Crossing the Atlantic Ocean (Day 8) New Year’s Eve

Happy New Year!  Hopefully you all had a great night of partying and welcoming in 2018 and aren't feeling the effects too badly today.  It won't surprise you to hear that our celebrations were quite muted: a quiet 'Happy nearly New Year' as Reg woke me for the start of my watch at midnight and a coffee and Panettone to while away the first hour of 2018 whilst Reg got his head down in preparation for coming back on watch at 0400.

The lines of weed that kept clogging up our DuoGen   

But it has to be said that the final day of 2017 has to have been the most frustrating of the passage so far. In the early hours of the morning we entered an area of the ocean with a huge amount of surface weed. It didn't seem so bad at first but by daybreak we could see huge swathes of weed all around us out to our horizon. The problem was not in sailing through it as such but that the weed kept clogging up the DuoGen (our towed generator) which reduced its propeller's spin rate and hence greatly reduced (or entirely stopped) its rate of electricity production. So, for much of the day, we have been watching the ammeter like hawks and have had to keep lifting the DuoGen to clear it of weed. At one point the weed was so bad that we had lift it about every 5 mins!! Happily, the weed thinned out at about lunchtime but there is still a reasonable amount of it and we still need to keep a close eye on the charge rate and clear the Duogen as and when required.

So, we have had to do extra jobs today on top of the normal sailing background tasks. And there have been quite a few extra jobs today.....

Drawing and replacing 3 sheared bolts on the now wobbly starboard stanchion    

Extra Job 1: Refit stanchion. In the middle of last night, in Reg's watch, he needed to put in a reef as the wind and the seas had picked up. Part way through the procedure, before the reef is winched in tight and too much strain taken on the lines, the person putting the reef needs to go forward to the mast to check that the sail is not caught between any of the reefing lines and the boom as if it is, it is likely that the lines will chafe a hole in the sail. So, Reg went forward, checked the sail was clear and returned towards the cockpit. Just before he got back, a nasty sea caused BV to lurch. Reg fell heavily, whilst still holding onto a guardrail stanchion (for balance). Quite impressively(!) he managed to unseat the stanchion, leaving it attached by just one bolt. Refitting the stanchion this morning took him over 2 hours and included pulling down part of the cabin headlining (ceiling) and the best part of an hour cramped into a tiny space trying to remove nuts and bolts which had been fitted 19 years ago, when BV was built, and then replace them with new ones.

Extra Job 2: Keep a VERY close eye on Georgina (windvane self-steering). Normally, once she's set up, Georgina steers BV beautifully. Not today (inevitably!). Today the wind was up and down, up and down and the swell pushed BV around all over the place. Poor Georgina didn't really stand a chance. So, there was nothing for it but to have someone pretty much hovering over the wheel all day, ready to make a rapid adjustment to stop BV gybing or heading up too high. It was infuriating and meant that I had to watch the wheel whilst Reg fixed the stanchion and then, whilst he was off-shift in the afternoon, getting the routine chores completed took about 5 times as long as they should have. Aaargh!

Extra Job 3: Mop up the galley and dry out all our clothing after a HUGE goffer of a wave drenched us and the cockpit (and the galley via an open hatch). The only positive to this event was that the wave waited until we had finished lunch - just!

Extra Job 4: Rod through one of the deck drains that we found was blocked when said goffer of a wave landed on the deck.

And then there were the routine jobs that took forever today as clearing the DuoGen and monitoring Georgina took priority:

Routine Job 1: Check and dry all fruit and veg. Important to make sure that nothing is going bad or, if it is, that it is caught before it affects anything else. It's a surprisingly lengthy task ...... made longer today.

Routine Job 2: Prep dinner.  As today's 'chef' I get to prep all the meals. Being New Year's Eve, I had thought that I might do something a bit special for sundowners and/or dinner...... after babysitting Georgina for well-over an hour until I was happy I could leave her for 10 mins (those figures should usually read 5mins and 1 hour respectively) I opted to reheat the goulash again. Thank goodness we cooked up so many meals in Mindelo.

Hopefully, things will improve in 2018!  Mind you, we gybed just before sunset and on the new point of sail everything seems to be going well. Clearly, we should have done this hours ago!

Position at 0001 Mon 1 Jan 18: N15 26 W043 40
Distance run 1159-1159: 160nm
Distance run 2359-2359: 156nm
Distance run so far: 1120nm
Distance to waypoint (just N of Barbados): 935nm

End of Day 8 position