Another challenging day on the water. We had a very squally night, and I got caught in a downpour steering the boat in complete darkness (no moon, stars covered by clouds) in 25-27kts wind. Steering the boat in those conditions is pretty wild -- it feels a bit like flying the millenium falcon through hyperspace as the shadows wiz by in your peripheral vision and you are focused on flying by the instruments adjusting rapidly to small micro changes to prevent large turns and potentially dangerous jibes. I finally got the hang of it for the first time last night where I felt ahead of the boat, a combination of placing tape on the center of the wheel and holding the tape with one hand, feeling the heel, and shifting the rudder side to side in micro movements to feel in which direction it is biting.
Today we were fully prepared to shake out the reef in our main and hoist the spinnaker for the last kite run of the race to the finish line. Running under spinnaker is considerably faster than main and jib alone, averaging up to 10kts vs 8.5 or so on jib downwind. Spinnaker hoists can be hectic and prone to complications that can set you back hours if it goes wrong, but we had finally got ours down to what felt like something approaching a science. As we were hosting, Jeremy, who was jumping the halyard, felt a little more tension (but not too much more) than usual. Since we had the bag up high and had significant windage, the (strong) preference of the foredeck crew (that's Eric and me) is to get to the part where we fly the kite before we are launched overboard (only partially kidding). For that reason we've been focused on a quick hoist, and Jeremy pulled a little bit harder to get the kite up. Unfortunately, it turned out that the halyard had slipped and got lodged in the sheave, and that meant that the spinnaker was stuck up until we sent someone up the mast. With the rough sea state and the string of luck that we had had, we decided it was too dangerous to send someone up, and instead secured the spinnaker in the bag against the mast. Since our jib was nonfunctional, we decided to pole out the storm jib wing on wing with the reaching strut and make as fast of progress in the light winds that we had as we could. Not great.
We managed to fix and hoist the jib and are currently reaching towards the finish line at a manageable 8kts. The morale of the crew is significantly improved, and we have been joking and laughing back and forth. We're all looking forward to crossing the finish line and seeing our families soon!
-david