06/03/2022 Day 13
Latitude 51 14.74S
Longitude 149 05.12E
Barometer 1020
Air temp 9 degrees Celsius
Time 2148 Sydney time of utc+11
Hi All,
Last night I finally managed to get to bed at 3am after tweaking the sails and finishing up with the blogs etc. I was really ready for some sleep however with all the large rolling swell it made it pretty difficult to get any. I would be just about asleep and poor Climate Action Now would get shoved so hard by a wave that she would be pushed off course and all the alarms would trip on the B & G auto pilot system, The autopilots self-correct but they like to let me know when they are off course and it seems that the waves were timing this to happen just as I was about to fall asleep….. almost every time.
By 6am we were getting steady 30-35 knot winds and I started to worry about keeping my smaller J2 head sail up in those conditions. It’s made with Dimension Polyant Dacron fabric so I know its strong, but I am also right at the beginning of my trip and I don’t want to risk a blowout.
The winds in the Southern Ocean are a little different to say Sydney or Brisbane. The air is so cold down here that it is denser so basically it packs much more of a punch. A rough example would be that 30 knots of wind in the Southern Ocean is close to 45-50 knots of wind in Sydney Harbour. 35 knots here is really pushing the envelope for the J2 head sail wind range, so I needed to drag myself out of bed and put the storm sail back up. I had thankfully left it all set up and just lashed in place so it would be ready to go but it would mean leaving my hot warm bunk with a still warm hot water bottle to go and face the icy 6 degrees air temperature this morning. I was not a happy camper.
I also had sailed to the 52 degrees South line and in Bob's (Metbob) forecast he mentioned that the swell will increase quite a bit past that line, so it was also time for me to gybe. The swell was mostly around 5 meters but every now and again we would get a monster through that was almost twice the height of all the other waves. Sometimes these would give us a solid kick, so I needed to be very careful about how I was going to manage the gybe. When you gybe you turn the back of the boat through the wind so it is behind you and adding pressure to your mainsail the whole time, if you don’t pull your sail in tight enough then when you gybe it can crash across to the other side with extreme violence. This is considered one of the more dangerous sailing manoeuvres, but if done correctly it can be perfectly safe. The only problem is it can be a little hard to do correctly in 30 knots of wind.
The trick is to maintain control over the mainsail the whole time, for me the boom that the sail flies from is secured with the preventer lines so it is a case of easing a little preventer and winching in on the mainsheet (control line), it’s when I need to switch the preventers over that it can be tricky, the deck is pitching and rolling hard in the swell and quite often you can have the sail come across early simply because the boat rolled hard. With some fancy foot work and a fast dash across the boat I was able to get the new preventer on and complete the gybe.
Afterwards I set the storm jib up and furled away the J2 headsail. I had now been on deck for two hours and I was exhausted from the lack of sleep and the manoeuvres I had just done, so I crawled inside. I was cold now too, so I made a quick bowl of porridge and before climbing back into bed and trying to get a little more sleep.
The sleep worked wonders and I woke around lunch time feeling much better. I also noticed that during the morning I had sailed past the Southeast Cape off Tasmania. This is the first of 5 great capes that I need to sail past in order for the record to count so it is a nice milestone of the trip.
Tomorrow is forecast to bring gale force winds so I am battening down the hatches tonight and trying to maximize my sleep so that I am able to deal with any issues that may arise. I am off to bed but before I go I would like to do a huge shoutout to the following degree sponsors.
145 East - Glass Australia - thank you to David, Shelia, Claire and Renee Weatherly
147 East - Aviso TAS Insurance Brokers - thank you to Ben MacMurray
148 East - Dick and Pip Smith - thanks again for being such a fantastic support and for not only being a major sponsor during my first Antarctica record but sponsoring me again. Thank you.
149 East - Flooring, Shutters and Blinds in Penrith - Dean Brown - one of the first people to become a degree sponsor so thank you for your support.
Good night all
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