Approaching the half way stage

Brian Thompson updates us from his Vendee Globe qualifier on the Pindar Open 60

Never leave for sea on Friday the 13th, that is a well known piece of sea lore. But if you are already at sea it’s a day like any other, in fact with less chance of seeing any black cats, or ladders.

So far it has been quite good sailing this afternoon, the first for a while, with the sea smoothing out on this angle, and the wind dropping to 15 knots. I still have 330 miles to the turn around point at 50degW, and soon I will be tacking on to port tack, to head more directly west, and to approach what may be the final front tonight. So more rain squalls tonight and I expect to be seeing more of the storm jib, as I did last night, and it is safely tied up on the bow ready to go. There may be another front just as I reach 50w but hopefully I can turn around just before that and use some of the southwest winds to head.....east!

So far, so good with the boat with all this upwind sailing, I am taking it quite easy as it's vital to finish this qualifier for the Vendee, so not sailing at racing pace, and though it is frustrating at times, there will be plenty of opportunity to train back in the UK. I am learning a lot about how to tame the power, when necessary.

The only casualty has been the loss of a weather vane from one of our two masthead wind instruments, this happened at night so I could not see what had gone wrong, only that the wind angle had frozen on the B&G displays. It was a 5 minute job to swap cables around in a junction box below, and it was up and running again. It was most likely the slamming that worked the wind vane off, and it had been put on with Loctite.

Last night saw the team ashore leap into action in a very efficient way. The engine has been cutting out as the main load of the alternator was kicking in, so not being sure what the problem was, I did not want to overload the engine. The team of Nick, AL and Andy quickly found a method of reducing the alternator output through a simple rewiring that I could do with the spares on board, and within a couple of hours we had halved the alternator output, taking the load off the engine. Still got to get to the bottom of the problem as halving the alternator output does almost double the fuel usage. Clean, simple energy from solar panels and wind generators are certainly what we are planning for the Vendee.

Just now a ship passed 5 miles ahead, the Orkney Spirit, a tanker heading west. That's the wonder of the AIS system, that the ships will show up on your computer screen, another good tool for collision avoidance.

Brian