A peaceful night last night which was thoroughly enjoyed.
Yesterday was fine, wind wise but there was still a big sea running, about 4-5 metres in height although the wavelength is far longer than it would be around the coast so it probably sounds worse in a blog than it actually was. It was, still, very uncomfortable and poor Freya is thrown around quite a lot and me too. Because I had to use the autopilot for some time yesterday whilst removing and refitting the stops on the wind vane I also had to run the engine for a couple of hours to boost the batteries. Shortly after starting it there was an alarm so I stopped it again and checked the water and oil, the water was a bit low so I topped that up but I think that the problem was that the sea water supply to the galley sink comes off the seawater inlet to the engine in between the filter and the seawater engine pump. There is a stop cock for the galley which is supposed to be closed if the engine is running otherwise it’s possible that the engine pump sucks air instead of sea water, this was open which I think is what the problem was. Normally once I’ve started the engine I look to see that there’s a good discharge of cooling water but at the moment as we’re trundling along quite fast in a poor sea the sea is above the discharge so I can’t see it.
I had an email from AJ Wanderlust yesterday, she has gone further North to try to keep out of the weather yesterday she was a good few miles NNE of us, she should be a much faster boat but, I think, needs better weather to achieve good speeds, she was doing 8 knots last night a speed I can never achieve.
After some sail changes yesterday we settled on 3 reefs in the main and half a genoa, the wind was, and still is Northerly about 15 knots which is a good sailing wind. A heavy rain shower is going through at the moment, if I was short of water I should be collecting some from the sails but I’ve used so little yet it’s not worthwhile. Hopefully the rain isn’t a front going through, signifying a wind shift, I don’t think that it is.
The hammock for my vegetables is working well now. I couldn’t rig it fore and aft as I would have liked as I couldn’t find anywhere to put it like that, so rigged it athwartships between the mast and the tie rods for the chain plates (where the shrouds are attached to ). It should have been obvious that this wasn’t going to be satisfactory as it was because every time we pitch or hit a wave the hammock swings wildly fore and aft. Last Sunday, just after leaving, it was obvious I needed to rig some damping system to it which ended up being a couple of sail ties rigged fore and aft which stop it from swinging much. I had chucked some raspberries, tomatoes and cake into it as a handy place to put them just before leaving. They all had a strong sense of wishing to escape and worked their way down the pile of potatoes, onions, neaps, cabbage and so on, some made it out but I think it was a bit of phyric escape in that they were eventually squished through the mesh of the hammock by weight of neaps atop them. I keep finding bits of raspberry now in unexpected places.
Not last night but the one before, after a particularly violent heave, half of the books came out of the bookshelf on the port side and were thrown across the cabin to the starboard settee berth. I wasn’t expecting that as there’s a good ledge to hold them in.