Remedios Ocean Voyage: On the Really High Seas

We have been fighting Mother Nature the last couple days. The winds and waves in this part of the ocean are mostly going from northeast to southeast. That is the opposite direction that we want to go, so we are going against the wind. And waves. If we had gotten to this point and still wanted to go northeast to France as we originally had planned, this would have cured us.

Even though the wind is only 20 to 25 knots, when we add our speed upwind (maybe five knots) the apparent wind, which is what blows over the boat, is then even higher. It makes the wind howl in the rigging, the boat bangs into the waves, and our stomachs are churning. Even sleep comes hard at times.

But, the forecast says it will get better in a day or so, and we are getting closer to mainland Europe - yet we just are not making 125 miles per day like we did on the first leg. It's also more lonely out here on this side of the Azores. We are seeing far fewer birds and sea creatures. We even put our fishing pole out for a time until we decided none of us really wanted to eat a fish...

One of the challenges of sailing is managing the size of the sails you have up and their ability to catch the wind. The bigger the sail, the more wind you catch. Sometimes we have too much wind and it really helps to have less sail up there catching it. There are a lot of ways to reduce sail. Pat prefers that we don't use our sailing knives so we have what's called roller furling.

The top photo shows the mainsail fully raised. If you look inside the boom you only see the furling rod because all the sail is up in the air - and it's not catching much wind if you look at the water! The next photo shows it all rolled up into the boom. It stows neatly (and we are all about neatness on Remedios...) and is easy to manage. It is a little tricky to get all lined up correctly on the roller, but when it works, we love it. Tom likes to say he doesn't worry about getting hit in the head by the boom any more. It won't hurt at all. With that sail in there, it's the old "we won't know what hit us."

The jib follows the same priciple, but it rolls up on the forestay. That makes it really easy to roll and unroll. Both of these systems are also designed to make it easy to have part of the sail rolled up and part out there catching wind. There are lots of ways to manage sails, including just using line to tie up the excess but we really are into cool here on Remedios, and these are cool. We also have spare sails. We have a solent jib, which is a smaller jib that fastens to its own forestay. We also have a storm jib, which is made from very strong cloth and gets hoisted up on that same forestay. And, finally we have a storm mainsail, and a tough, small mainsail that we can hoist when Rob tells us a really big low pressure system is coming and he expects high winds...