Tuesday 9/29/09
There is a slight break in the weather and it is finally calm enough for me to write although there is still a six to eight foot swell right now. We have been sailing through a gale the last two days with winds averaging 35 to 40 knots. Definitely a rough ride. Tom has been down for the count pretty much the whole time, and i have managed to stay well by hardly eating anything. i learned my lesson the first day, and my fisherman hubris was humbled in the form of upchucked spaghetti. I ate a rather large portion with a beer thinking i was a hardened seaman, but as the water grew rougher the resilience of my stomach grew weaker. Yesterday i ate two pieces of bread in the morning and five saltines with peanut butter in the evening. I don't feel sick, i just can't seem to hold anything down. I have been sipping water throughout the day trying my best to maintain hydration. I am fine today and have eaten a bowl of tomato soup and a salmon salad sandwich. We had to furl the jib as the stormy black sea surged about us at 2 AM the first night for fear of the heavy winds tearing it to shreds. We had a hair raising adventure yesterday in the middle of the gale. One of the halyards on the stay-sail broke and i had to climb up the mast and restring the cable through the pulley. This was in 12 to 20 footers and 40 knot winds. Eric's last words weren't too encouraging-"i hope you don't fall". But it had to be done, and with all the concentration i could muster, i treated it has a hard rock-climb and tried to time my movements with the waves. After I got down the rest of the repair took an hour and a half in the whipping winds and heavy spray. Afterwards Eric complimented me on a job well done, and said he didn't think he would've had the gumption to complete the task, and even if he had, he didn't think he could've done so. That compliment left me feeling swell as i nestled into the damp recesses of my sleeping bag. Everything is damp right now as we haven't been able to run the heater due to the seas being too heavy and water filling the exhaust. It is particularly a test of spirit at night during watch. We rotate two hours on and four off, but since tom is down for the count eric and i have been rotating every two. There isn't much to do except huddle in the dark and watch your breath in the screen light of the gps. In some strange way i have enjoyed these night watches, cold and damp, nodding in and out of consciousness, not quite awake, but never asleep. I am trying to compose a poem about it, yet my mind is never fully sharp enough during the experience, so i suppose i will have to be patient and let it compose itself as it comes. I have plenty of more nightwatches and plenty of hours to spend in delirious state of the in between. We just set up a "wing and wing" sailing configuration, where the wind has to be at ones back, or in proper sailing terms,"before the wind"- typically this is in a following sea. The jib is set to one side and we set up a whisker pole on the windward side to stabilize it. We stabilized the main boom with a preventer line which runs from the end of the boom all the way up forward through a block on the bow sprit, and is then winched and cleated. This is a difficult configuration to sail as one has to be in the exact position with the wind to keep the both the jib and the mainsail full of wind. There is only about a 20 degree window, and it can be a bit finicky. High winds forecasted for tomorrow so its likely we'll have to change our configuration. Most likely we will reef the jib, which means taking in some of the sail. Our main sail is already reefed.
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