What a difference a day makes. Yesterday we were rejoicing at what we thought was the beginning of some steady trade wind sailing. Today we were cursing the instability of the wind and battling to keep the boat moving in the right direction.
Despite the fact that we are now mid ocean, and there was hardly a cumulus cloud in sight all day, the airstream was remarkably unstable, with the wind constantly oscillating between NE and SE and varying in strength from 5-15 knots. To keep the yacht heading on our westerly course we would ideally have needed to gybe every 30 minutes or so to keep in phase with the shifts.
Therein lay the problem. Cosmic Dancer is not an easy boat to gybe at the best of times, and especially not when sailing 2 handed. With only a single spinnaker pole, but with 2 inner forestays, gybing the pole is a time consuming business. Add to this the fact that it takes a minimum of 2 people to manhandle the massively heavy pole from one side of the boat to the other and you have your work cut out as a double handed crew.
Sod's law dictated that the wind would always make its shift through 60- 90 degrees just after one of us had gone off watch - leaving us with a dilemma - wake the other person up so that we could gybe back onto the correct course, or sit it out and hope that the wind would shift back again so that a gybe wouldn't be required? The decision would have been a lot easier if the shifts had been a bit more predictable in their pattern. Sometimes they would last for 5 minutes, other times for 3-4 hours. However, there is still enough competitive spirit left in both of us that the "wake the other person up" option prevailed most of the time!!
By mid afternoon we had accepted that neither of us was going to get much sleep that day, and with the wind dying to less 6 or 7 knots,we hoisted the spinnaker. It just about kept us moving but was no less demanding on our concentration.
We did take some consolation when the daily position reports came in - if we thought the conditions were testing, then it must have been equally so on other boats, because overnight we had somehow managed to claw back 3 places to 9th overall in the cruiser division. Despite being one of the smallest boats in the fleet, we are working hard to ensure that we arrive in St Lucia before all the parties are over and there is some rum remaining on the island!
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