Days 10 - 13 March 21 – March 24, 2000

The wind has switched mainly into the northwest, making us travel more west than we would really prefer. We are making for a waypoint of 5º North and 130º West to cross the ITCZ. The weatherfaxes we get don’t show any strong winds anywhere on our track, so we must just continue at our present 3 to 4 knots. Travelling at this slow speed is comfortable unless we get a cross sea. Then the rolling makes it impossible to keep the sails filled and they flap and bang madly.

In the afternoon of day 11 it got progressively cloudier from only 10% in the early morning to 100% by 1600 when we had light rain falling! First rain since San Diego. The wind increased with the cloud until it got to about 18 knots in the late evening. The wind continued strong overnight and Vlad shortened sail and tacked three times within 15 minutes during the 0100 to 0400 watch. A surface analysis weather fax from Point Reyes showed a large convection area just south of 10ºN so we decided to head more west than south to avoid an area which is likely to contain lots of squalls and thunderstorms (although not necessarily any wind!). A big squall about 1330 on day 12 had us down to double reefed main and staysail for the hour or so that it lasted. The wind shifted completely from north to south. Vlad hand steered and once the sail area was reduced, the boat felt quite stable and safe. Both of us got absolutely soaked from the rain. Later on the net one of the boats reported winds of 35 knots and more. Two boats broke sail battens and another broke a halyard.

After the squall the wind just died completely and for a while we were puttering along on confused seas at 2 to 3 knots but the wind gradually increased to about 8 knots from the NE and we were back up to 4 knots, wing on wing.

The alternator woes continued. Vlad put the high output alternator back and redid all the wires resulting in a good charge of 60 amps or so. He was on the radio for the Puddle Jumpers chat net and was just telling Bob on TUCUMCARI the tale of his success when the charging stopped! Then it started again, and stopped again and…. And Vlad realized that transmitting with the radio was stopping the charging! Something we have never noticed before. We charged successfully for about three hours. Next day we charged up fully and were very happy until a couple of days later when once again we could charge only intermittently. This time Vlad narrowed it down to the Ideal regulator, so he swapped it out for the backup regulator we bought ages ago. That seems to work okay and we ran the engine for two hours charging properly. (it’s been working well ever since).

On an inspection tour of the deck, we found that three of the screws on the Harken roller furling were loose so Vlad tightened them and put Loctite on. I have a sneaking suspicion we used Tef-Gel last time we took the unit apart, instead of Loctite. These are not screws you want to get loose on their own.

The boobies have all gone, so Vlad has the fish line out and on day 11 we caught three fish – a small chub mackerel which the book says is excellent to eat but which unfortunately escaped just as Vlad was hoisting him aboard, a beautiful dorado about 14 inches, which we decided was both too pretty and too small to eat, and a small bonito tuna, which was also returned to the ocean as being too small. He left behind a heap of tiny little fish which he had been in the process of digesting when caught.

It is getting harder to stay awake on night watches as we get more tired, although sleeping when officially off watch is easier. With the moon as bright as it is now (it’s just past full), and if the clouds aren’t too thick, I sometimes play Solitaire in the cockpit by moonlight and that keeps me awake.