A race against time!

Greetings from the fine yacht Flyer, now only 330 NM due south of Dutch Harbor, AK. This will be a fast/scattered update as we have our hands full fixing things and trying to keep Flyer going fast! 

It’s been a bit of a race against time here lately. The weather forecasts have evolved every day to make it clear that as we move north there will be a big area of no wind forming right on our path. If we can keep our speed up, we’ll be able to sail right through it before it forms. If we can’t stay sailing fast, we’ll get caught in the windless zone! Nothing like the potential of motoring (or a little drifting) to light a fire under our butts!

With Cameron aboard we feel more comfortable pushing the boat harder, more consistently. This has translated to keeping more sail up as the wind builds, and sailing a little less conservatively at night. It has paid off, as we’ve stayed slightly ahead of our predicted performance, and for the most part have stayed with the breeze.  But pushing the boat has not come without its consequences. We’ve had some excitement aboard lately… and here are a few highlights:

We did our first full accidental gybe aboard Flyer!

We were sailing along nicely under full sail and a poled out genoa in 20kts of wind when the breeze suddenly built to 30. Cameron was on watch and came to get me so we could put a reef in quickly. As I got on deck only a few seconds later, we found the boat had gybed and rounded up into the wind, with the mainsail fully aback, restrained by its preventer (as it should be!). Our trusty autopilot had likely just been overwhelmed by the gust and the swells. Head to wind with the mainsail as a brake, Flyer came to a complete stop. So we set about easing the main across using the preventer and sorting out the mess of genoa sheets that had wrapped themselves in all the flogging. We got things under control, got the boat moving again, gybed back to port, and got the reef tucked in and were back on our way… only to discover the next day that we had bent a forward aluminum lifeline stanchion with the preventer! I quickly bent it back but have made a note to myself to have it replaced soon (as repeated bending will weaken the aluminum). Phew!

We discovered a broken batten!

Back in Honolulu I replaced the bottom batten with one of the proper length. The one I purchased from the local North Sails outfit was a segmented batten, as it’s cheaper for them to ship a few 6’ sections than one long 16’ section. This segmentation though requires a mechanical splice, and it appears our batten broke at the splice point. Duh! Currently the problem seems well contained and we will monitor it as we progress, as the batten pocket is very well reinforced and it’s on the leeward side of the sail. With the wind forecast to build soon, we’ll likely put our 1st reef in which will also take a lot of the load off of the broken batten. We’re still not sure how we broke it but it could have been in one of the gybing maneuvers we made trying to avoid ships… which brings us to our next highlight:

We’ve had some close calls with ships!

We’re now in a major international shipping highway, which large ships use to transit between Asia and North America. There are ships all over the place up here, and while we can see them coming from a ways away, it cramps our style of sailing fast! To top it all off, our AIS (the automatic identification system on board that allows us to transmit and receive positions of nearby vessels also equipped with AIS) has been malfunctioning lately and isn’t transmitting or receiving reliably at longer ranges. So, we’ve been making do relying more on internet based AIS (info published via satellites to the web) and then waiting to see the vessels on our radar and finally received by our troubled AIS system.

All this makes collision avoidance even more tricky when we are in the fog, as visual sight of the other ship helps confirm the data we’re seeing is correct. Our process for managing these situations is as follows: wait until we’re within VHF hailing distance (around 40nm) and call the vessel on the radio. We then ask for their coordinates, and give them ours to get a more accurate position (we’ve learned web-based AIS, while ‘received’ as recently as 2 seconds ago, can be up to 30 minutes behind reality!). We then do some plotting and calculations to determine if we can pass in front or go behind them. We’ll then tell them what our intentions are and see if they’re okay with that… which they usually are.

However, last night, in a first, we had a ship captain tell us he wanted to change course so HE could pass behind US! I thought he was crazy (it takes a long time to turn a 700’ long ship) but given he likely has more hours behind the helm than I, I accepted his offer. We passed easily in front of him, at least according to our AIS… we couldn’t see him even with decent visibility only 5 miles out. 

All the while we’re still all doing well out here, enjoying our time at sea and getting some good chill time when we’re not trying to keep the boat from being a soggy mess! While Flyer is fully insulated, she does still collect condensation on cold surfaces, including bulkheads (against the centerboard trunk in particular where cold water makes the aluminum and then wood cold) and also the floors (where there’s no insulation below the waterline). And the sea surface temperature is now down to 46f! The air outside is a bit warmer than that, but not much. It’s so cold that our passage routing software is giving us wind chill warnings!

We’re now about 2 days from the Fox Islands (where Unalaska and Dutch Harbor are) and the anticipation aboard is building… the betting is in on our arrival time and we’ll see who the winner is this time! Fingers crossed we make it there safely. Until then, SV Flyer sailing fast and standing by!