wave trains 90 degrees apart with 12′ waves coming at us every few seconds. I can sit in the cockpit and as we drop into a trough I can’t see any sky out the back of the boat, only the next huge wave moving toward us. Luckily none have broken into the cockpit today like when we got pooped earlier in the week, but a couple have come pretty close.
We would like to put up the staysail and steady the boat a bit, but the pole is still up and the staysail halyard holds up the pole. The thought of going forward with the boat rolling toerail to toerail every once in a while does not appeal to either of us. So we’ll roll more and put up with it until it settles down, which hopefully will be this afternoon. I haven’t pulled any forecasts in the last three days because it just looked like more of the same, but I’m requesting a couple now and we’ll see what we’re in for. I remember Brit talking about this same weather and Hello World rolling like hell a few days ago. Looks like we caught up with what they had. I think it only lasted about a day for them.
But we’re still averaging 6 knots, even with just a reefed main, as we slide down the back of these huge waves. I won’t look at the chart, but I think at 6 knots we’re about 9 days out at this point. Hopefully they’re a little calmer days.
Teresa
