March 5th 2019
Tossed and turned all night tonight, trying to sleep for my 4 am shift. Have a crick in my lower back that doesn’t want to go away. I know it would if I took a walk. Oh yeah, I’m in the middle of the Atlantic and can’t do that right now. Cruiser’s problems. Guess I’ll get up and give Carol and early relief.
It’s misty and cold and dreary outside this morning. Everything is wet and a fine mist of water is blowing throughout the cockpit. We still have battery issues and we’re still navigating by auto-pilot and eyeballs.
We switched to just using the genoa yesterday because the wind has backed to behind us and the mainsail was just causing the genoa to luff. Taking the mainsail keeps the genoa full more than not. If you think of the sails on a boat as their engine, the genoa, because of it’s size, tends to be the main engine. I didn’t always think that way. I always thought the mainsail was the main engine, but realistically, you can do so much with the genoa and because it tends to be larger than the mainsail, it’s a bigger engine that the mainsail is, and can give you lots of driving force. It obviously depends on where the wind is and what point of sail you’re using and where you need to go. If you’re sailing into the wind on a close haul, using both sails are going to give you much more power. But with the wind behind you, the mainsail often steals the wind from your bigger engine.
The ocean is so blue out here during the day. I’m sure it’s a partial reflection of the blue sky when it’s out and not overcast, but it is a beautiful deep blue, and the thought of it being miles deep below me fills me with awe and wonder. We just spent 2 weeks in Walvis Bay, and unfortunately, it was quite dirty. It’s because it’s a deep bay and it really only has one exit point and everything gets trapped in there. Reminds me of where I used to live, Bakersfield, which was at the bottom of the San Juaquin Valley. All the smog and dust from all the farmland and cars from there to San Francisco get trapped in the bottom because it’s surrounded by mountains and has no way to get out. Anyway, it’s wonderful to be in this great big blue and clean Atlantic Ocean after being stuck in a dirty harbor for weeks.
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