Starship Friendship - ARC+ St.Lucia Blog - Starship Friendship

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Saturday, December 1st, Sao Vicente to St. Lucia, Day 11

The first day of December finds us with a gray breaking dawn, still sailing down wind roughly along the rhumb line flying only our Asymmetrical Spinnaker, making 7+ knots in 8 knots of Apparent Wind and 15 knots of True. Of course that 1.2 knot of current in now going with us instead of against us, so that helps. This is the fifth day straight we have flown the Asymmetric, only trimming the tack and sheet occasionally as the wind angle changed and to prevent chafe. The sail is a Doyle APC, Asymmetric Power Cruiser, and I’m sold. Granted, our Lagoon 42 catamaran is easily driven, but this sail has worked far better going down wind than any combination of wing and wing or goose wing using the Jib, Main, and Code Zero that we have tried previously this voyage. It also flies relatively high above the deck, which gives us an un-obstructed view ahead. It will be interesting to try it out under other conditions as well. The specs say it can be used in light winds to point up to 45 degrees off the wind, much higher than I would have expected. We’ll see how that works out.

At around 11:00 AM UT we passed the 600 mile mark from St. Lucia. This steady down wind progress hasn’t been exciting, but it eats up the miles. It has also been another day with no vessels in sight on the horizon or on the AIS. This is a big ocean out here.

The rest of the day passed quietly under our “Set and Forget” Asymmetric Spinnaker. The big event of the day was doing my laundry in a bucket on the stern step, using the shower hose to wash and rinse and the lifelines to hang. I’m glad our neighbors aren’t in range to see our laundry display

My evening watch was uneventful as well. No contacts on the horizon or the AIS, speed 6 to 7 knots under the “Set and Forget”, house batteries charged up to 86%, water maker brought the water tank up to 3/4 full, fuel tanks still at one full and the second at 7/8 full, and I have polished off the last of my stash of chocolate and other snacks. I hope we get to St. Lucia soon.

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Sunday, December 2nd, Sao Vicente to St. Lucia, Day 12

Another day of following winds and swell, no vessels on the horizon or AIS, and our single Asymmetric - our “Set and Forget”. We have now been under this single sail for 6 days and 914 nautical miles with only minor trimming. I would like to say we are bored, but I don’t want to piss off the Sea Gods, whomever they may be. Since about 2:00 AM (UT) this morning we have been less than 500 miles from St. Lucia. I’m pretty certain we will start to see other vessels soon as we approach our destination en masse.

We have been seeing random clumps of Sargassum for several hundred miles now. Most of the clumps have been small, the size of a dinner plate or smaller, but lately we have seen larger clumps several feet across. The interesting thing is that they seem to be distributed over large areas, never completely disappearing.

At about 13:30 (UT) the boat started veering off course radically, with the auto-pilot unable to correct. We went to manual steering and finally diagnosed the issue as a bunch of Sargassum caught in the port rudder, limiting the rudder travel under the auto-pilot. We were able to snuff the Asymmetric with the sock, which dropped our boat speed to about 2.5 knots. The Sargassum dropped off the rudder on it’s own soon after and we were able to redeploy the sail and continue on, speeding back up to 6 to 8 knots.