[p]kudzuu1114
[s]
pos: 33 28S 27 50E
d: 10 11/2018 0730 GMT=2
w: Beautiful
sp:
Oh what fun it has been to ride the Agulhas Current! We still have another nice day of moving water ahead of us and we're having a great time.
Winds have been slightly lighter than forecast, but the current and motorsailing have more than made up for that! We, and a bunch of friends -we are within 12nm of one another, have all found it necessary to motor in addition to the little velocity we can develop from our sails because the wind is dead astern. Mersoleil is difficult to move when the wind is directly on the butt. It's the hardest point of sail ('cept I suppose for wind straight on the nose when she'll actually go backward in full rebellion). Is it backward or backwards? I always wonder.... the nuns did not teach me this, toward or towards, backward or backwards.... Or if they did, I have forgotten.
So! The really good fun began yesterday at 18:30 local (31 54S 029 39E) when we sailed into currents approaching 4kts and our speed over the ground reached 10kts, something we almost never see. Yippee! Then it only got better and better! Top so far, and this record may endure as now the current has slowed somewhat, occurred during my 0200 - 0600 watch just completed when we screamed comfortably along at 11.7 over the ground in current running 5.5kts. Pretty exciting - and very manageable seas with the wind and current nearly aligned. Swells have been no higher than 2m, big and broad and rounded and going with us, so we barely notice them. Can we come here again sometime for another ride?
There's a standing joke onboard Mersoleil that all the thrilling events happen on my watch. Don't know why, but we've observed this time and time again. Last night's moment to remember came a mere 10 minutes into my 2AM watch when, shining my torch up into the rigging for a quick ''s everything OK' scan, I saw a five foot vertical tear in the mainsail. No idea how that happened. Perhaps it's testament to all the horror stories about rounding the Cape of Storms. Robbie and I both make sail changes singlehanded, but in any crisis, we like to have all hands on deck, so he came up again after only 5 minutes of repose and we furled yet another reef in the main, leaving us now with a teeny ridiculous little bit of sail. We'll have this repaired in Cape Town (thank God we are in a land of resources) and will probably have a new main built there for immediate use. This sail will go into stowage as a backup. How we wish we could have Carol Hasse build our new sail. Alas, her lead time is a year and VAT/duty in South Africa are outrageous. We'll order a sail in Cape Town from somebody there.
When the sun greeted me this morning, 0355 UTC, 0555 local...
POS 33 15S 028 09E
WIND NE 16- 0kts
SOG 10.0kts
COG 226T
Set/Drift 223T/4.9kts
Sea state very tolerable. Rolling a little due to the deeeeep wind angle, but huge flat-topped swell of not more than 2.5m and long period.
We've been downloading PredictWind current charts and are setting waypoints to keep us in the best the Agulhas Current has to offer. What a nice ride! But as far as boat records go, I doubt that we'll ever equal the 16.9kt SOG Mersoleil did in the NE Pacific in 2010 in a late March storm packing 49kt winds.
Life is good on SY Mersoleil! We are in Africa!
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