Friday and Saturday

It seemed like a long time since we’d done an offshore passage and a night sail. Of course it was…. nearly 5 years since we’d completed the ARC in December 2018 and we’d only completed a handful of channel crossings on the previous Offbeat since then. We’d decided to sail conservatively on the first night in the Atlantic whilst we settled into the routines of sailing the boat and taking watches.

We’d decide to sail on mainsail and genoa only for the first afternoon and night. The weather forecast wasn’t playing ball and we had the option of either sailing nearly due West on a broad reach on Starboard or hug the Moroccan coast on the other gybe. The forecast showed that the breeze would eventually veer from WNW to N and strength if we headed offshore. If we stayed close to the shore we’d get swallowed by a large calm area so to the West it was.

We sailed through the afternoon with about 10-12 knots of wind and had a first meal at sunset. Chicken and lentils from the new slow cooker which is very power efficient and lets the food preparation be done early in the day.

We then settle into the watch system for the night sail with everyone taking 3 hour watches. David slept overnight in the saloon when off-watch so any questions or concerns could be answered quickly.

The first night was busy, lots of fishing boats around with completely unpredictable course changes, so everyone had to be on the lookout through each of the 3 hour watches. We had one close call on Paul’s watch where a fishing boat seemed to be trying to do circles around us but eventually we cleared the group and the rest of the night was fairly uneventful with no sail changes needed. With a strengthening wind we were making reasonable time but when dawn arrived we decided we needed to get a move on and time for a downwind sail to appear.

We had decided to use the Code 65 sail rather than the Parasailor as it was the best option for the reach and easy to furl if we needed to get rid of it at night. The downside is that you can’t go straight downwind, the deepest angle is about 150TWA. The process was discussed and was executed perfectly in about 20 minutes with Paul, Graham and David combining on the foredeck to rig and hoist the furling sail. Once unfurled we had an immediate speed improvement of about 2-3 knots and we were trucking along at 8-10kts in 16 kts of wind.

Sunday – Sailing fast!

We kept the Code 65 up all day Saturday and through both Saturday and Sunday night. The routing to the West was working as planned, the large patch of calm inshore had developed but we were sailing in a band of decent pressure that was actually better than the forecast. The wind steadily increased with gusts of around 20-22kts overnight and we were sustaining around 8-11kts boat speed with occasional higher bursts as the wind kept shifting around 20 degrees round on to the beam.

Graham hit over 15kts and David saw over 13kts regularly on their 0300-0600 and 0600-0900 watches. Offbeat was flying and at each of our hourly log entries we could see that we were clocking up 24 hr runs of 190+nm, unfortunately we didn’t quite hit the magic 200nm as the breeze kept dropping off.

We spent the day listening to the football, the Rugby World Cup and Anne-Laure and Sara played Scrabble. Graham and Sarah even did some work thanks to our StarlinK satellite connection. We put the drone up and took some great pictures and then crashed it as we tried to recover it.; more practice landing on a moving boat needed. Fortunately Paul managed to catch it just before it bounced over the transom! We even assembled our new fishing rod with tuna lure but of course didn’t catch anything.

Monday – a challenge ahead, more boat fixing, a birthday and champagne sailing

At daybreak on Monday we decided to try to start the boat engines again to check that they had held charge. Unfortunately neither would start. We had only 9v on the starboard engine battery and 10v on the port we needed 12v. Neither engine would turn over. Damn! (Or words something to that effect ensued). This meant some serious thinking ahead, the wind was expected to drop on Monday afternoon and we’d assumed we’d be motoring at least part of the day. It would affect our arrival options in Tenerife as without engines we’d need some assistance to get into the berth.

We put a call into to the yard at Tenerife who were amazingly helpful. We agreed that we’d adjust our speed to try to arrive in daylight on Wednesday morning (with the expected calm patch we are unlikely to get in during daylight on Tuesday) and they would bring a jump starter out in a boat to get the engines started (we’d need both as apparently it’s a tight berth to get into). But it could be worse, we are on a sailing boat, getting to Tenerife won’t be a problem!

We used the generator to top up the house batteries and filled the water tanks and then focussed on the routing again . We decided that we would need to gybe south-east later to keep us in the wind band but it seemed inevitable that we’d suffer light winds later in the day. We gybed for the first time but the wind shifted (of course) so within a short period of time we’d gybed back again (fortunately heading straight for Tenerife).

At 2pm the breeze started dropping and we gybed the Code 65 for the third time, executed flawlessly by our well oiled machine of a team. As the sails came across we noticed that one of the mainsail battens looked odd. A closer look revealed that the batten box, which holds the end of the full width battens in the sail, had become detached from the car on the mast. There are 6 bolts holding each batten box together and on this one they had all shaken loose and the box had separated. Further investigation showed that all of the boxes had a similar problem but with the wind now down to only 6 kts we weren’t going anywhere so we spent the next 90 minutes dropping the mainsail, tightening the batten boxes and, thanks to Anne-Laure’s brainwave, by reduced the number of bolts from 6 to 4 on a couple of other battens, we managed to get the whole sail sorted and rehoisted. The generally light airs mean that the reduced number of bolts should be fine to get us to Tenerife. Another item to buy for the spares list!

We also took the opportunity to add Cuben fibre chafe patches to all the points on the mainsail batten pockets where they rub on the shrouds and the lazy jacks which support the mainsail cover. Anne-Laure and Sarah cutting the patches with a stanley knife whilst Graham applied them to the sail. At least that is one job we had planned to do before the Atlantic crossing sorted already.

Paul had a message from one of his friends asking who was steering so incompetently… he’d been following the kink in our track. So now you know why!

It had been a busy day and also a special one for Anne-Laure… her birthday. As the wind recovered to 9 kts and we started moving again, we had another wonderful evening meal and broke our “dry boat” rule for a change. We treated ourselves to a cold beer after the hard work in the sun and then a single bottle of wine over dinner before enjoying the sunset