The previous 48 hrs have had plenty of wind, but fortunately no drama. With true wind speed of 15-20 yesterday, and 20-25 last night, we've yet to fly the full mainsail. My thoughts of flying our spinnaker for endless days now seem absurd. But this also means that my concerns about the chafe on our mainsail halyard are not yet an issue since the halyard has't reached full hoist. We've always had at least one reef in the main, and yesterday we had the 2nd reef in for 12 hrs, and the 3rd reef in for about 6 hrs.
The seas have been fairly lumpy, not the long smooth Pacific swells we had expected. We have 5' - 7' seas from the SE which are crossing with the SW swell coming up from the roaring 40's and the result is a lumpy cross sea that looks more like the Caribbean than the Pacific. It makes life on board a little less pleasant. None the less, Fay has fully recovered and we're able to sleep, eat, play Scrabble (no - not with a board!) and write email so it can't be that bad can it? There is just a little more rolling around than we'd like and every few minutes we smack into the intersection of a SE sea and a SW swell and 45,000 lbs of boat lurches in a seemingly arbitrary direction. Then things settle down and the freight train rolls on.
To smooth out the lumps we've aligned ourselves a little more with the waves resulting in a course of pretty much due west. We can do this for a few days, but eventually we'll need to turn left about 20 degrees and make some southing to reach the Marquesas. We're currently at 4 degrees south and the Marquesas are close to 10 degrees south so we need to travel roughly 360 miles south at sometime in the next ten days.
Even with such little sail, our daily runs thus far (noon to noon) are 173, 177, and 206 nautical miles. This is kind of a big deal because yacht marketing materials love to use the phrase "capable of 200 mile days…". It's sort of the holy grail of performance under sail for a cruising sail boat. New Morning is just tearing that up. With a reefed main, and reefed jib we haven't even let this dog off the leash, yet we did 105 miles from noon to midnight yesterday so we're well on our way to another 200+ day.
All of which means a shorter passage, but we would happily trade a little slower pace for a little smoother ride. But oddly, if we slow down the boat, the ride is a little less comfortable because the waves push us around more than when we're scooting away from them at a higher speed. We don't actually move away from them, the waves always travel faster than we do, but when we're going faster they overtake us more gradually.
Time for the 2am log entry so I'll get this up to the satellite. Coming soon: "Eating on board" and "Why cruising makes you a pack rat". Those are separate topics.
