Raritan -12/7/18 Day 13 Twenty Three Hours of Good and One of the Bad

The evening brought light winds and choppy seas, and at 0400 we furled the jib, centered the main, and started the engine. In our cruising class, we are allowed to use the engine as much as we want, but we must record our hours and the race committee will assess a penalty to our finish time based on engine usage. We have used it very little, less than 8 hours so far, but last night was a good opportunity to motor SW toward the rhumb line for a few hours while we waited for the wind to build again.

Once dawn broke, we gybed to port and hoisted our spinnaker. The wind was 14-16 and Raritan performed spectacularly, sailing at 9-11 knots at a true wind angle of 160 degrees. This translated to 8-10 nm of progress toward St. Lucia every hour. And it continued all day! For a few hours the wind built to 17-19, which made steering Raritan a bit more tricky, as taking a wave at an unfavorable angle could lead to a broach. With experienced hands on the helm, we surfed along without incident.

At noon, Ian continued with his celestial navigation lessons, teaching Tom and Doug how to use the sextant and tables to determine a yacht’s latitude. Wow, it is involved! And we didn’t get to longitude yet, which is more complex. Rob and Matt rigged a go-pro to a pole and took video from various locations, hoisting it up the mast and holding it in the water behind the transom. Hopefully we’ll have a nice selection of shots to make a short video.

The day was sunny and the temperature perfect. We lounged in the cockpit as we crossed the only boat we would see all day, the 35 meter long “Ghost” who had been a dock neighbor of Raritan back in Mallorca. Just when the afternoon seemed perfect, a pod of dolphins lept towards us through the waves. Over a dozen were observed gliding in our bow and quarter wakes for 15 minutes. We ran around Raritan watching and filming them. Ian, our experienced captain, commented “Watching them never gets old.”

Rob whipped up a mac and cheese enlivened by leftover BBQ chicken and we all watched a brilliant sunset to look for the Green Flash. Matt claims he saw it, none of the rest of us did. As darkness fell, we doused the spinnaker and set the genoa. Once again, the wind velocity dropped into the low teens and the large swell made keeping the sails from flogging the priority of the helmsman. Unfortunately, at about 1000, we were hit by two large waves in succession, and the resulting roll caused the genoa to back and fill quickly. In one of its swings, it appears to have caught on the radar housing and tore the sail’s leech. It took us a few minutes in the dark to figure out what happened and get the genoa properly stowed for the evening. We will not be able to fly the genoa for the remainder of the trip, and our morale has taken a hit for sustaining the first significant damage to Raritan of the trip. We hope it will be the last.

Doug