B2G - Day 3

9AM Position Report

Yesterday morning, starting around 7AM, we started sailing on a broad reach, port tack, in 6 to 8 knots of light wind.

At 1:45PM, I got the brilliant idea of "poling" out the Genoa. This involves using our handy dandy jib pole to hold the end of the sail out, to keep it from collapsing in the light winds. It has been a long time since we last tried this maneuver and we had some difficulty with both the equipment and the personnel. After only about a 1/2 hour of acrobatics on the foredeck, Susanne and I got the job done. And it worked! We gained at least a half knot on our down-wind sailing. In retrospect, we probably should have taken the mainsail down completely before we did this, but everything seemed to be going good for most of the night.

After midnight, the wind freshened up to around 10 to 12 knots, still from almost directly behind us. We sailed along quite nicely at 4 to 4.5 knots for many hours, until around 5:30 in the morning, when the wind dropped, became fickle about its direction and the ocean swells got a bit rolly. The boom started flogging back and forth and managed to break the somewhat rotten control line on the mainsheet traveler. After another 1/2 hour or so, making a jury-rig repair, getting the headsail furled and the pole put away, and the mainsail tamed, we started the engine and motored in very light winds until morning. Many lessons learned.

Distance made good so far is 252 nautical miles. We can hardly wait to see what excitement today brings.

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