Now into our 9th day aboard, the plan was to sail back to the Falmouth area. The forecast was NE force 3-4, then becoming E4 in the west. The tidal stream wouldn’t be with us until midday but as its a long passage we pulled up the anchor early.
Without a working depth sounder, we could only use the chart plotter as a guide to depth when we arrived last evening, we anchored in the 5m contour line and with a 4.5m high water had use nearly all the 40m of 8mm anchor chain. I have found out in the past, if anchored in depth of over 8m l need to use the windless to bring the chain and anchor back aboard. This was one of those days, normally pulling the chain up hand over hand, it’s a very quick process but using the windless is slow going with 40m of chain out as the chain has to cleared from the deck at the same time as its winched up. I knew when the anchor pulled out of the bottom as it suddenly got easier to turn the windless. The anchor had set well because it came up with a hole lot of sandy/mud stuck to it, so l plunged it up and down a bit to clear while Vicki got Elektra under way.
It was 0700hrs when l wrote in the log and 10mins later we were rounding Daystone and setting chart plotter for St Anthony WP 33nm to the west. I had pulled up the main sail while Vicki motored to Daystone and once turned onto track l set her genoa and stopped the engine. And went below to get the tiller pilot. Once set up Vicki went down below and slept a bit longer, leaving me to play with the sails. The wind was almost dead behind and l found the best speed was goose winged which l ran with for the next 3hrs on calm seas. By which time we had covered 10nm. But with the sea starting a swell and Elektra rolling bit, it was safer to lower the main and just sail on her genoa.
But by 1110 the wind had died away and we had started motoring in a rolling corkscrew sea. We could only motor at 4kts as the rolling motion was too much if going faster.
By 1310hrs an onshore breeze had developed from the south and we had started motor sailing to ease the rolling and by 1325, l had pulled the mainsail back up and we were sailing again, having stopped the engine. From there until 1600hrs when we got to our WP it was great sailing. By 1630hrs we had dropped anchor in the Precuil River having logged 37nm. Not the fastest passage but at least we sailed most of the way.
The evening was lovely in the cockpit, l was sleepy.
Love Sailing 