TranspacBlogII-15: A beautiful beat.

7AM, 12 July 07

Sitting to leeward in the forepeak just before the morning role call. Many of you know that this is a coded way of telling you that there isn't much wind.

We have been beating or close reaching on starboard tack all night with a miraculously constant, but weak breeze.

I wrote of beating to windward in 2005, but I simply must relate last night as an addendum. To remind you, beating is what you do when the wind is coming at you. When where you want to go is where the wind is coming from, meaning you have to sail a bit away from the direct course. Beating to windward is what sets apart really good sailors from mediocre sailors. There is a magic to solving the yin-yang problem of sailing as close to your course as you can but still keep the boat sailing fast.

Old boats, like Psyche, sail best at a true angle of about 45 degrees to the wind, newer boats can sail much closer. There are various ways that sailors decide whether they have pointed their boat too close to the wind (this slows their progress, till they turn a tad away from the wind). Some sail up until the jib 'luffs', that is till it gets a bubble in its front end, as the wind comes around on the wrong side of the sail. Some sailors approach that turn-away point by watching the tell-tales on the front of the jib. If the windward tell-tail flutters skyward, you are heading too close to the wind and need to head a little away. Good sailors keep track of more than whether the tell-tales are fluttering. Most importantly, they sense the boat's speed. If the boat is going really fast for the amount of wind, you can turn a bit closer to the wind for a while; if the boat is going too slow, don't sail so close to the wind.

A really good sailor, but an even more successful father of sailors, named Bob Allen, once suggested to a very young me back in 1967 that I should try steering the boat in an oscillatory course, e.g., 50 degrees from the wind for a while till I hear the boat's bow wave and hear more bubbles hissing by, both indicating increased speed, and then turn the boat ever-so-slightly toward the wind for a spell, then a smooth return to 50 degrees for more speed, and so on. To paraphrase a recent unmentionable quote, you bank your boat-speed 'capital' in yards to windward.

My dad doesn't sail that way. He just finds a very narrow optimal groove and keeps his boat there. When I was first learning how sail to windward in my grandad's old wooden dyer dinghy, my dad told me to "just feel the boat, son."

I didn't feel anything then, but I do now (thanks for telling me that I would, Dad).

The point of all this, is that last night would have been the prototype evening for teaching a youngster what my dad meant. Normally, there are a myriad of sensory inputs that prevent you from "feeling" how fast you are going. Waves come at you in frustrating clumps abruptly slowing you down and changing your course. Other boats are distracting you. A crew member talks and you lose your concentration.

Last night there was wind direction and speed, boat direction and speed, and nothing else; no waves, no wind changes, no crew noise.

I shouldn't say nothing else. Last night was the clearest I can remember in a very long time. Bizillions of stars, and a dominant Milky Way. So much structure to the heavens, that you only needed to refer to your compass now and then, to check in. I used the Milky Way as if it were a palm tree on the shore. There were NO waves. At all. Truly the calmest sea I have seen in a very long time. The wind was incredibly constant, 3.5-5.0 knots. The boat speed ranged between 4.0 and 5.5 knots. These are amazing numbers for an old sailor like me. In these rarified conditions, the boat was actually moving faster than the wind. In these conditions, it was so easy to see the relationship between boat speed and wind angle. You needed hardly move the tiller at all. I must say that I experimented (are you surprised?) with both my dad's stable equilibrium algorithm, and Bob Allen's oscillatory one. The latter is better for me, because I'm never quite sure where the "groove" is, unless I try out everything else. Moving back and forth between a little too high (as evidenced by reduced boat speed), and a little too low (as evidenced by the wider wind angle)lets you sample the sailing space, and get an idea of the morphology of the process. Anyone sailing last night, would have quickly come to understand all this.

This intense meditation on beating to windward alternated with a different kind of meditation when I gave over the helm to my watch mate. The sight of brilliant stars reflected on a barely ruffled sea, was kind of a reunion with the night sky I used to see as a kid, sleeping on the deck of the Siwash, staring up and wondering what it was all about. Last night, the big dipper pointed out the North star, which was right in our wake, reminding us of the radical departure our course is from previous transpackers.

Blah, blah,blah
BREAK BREAK BREAK
News flash. Round 3 to Psyche!
We have KICKED ASS! The role call is in.
We moved from 6th in class, 11th in fleet yesterday to 2nd in class, 3rd in fleet today.
Just like that. We made up something like 35 miles in 24 hours over Farfar, who really tanked. She is behind the other Cal 40, California girl, who is 15 miles behind us. Wow. Amazing. We know that Farfar has as good or better boat speed than we do: the first day convinced us of that. Somehow the different oceans we sailed in treated us very differently.

Now I haven't been completely straight with you. I've been holding our strategy very close to the chest. Some of you, who have been tracking the boats already know what our strategy is. I'll come out with it in words tomorrow.