Misgivings

Team Figure 8 Made a bit of an error and missed this post. Instead of depriving you we decided you should get to read it too.

Noon Position: 51.53S 56.36W

Course/Speed: NE3

Wind: W7

Sail: Big genoa out full

Bar: 1006

Sea: W3

Sky: Clear

Cabin Temp: 56

Water Temp: 47

Miles last 24-hours: 149 (previous 24-hours: 159)

Miles since departure: 8144

The south is dealing gently with me these first few days, as if it can sense my ambivalence.

Wind on port quarter has been 15 to 30, and I’ve run with the working jib only, making way to the NE that seems effortless. Downwind of the Falklands the sky cleared to blue and sun and the breeze backed off to but a whisper. The sail went limp like laundry on a line. Except for the temperature and the Wandering Albatross, we could be in the middle Pacific, but even temperatures are warm. The cabin is 65 degrees as I type, up from 49 this morning.

Probably the ambivalence needs no explanation. The Figure 8 has but one goal: to get around the route and return home safely in one year. But I had personal goals nested inside the bigger endeavor, like going non-stop from San Francisco to Greenland, like rounding the Horn twice in a year. Both now gone. Then there’s the disappointment of having prepared so intensely only to be stopped two days from the first big achievement, the Horn, by failures no-one would have suspected. When particularly morose, I think to myself that I planned like Amundsen but was dealt a Shackleton. Then add the uncertainty of the next three months in the Roaring 40s and a second attempt at the Horn on the cusp of inauspicious southern fall.

Please don’t take this as complaint. When Jiver of SIR ERNST, the boat rafted next to Mo in Ushuaia, says, “It is a beautiful cruise you are making,” part of what he means is “you lucky bastard…look at what you get to attempt,” and this from a man who is recreating the cruises of Earnest Shackleton. I do understand my inexplicable good fortune to be out here at all. But I presume you are reading this because you are interested in what goes on inside the mind of a man who would try such a thing, and what goes on is not always guts and glory.

So I am grateful to the south for dealing gently with me these first few days.

—

I came on deck yesterday morning to find Lt. Wattsy’s (Watt and Sea Hydrogenerator) propellor had come off. What I pulled from the sea was a bare stainess steel shaft, clean as new. The day before a school of dolphins were at Mo’s stern nibbling at Monte’s retrieval line. I watched until they dispersed, but half suspected they’d returned to have a go at Wattsy, with the result being that they’d sheered the pin holding the prop in place.

Not so. The pin simply unwound and it and prop wandered away in the night.

I have one extra of the right size. Now in place with a screw that is doubled-down with Locktite.

By way of breaking the mood this afternoon and reminding Mo and me that we aren’t beyond the pale just yet, I looked up from the cockpit where I was hanging damp clothes to dry to see a C134-type aircraft giving us the once-over. Ah yes, the Falklands are just over the horizon to our stern, I thought.

After the fly-low, it took off to the south.

The wind has filled in from the NW to 20 and we romp on at 8 knots under all plain sail toward our rendesvous with 48N.

Steady as she goes.