Day 2 - Feeling squishy

We’re out in the Atlantic at 7:30am after leaving St. Michael’s at 11:30am the previous morning. The winds are doing 15-25 kts gusting to 30. The seas are 3-4’ out of the north-east with big rollers of 6-10’ added to them every 15 seconds or so from the north added to them. I’m feeling pretty good and the boat handles them with aplomb.

Short video of our sail to Cape Hateras

We sail on a broad reach (the apparent wind is about 60º off of our stern on the port side) with me helming most of the way up to the top end of Cape Hateras at 7-10kts.  We've been making excellent time and these strong winds are really pushing us along.  It's been a long night though so turned the helm over to Steve and decided to have a nap.  

When I got back up a few hours later, I see that we’re doing only 3 kts with a south wind of less than 5 kts so not only is it no longer on our tail (which this big old girl likes best) but it's now almost on our nose.   The seas are still very lumpy but now the wind and waves are coming from entirely different directions.  I go up front with Kent to learn how to set out the spinnaker poles and started to feel a little squishy for the first time as the big rollers continued from the north but were met with smaller seas from the south along with remnants of the slop that was created when the winds were out of the north east. There was no predicting what was going to happen next and me with my head down wasn't helping.

We put the starboard poles out but there was a problem with the port side pair that stopped us from being able to use that. It turns out that Kent had recently had them rebuild the end fitting on that pole as it sort of exploded when the pole got caught in a large wave some months before during a big storm.  Kent said that they'd set the pole a bit lower than they should have and it dug in on a big wave.  When the shop reassembled it, they put it together wrong so that it would no longer latch into the fitting on the short pole despite our best efforts.

This is the short pole which is attached at one end to the mast and held on the stays on the other.  That big cup at the end accepts a male fitting on the end of the long spinnaker pole and allows it to articulate.

Here's a better shot of the attachment point.  The long pole connects into that "cup" labeled Francespar.  

Here you can see how the short pole is attached from the mast horizontally out to the stays.  There is an identical pair on the other side of the mast as well.

This is the long spinnaker pole.  The near end plugs into that "cup" and a latch inside the cup grabs on to the hollow tip of the pole and latches.  The other end of the pole is attached to four lines to allow it to swing out horizontally at full extension.  The white line is attached from the top of the mast to the top of the end of the pole.  It is used to hoist the mast up vertically.  A yellow line is attached from the bottom of the pole to a point on the deck railing directly under the short pole.  It's purpose is to hold the pole from going up too far.  A blue line is attached from the front of the boat to the forward side of the pole at the back.  This line pulls the pole forward.  And finally a red line is attached from the back side of the pole to a point on the rail towards the stern.  It's purpose is to hold the pole from going too far forward.  The four lines are positioned so that the pole is perpendicular to the side of the boat, runs out nearly level (can be as much as 3' higher than level) and doesn't move at all once in place.  

The very end of the pole has a little pulley on it and the Genoa line is threaded through that.  By pulling on this line, this allows the far end of the Genoa to travel all the way out to the end of the pole extending it as far to the side of the boat as possible allowing it to gather as much of the wind is available.  

Here's a picture of an Amel running downwind with both poles out and the Genoa (white sail) on port and the Ballooner (red, white and blue sail) on starboard.  You can see with the wind behind you, you can't catch much more than this so the boat really flies.  It can actually go a bit faster than this with the wind about 60º off the stern as it can start to make wind at that angle but the poles help there as well as they allow you to sail up to about 60º off the wind on either side without gybing (the mainsail and mizzen are likely furled right in as they'd just blanket the two big sails anyway).  This is exactly the conditions the big Amel is designed for... running downwind on the Tradewinds around the world.

After about 30 minutes of trying to figure out why the port side long pole isn't connecting with the port side short pole, we swap poles and the problem moves to the starboard side so it's obvious that we have a problem with the port long pole which Kent had just gotten repaired.  We toss in the towel and decide to run with just the starboard pole out on the Genoa and not bother with setting up the ballooner sail on the port side.

We did get another knot of boat speed from putting up the pole on the genny but we soon lost most of the wind and had to fire up the motor (Iron Genny).  Running downwind now, I could smell a bit of diesel exhaust so was getting a bit more mucky so I went and sat up front for a bit and was soon back to normal but the guys Kindly let me off the cooking for the day which was much appreciated by me.  Steve warmed up a Shepard's Pie he'd brought along with some fresh beans.  It went down well with our evening beer.  I stayed on the helm until about 8:30 and then headed for bed to be up at midnight for the midnight to 4am watch.