We have been making excellent progress sailing mostly directly downwind goose-winging or on a very broad reach. The sandstorm that plagued us for so long has now fully dissipated and the water is taking on that magical blue hue that I love so much. As I type we have 1,320 miles to go (as the crow flies) to our waypoint North West of Trinidad, where we can start to make the approach into Chaguaramas. Predictwind (https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Nakee/) has been forecasting our ETA to the waypoint for several days now as Sunday, Feb 11th. If that turns out to be true, it would be just in time for Trinidad’s Carnival which is 12-13th February, assuming the health, customs and immigration staff are still on hand to clear us in (for which we expect to be charged overtime).
We have been visited by dolphins (pics below) and have seen schools of flying fish buzzing low above the waves. Some of the unlucky ones end up on the deck of Nakee, so every day when I do the rounds on deck to check the rig and equipment I have to send them back into their element, sadly no longer alive.
I discovered that my very finely spliced (by the rigger in Bari, Italy) genoa sheets jam in the jaw of the pole, when sheeted in tight. This is because the splice makes the sheet gradually thicker as it leads up to the soft shackle attaching it to the clew of the genoa. That jamming in the jaw makes it very, very hard to reef the sail in, or to furl it up completely, say when jibing. To sort that out I needed to put stopper knots (I use Admiralty stopper knots on Nakee) in the genoa sheets before the splice. The difficulty doing that is that the clew of the genoa can’t be reached from deck, as the genoa is cut very high, to minimise it catching waves in heavy seas. So, I had to put on my harness again and have Andy winch me up the forestay with the genoa furled up. With the boat rolling it wasn’t easy (but not nearly as hard as having to climb to the top of the mast) and I managed to get two stopper knots tied, with only one bad bruise to show for it. Last night at 4:00 am I was easily able to jibe the poled-out genoa without a jam. Lena took a picture of me hanging up there.
