Back on track

Steve Fossett and Cheyenne now into the Trades

Position at 05h10: 24deg 57.900N 23deg 21.800W
Heading/speed: 200deg 21.8knots
True wind speed/direction: 20 knots 053deg

After some disappointing daily runs early on their Jules Verne voyage - their worst day to date has been 233 miles, Steve Fossett and the crew of Cheyenne are now into the trades and are able to stretch their legs.

The Trades winds are well established and the navigation team including Fossett, navigator Adrienne Cahalan and the team in the States at Commander's Weather will now be looking at how best to tackle the crossing of the Doldrums.

From on board Brian Thompson reports

Day 5 was a good one, we fixed some potential problems, we saw some amazing sights and we finally got moving fast in the NE trades.

We got the blast reacher stitched up in the morning and had a good workout session getting it set on its luff rope to the correct tension. We rolled up the staysail, rolled out the solent, then furled the big reacher, hoisted the blast reacher, dropped it, hoisted it, dropped it, hoisted the big reacher, rolled the solent and then finally reset the staysail.

We needed the exercise and more importantly we reduced the luff tension on both of our gennakers, making them less prone to failure. Whirley thinks that the Cuben Fibre cloth shrinks about 3% over time so as this happened the sail was starting to take the halyard tension instead of the luff cables running up the luff of the sail.

Also in the morning Guillermo was looking around the deck and asked Dave if it was normal to see so much of a 2 inch diameter pin sticking out of the cap shroud link plate. The answer was no, the pin was about to fall out! What had happened was that a small rope used to hold up the block to pull up the daggerboard had slid its way between the eye of the rigging terminal and the fork that it was attached to and gradually prised open the massive stainless steel fork, rather like ice opening up rock.

Fortunately we saw it and within the hour we had pulled the fork back together and Mike machined up with our 240v grinder a new solid pin to replace the split pin that had not managed to hold the fork together. It took a couple of gybes to unload to rigging on that side of the boat, and Jacques re-lead the rope holding up the block so it was not going to happen again.

We did plenty of other preventative maintenance jobs through the day, Dave took apart a block that was seizing, Nick and I tensioned up the bolts that hold the front beam bearings in place, and the entire boat was checked over.

As we were working on the rigging problem we saw the spouts of whales and passed only about 50m from one whale, which was steaming resolutely the other way, just breaking the surface as it headed NE towards Europe at about 5 knots. It was a great sight. Later in the day Jacques spotted a turtle.

Last night was another great night for stargazing with Venus bright in the Western sky and another planet, we think Jupiter rising to the East.

As the day progressed we steadily got more breeze and now as dawn breaks we have a steady 20 knots of NE tradewinds which should reliably push us down towards the equator. We have full main and big gennaker up, and are sailing fast but keeping the loads off the gennaker to make sure it lasts the distance.