Day 84, Year 5: Passage to Cochin, Day Three
Date: Monday, January 18, 2010
Weather: Overcast AM; Clearing PM; NE Winds 15-20
Latitude: 07 degrees 38.533 minutes N
Longitude: 094 degrees 15.413 minutes E
Miles to Go: 1,297
What a relief. Last night was MUCH better than the night before. We were able to sail with steady winds all starry, starry night. This morning, we shook the reef out of the main and made even better progress, but mid-morning we were threatened with another squall, so we reefed down again. This time it was unnecessary, but better safe than sorry. Once the threat passed, we shook out the reef again and have had a great day of sailing with 15 to 20 knots of wind and sloshy following seas. I don’t think ‘sloshy’ is really a word but when you are sailing downwind in these seas, you do slosh around a bit. There’s a children’s book called Mrs. Wishy Washy and when we are sailing downwind with 20 knots of wind pushing the waves up behind you, I think of myself as Mrs. Slishy Sloshy! Anyway, we’ve averaged 5.5 to 7 knots today even though the headsail has been reefed most of the day. So we will declare today a good sailing day.
We check in via VHF radio with Constance each morning at 9 am and this morning when we reported having a good night, Ed said he wished he could say the same. Their auto-pilot stopped working about 4 am and they have been hand steering ever since. We will talk again at 6:45 pm and hope he has been able to generate some sort of fix. But if not, they are going to continue on to India. It will mean that they will keep their three hour watches around the clock, sleeping on off-watch hours to keep the energy flowing. Hand steering in these seas for days on end could be a real challenge. Lynne crossed the Pacific in the early 1970’s on a boat that was dismasted halfway between the Galapagos and the Marqueses. It took a long time, but she made it to the Marqueses, on to the Tuamotus, and then on to Tahiti with no mast. She made it through that, and she says she will make it through this. Both she and Ed have such a positive attitude. But I’m still hoping for a fix for them. If their back-up drive unit, which is seized up after being on board for fifteen years, doesn’t work, we have a complete back-up for our Raymarine auto pilot, everything except the control unit, that might help. But they have no Raymarine instruments on their boat, so there might be no way they can use what we have. But cruisers can be very creative, so we shall see.
I planted my herb garden today. We bought a couple post in Phuket and Lynne gave us some soil. So I should have sprouting herbs by the time we reach Cochin, India.
Tonight during my 10 to 1 watch, we will leave the Andaman Sea and enter the pass through the Nicobar Islands. When we emerge from the Nicobars, we will be in the Bay of Bengal. This is a huge bay and is bordered on the NW by Myanmar (Burma), on the N by Bangladesh, and on the W by India and the tear-drop shaped island country of Sri Lanka. This is all part of the Northern Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean is the third largest ocean in the world, coming after the Pacific and the Atlantic. It makes up 20 per cent of the world’s oceans and we are going to see a lot of it this year. So Indian Ocean, here we come!
