Thursday, March 29, 2012

3/29/12

Noon Position: 43 11' S, 62 50' E, SOG 3.5, COG 135, Day's Run 102 nm,
Week's Run 883 nm. We crossed the antipodes of Los Angeles last night.
This means I'm a little bit more than 1/2 way through with the trip,
since I don't have to go as far south as Cape Horn on the way back. I
celebrated by spending the morning debating whether was nobler to endure
sailing SW at 1 kt, or to quietly sail NW at 1 kt, as of course we were
almost becalmed, and could point no further east than either of those
two directions. Light air is frustrating, especially because there was
probably a good 5 kts of breeze, plenty to sail in if there weren't
great galumphing swells knocking about the sea, turning the boat and
knocking the wind out of our sails before Odyssey could get any way on.
I ended up compromising and spent some time sailing NW, some sailing SW,
and some going backwards in circles as the fancy took me. I managed to
collect another couple of gallons of rain yesterday before the cold
front came through, so as rain collecting is not an activity calculated
to keep me and the boat warm and dry, I interlaced my futile sail
handling this morning with drying out and cleaning up, most importantly
the entire jar of ground cloves that managed to unscrew its cap and
empty its contents all over the spice rack, and the jar of curry that
did the same in the fridge, which I use for dry-ish storage of sauces
and the like. All of this activity was set to the entrancing melody of
my very expensive Echomax active radar reflector antenna pretending to
be an entire percussion section against the top of the mast. Clearly
the cost of the antenna all went into the antenna, not the mounting
bracket, since the force of the wind yesterday first twisted the bracket
so that the antenna pointed straight forward, trying to joust with the
clouds, then slowly disintegrated as the day went on, leaving me with
one very expensive antenna and two very cheap pieces of stainless
bracket banging around the top of the mast, all suspended by the wire,
which is apparently more suited to the job of keeping the antenna aloft
than the bracket is. I'm waiting for either the swell to go down or the
wind to go up before I make an ascent to try to clean up the mess. The
bright side of all of this, of course, is that the galley is
significantly cleaner and less moldy, my sheets are pretending to be
dry, and I discovered both peanut butter and jelly buried in the bowels
of the fridge!

3 comments:

  1. Eric, You could make reading the telephone book interesting!
    Sail on...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Your heading home, baby! Your heading home...

    ReplyDelete