Balance

With Otto on the disabled list, Francene has been taking the load of being our fourth crew member, the one who does all the steering. Mile after mile, hour after hour, our little Hydrovane does her job without complaint, without food or fuel or rest. All she asks is a body of water to dip her rudder in.

Oh sure, she can be a little temperamental in a way that Otto the autohelm rarely is, but what relationship doesn't require a little negotiation? We've discovered by working with her over the last few days that she doesn't appreciate having to work too hard. Her owner's manual emphasizes the importance of starting with a balanced sail plan: neither sail overdriving the other. We've found that our large Genoa can quickly over-power the wind vane making it difficult to hold her coarse, especially when wind speed picks up or the sea state becomes turbulent.

The winds have been fairly consistent over the last week, blowing in the upper teens (in knots) with occasional lulls in the lower teens and gusts as high as 25 kts. We have yet to fly full sails in these conditions. We reef the main to keep the crew happy, reef the Genoa to keep Francene happy and achieve a Quijote kind of balance.

The wind has been slowly clocking around from our beam to our stern quarter as we proceed west. This allowed us to put up a full main sail today for the first time. Our boat speed was at least 7 knots for much of the day, exceeding 8 at times. We don't usually like to go that fast at night though with only one person to react when things go wrong. So we'll shorten sail and slow this girl down for the night.