It is a breathtakingly beautiful night. After a day of showers and clouds, the skies have cleared leaving nothing but the infinite universe of stars with a few planets interspersed. Jupiter is in its opposition (kudos to Rowboy for pointing that out in a comment to my last blog post) making it one of the brightest objects in the sky.  We can see all of the familiar constellations of the northern hemisphere, Orion, Ursa Major, Cassiopia being my childhood favorites. 

We are now 530 nm from Antigua, having traveled almost 400 nm since our departure midday on Monday.  Today was a frustrating one as the winds have not performed as expected. We motored all last night through a trough of showers and light winds expecting to find strong northerlies on the other side. Instead we found weak winds from a mediocre direction with a big swell that kept shaking the wind from the sails.  Our options for dealing with this were all bad ones — sail far from our course, suffer with the slatting of sails or motor. At various points in the day we tried each, none giving us any satisfaction.  As we approach midnight I note in our log our daily mileage and it is a somewhat anemic 162 nm. Our hopes for a Saturday landfall in Antigua will require better days than this one!

While the day was frustrating for its unpredictable up and down and shifty breeze, it certainly wasn’t uneventful. During a period of stronger breeze we went to set our spinnaker pole in order to pole out our headsail, only to have the pole come detached from its fitting on the mast.  It is difficult to convey the danger of this situation as the pole itself is 25 feet long and a beast to handle even when the boat isn't moving.  The “inboard end” is supposed to always remain attached to a car that slides up and down on a mast track, leaving only the “outboard end” for someone to walk forward with when deploying it.  But in our case as we were preparing to deploy it the inboard end came free of its fitting 25 feet up in the air so the pole was simply leaning agains the mast with its full weight on the deck. This, as the boat was surfing down waves and rocking back and forth. Ugh!  

As soon as we realized what happened, we began pressing against the pole to hold it against the mast, thus keeping it from toppling over. We then jury rigged a support for the pole as we prepared to “walk” the pole to the deck, as you would walk down an extension ladder.  But before undertaking this we realized that our likelihood of success without damaging the boat, the pole or one of us was slim.  The safer alternative was for me to go up the mast to reaffix the pole to its mount and then use that system to lower the pole safely.  But this meant going up the rig of a rocking and rolling boat, which brought its own challenges.  

Fortunately, the work aloft went smoothly and in 15 minutes we had lowered the pole safely to the deck.   Upon inspection of the pole fitting we believe that we may have incompatible fittings on the mast car and the pole end.  When we took delivery of Saltair  Hallberg-Rassy informed us that their order of a new pole for us was somehow lost and instead they offered us a pole that been in their inventory for some time, designed for another model boat. While the fitting on the pole appeared to work with that of the mast car, the pin that secures the two parts together now appears undersized and is prone to unintentional release. We will need to investigate further before setting off for the Pacific. 

Once the pole was re-secured and raised we used it to set our genoa in a wing-on-wing configuration. This worked quite well for us for a few hours when the breeze was up in the mid-teens, but then it lightened and once again we were left struggling between bad options. As the afternoon wore on we finally put the sails away and started the engine. 

But just as the sun was setting the breeze finally picked up and shifted to the right as forecast, allowing us to turn off the motor and resume sailing in the right direction.  And what a beautiful night of sailing it has been!  With the wind shifting to the NE we finally have a sufficiently hot angle (to the wind) to keep the sails full and the boat moving at 7-8 knots. There’s still a bit of adverse current slowing our progress but given the frustration of the day, we’re happy to suffer the current for these otherwise beautiful conditions.