Highs and Lows : Knot Happy

For sailors - if I could include myself in that group for the moment - life revolves around Highs and Lows on the weather map. Right now the high in the Tasman is dominating things, like God who giveth and who taketh away - no wind yesterday but now as the high moves away, wind off its western side in abundance and I'm not complaining. But to mix the metaphor a bit more, the atmospheric highs and lows give rise to internal emotional highs and lows and yesterday for me it was a depression. I'm just reflecting on how our lives, even in the city are still bound more or less tightly to the elements and to Mother Nature - described by an eminent obstetrician in Sydney as a cruel midwife - and by mariners? As a gorgeous bitch perhaps, someone with whom we have an intense love-hate relationship, providing episodic at times ecstatic pleasure and at others fear and terror... but mostly the former. So yesterday it was depression, motoring and using up precious diesel, sails flapping here and there, less than optimal speed and noisy down below.

In the evening however it all changed as the wind finally returned to give me a thrilling night. By 1am the motor had been off 6 or 7 hours and Sapphire had been reaching on port in a building breeze - now 17 knots - by then we were hitting 7 knots which is close to theoretical hull speed and too fast for my liking so I went forward and reduced sail. I still find it pretty scary going forward in the middle of a black moonless night with the boat powering through a moderate swell, the occasional wave breaking across the bow and sending water down onto the dodger, the sail flapping wildly - you are in a black world about 10 feet across outside of which there is nothing - but you know there are things out there and they might just be the occasional rogue wave... You clip on and transfer clips as you get to the mast, momentarily hugging the mast to wait for a violent lurch one way,and then you drag the sail down a few feet to find a ring on the sail that you have to heave over a "Bullhorn" and attach it there. Every action has to be timed with the rolling and lurching of the boat, there being short moments when you can use two hands for some things, but mostly one hand is gripping the nearest sturdy handhold. And if you haven't let out enough sail and you cant get the ring on you have to clip your way back to the cockpit again and let a bit more sail out and back you go to the mast, being careful not to trip on the various other lines along the deck and keeping an eye on the boom in case it suddenly decides to swing across and smash your head open...believe me this happens! Anyhow once the ring is on you go back to the cockpit tighten up the sail and then go back forward AGAIN to put ties through the redundant sail that is flapping and loose along the boom. And then you come back and have a cheese sando and some water - well I know I do! And you feel relieved its all done and the boat is safer. The thing that I find so challenging is the sheer physicality of everything, I wonder at times if I will have the necessary physical strength. Its exhausting.

So then I sit and watch how Sapphire responds to the changes, adjust the trim, fiddle with the Hydrovane and watch again, checking what the wind is doing. The sky was awesome - I saw a satellite moving across silently, and Orion rising dead ahead of us. Eventually we were travelling beautifully, 6.2 knots, and the wind occasionally touched 20 knots but didn't seem to be continuing to increase so I turned out the lights and went to bed!

I woke a few times to check and all continued perfectly to this very moment. Now we have 115 miles to go and should arrive on Monday after all. needless to say the depression has lifted and I'm hoping this evening that if I am lucky I might just see Lord Howe in the distance - Alan Lucas says in his sailing guide that in good weather the mountains can be seen at least from 50 miles out. That will be quite a moment.

Sapphire Out.

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