Squalls All Night, Trouble All Day – Sailing Across The Pacific

It's ugly like it's so beautiful but it's ugly because the the waves and the the white water crashing off the crest of the waves and all the moody clouds and the sun's just come up. Ominous I guess that's the word not ugly. Yeah there you go ominous. It's not a scary way we're triple reef which means we have two reefs in the main and three turns on the genoa which gets us to 30 to 35 knots of wind and right now we're only seeing about 25. So we're being super super conservative but it's better to do that than be caught with our pants down. It is morning. Well prop two Spanish style paella kind of sort of minus the paella man. That's nice tea. Messaging Kent back and forth. Thank you Kent for answering my messages. We are hearing a lovely moaning sound coming from the helm and I think it's like within the wheel mount or maybe the gearbox right behind. Not sure. So Kent's going to check out the schematics on the wheel to see if we can disassemble it while underway. Yay first boat problem while sailing on this trip. My reef in the rain three in the morning. Out of a dead sleep. Yeah. But tell everybody about the cool downwind trick we learned or that we read about. We read about this trick where you use the reefing lines that are on the back to pull down while you pull down on the front so she lets it out I pull down on the back reefing line it pulls it tight and then I can pull down the front back front back front side to side. I should wake you up at 3 a.m. more often. Okay I'm going to sleep. All right and that's downwind reefing. Good night. Man these storms just don't quit. We've had them all night long just coming and going go from only 10 knots of wind to 25 knots of wind to 30. Keeps you on your toes. That you said my love. Balls all night travel all day that's what we're gonna write a song about today hey hey. Still working on the loud grinding moaning noise coming from the steering wheel. Kent said just stop moaning. There was we're only we're not even we're almost halfway there so the worst thing would be if our steering wheel just went out for some our steering went out somehow halfway out in the middle of the ocean. Yeah because our emergency tiller is basically in the water. It's ridiculous. Just a super squally day today and it goes from this 10 knots of apparent wind thick storm coming up behind us to this 17 18 19 20 sometimes 25 knots apparent wind storm is right here less than a mile from us yeah we're just hitting 26 through in there we're about 8 knots 9 knots sometimes 10 or 11. The seas build and that's pretty much been our day that's five minutes this happens like every hour and i've watched two movies ah crazy day crazy day between squalls i think we found a solution possibly it looked well we tried everything else and it looks like me one of the blocks down here isn't turning trying to get getting out of there quick before a wave yeah all right we're clean at eight knots it's another night of unsettled weather which makes for an exciting watch it feels oddly normal being at sea it's not um it doesn't feel isolated like i thought perhaps it would after so many days um maybe i should pause before i say that because maybe by the time we get there i will feel that way but so far it's been um been good tiring at times and challenging to get a little bored um but you can't really do that much because of the seas and because of you you know you have to keep watch and everything else so it feels kind of like your hands are tied to just one task and so i suppose you feel a little useless in other departments where you pick up a ton of computer work done or a lot of other projects on the boat kind of like minimal tweaking and messing around with things here and there but it's in the beach i don't know like three days or something three engines time for this i agree 10 knots 10 and a half good morning the first time in days there's not giant squalls surrounding us we have some blue sky the seas are still three meters and this morning we're doing the cleanup flying fish number one makes me feel bad two three there's a tiny one four five and one stuck on squid yummy we haven't caught a regular fish only suicidal fish i mean regular fish on the pole yeah we haven't really been trying though no when the seas are this big and 10 knots it's not something you want to reel in there's only two people you mean 10 knots of speed what did i say you said three three meter three meter waves 10 knots of wind 10 knots speed whatever you know i'm gonna go take a shower well i was on the way to the shower and i noticed some water popping up through the floorboard actually nikki noticed it and it turns out something's wrong with our bilge and it works for a minute and then it stops i think it spins but it just stops moving water so we either have air leak way up high which is a possibility but a very difficult one to assess but i have a spare pump notice a lot more on this brand this is a sureflow this is a rule on this sureflow one the hole's a hell of a lot bigger the fan blades in there that move the water are a lot bigger this is just a more powerful more diameter can suck out more water i'm gonna install this and hopefully it'll only take 10 or 15 minutes and this might just solve my problem yeah that's what i'm hoping hooray boats you think that was it i don't know it definitely pulled out some water but it's definitely working oh please work it's definitely working please work all the way come on the water level looks but i won't uh cut my chickens yeah had to take a smoothie break we're doing like 7 8 9 10 11 knots as we surf down these waves just kind of doing this all day yeah it's a lot of movement we've got swell coming from the side and a little bit from behind so we kind of keep getting knocked around a lot which does not make for comfortable head down in a bilge situation no and the sun's hitting the starboard side and that's the side we're working on so it's hot and a good excuse to have a smoothie coconut water and i think we have it solved so i'll show you down there in just a second all right success don't know if i had a problem in the first place other than the fact that the bilge pump is installed in a place that is not great on this boat because the boat sits heavier in the back all the water goes to the back and it rough seas it sloshes around it comes up to the floorboards so we took the old well we left the old pump installed for now i just disconnected it i installed the new pump way back here where more water collects so hopefully we'll be able to suck out more water more quickly back there versus up here and that's the solution for for now it's uh it works that's all that matters go get some air nice yeah those are big i know they don't look that big in the camera but they are big houston we have a serious problem say the least maybe or yeah i don't know they just bust right there at that block yeah it's all broken in pieces here on the traveler damn okay we got two preventers on the main to keep it to the on the boom i guess to keep it from flopping back and forth too much basically this entire piece just ripped straight out of the traveler and the traveler is the only thing that can hold the boom yeah so i don't know what we're gonna do no maybe out of main um can we and that was a new block right we just bought that this block is brand new but this old lumar part is part of the traveler and that's what just just blew son of a mother pulled right out yeah and we were nowhere near like we were sailing very conservative this couldn't have happened at a better time we have less than 15 knots and our seas aren't crazy so we have 18 knots 18 knots i can't i just can't say how thankful i am that mother nature oh let this happen right now versus in the middle of night or during one of the squalls yeah hell yeah so we are super super lucky yeah totally okay let's get it okay well that was a fun event we have the preventer on boom now and an extra line run so that we can control it we've got the genoa back out we're back on route uh and i think that just may be our sail plan for the next however many days because we took a photo we sent it to kent but i'm fairly positive there's nothing we can do about that i'm pretty sure we just need a new part uh because there's nothing else that can hold the weight of the boom under pressure with the sail out so we're down a sail but that's okay because that in like the realm of stuff breaking we couldn't have gotten luck here not on this passage so yeah all is good in the hood for now i suppose hey folks it's vinegar day laundry day it was sunny like two minutes ago had a fresh fruit so resorted to our frozen stash little frozen fruit pulp coconut water ice good to go ready yeah go go go go go what are these words of wisdom what's the uh jason wen definition of sailing yeah basically you're just laying around all day conserving energy so you can deal with a heat storm whenever it happens because it will happen stuff will break i don't know why i put the tools away so it gives you something to do so you can get them back out again it's eviction time again be careful it splashes big time you're asking for it you're gonna get soaked honey you got it i got soaked i think that's it okay that's all the tenants except for the ones growing on the sugar scoop but maybe another day on that one okay so now we're really out here our rigged solution for the busted traveler piece some spectra double shackles but it's holding up okay we've got minimal chafe which is good we i we had it rigged up differently the first time and we were getting a lot of chafe so we switched it up to this with the shackles and it seems to be doing a lot better but makes our main sail usable and that's all that matters all right going into the inreach app valuable information to know trip time 384 hours at sea distance traveled 2,366 moving average 6.17 knots today's information it is 169 nautical miles sailed today and oh i didn't do the math on how many days left i'm assuming like eight yeah maybe maybe if we keep up this speed maybe seven and a half when so what is our tell everybody what what is our sea state and everything right now sea state is you know in the scheme of things it's pretty good but we have waves coming from like 120 which is slightly behind us and then we have waves coming from 90 which rocks us this way so we're getting rocked this way and pushed that way and it feels like a damn washing machine again i feel useless i hate feeling useless and singa has trouble just walking around the surface we're trying to get love and how fast are we going on average today right now we're doing nine knots eight and a half eight nine nine that's that's basically the general idea of how the sail feels where you going buddy thank you for that report you're welcome