The Burnetts are probably the happiest people ever to begin the process of being trapped in a small vehicle with your family for three weeks. Since The Disaster occurred after just four hours of sailing last time, the family was in a celebratory mood as we ate our dinner 6 hours into our crossing last night. Mel failed to see a single fishing boat, fish trap, or even pile of floating debris on the way out. She knows this for a fact; she never took her eyes off the water. Just our luck.
Night watches were a bit, er, anxiety-filled. However, despite the minimal moon, the night was clear and there was a surprising amount of comforting light coming from the stars and the phosphorescence in the breaking waves, a welcome sight after a long hiatus.
The family is still getting their sea legs back after a long rest. It appears that being able to predict exactly when you should grab things a little tighter before the big wave is a learned skill that can get rusty. Mel forgot the ache that settles in the core because you are contracting those muscles at a constant low level. Forget sea legs; after this, we are all going to have great sea abs!
Boat stuff: 170 nm in 26 hrs. The seas and wind are a bit mixed up for several tens of miles in the lee of the islands. We have some restrictions on our movements as we are expecting a big swell of 3-4 meters to arrive tomorrow, the aftershocks of a storm north of us. So we are trying to go more south than southwest. We also have learned that we need to run our engines at 60% load (ends up being about 2700 rpm) for the first ten hours of use to break them in, which is using up a little more fuel than planned. With all of these restraints, plus the desire to minimize beam seas to help with our nausea, we have been sailing with various combos of main and jib, jib only, and motoring at 120-130 degrees apparent (any deeper and we gibe when a 6-foot roller comes through) in 10-20 kts of true wind and have gibed 5 times already to adapt to the clocking winds and sea state. Number of barfs: 0 (Dramamine is all we’ve needed!) Number of cat protest pees: 1 (on Allie’s blanket). Number of broken boat things: 0. The duct tape is holding in the window just fine!
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