Spinnaker up, spinnaker down … repeat!

Passage Panama to French Polynesia, days 22-23:
Monday 10-April:Today, at 6pm, is 3 weeks since we departed Panama. It’s the longest passage we’ve done so far. Our Atlantic crossing had been a tad over 17days; Antigua to USA 12 days and USA to Colombia 10 days and several of a week or so.
The most amazing thing is, 3 weeks in, and Oana hasn’t thrown me overboard yet. Although she’s been very quiet these last few days, so I suspect she’s thinking about it!

Yesterday, Easter Sunday, we had gybed back onto port hoping we’d gone far enough north to be in a more favorable westerly current. Sadly, we didn’t see any stronger flow than the ~0.8kts we’ve been getting for several days now. So that tactic was a waste of time and diversion 🤨

Talking incorrect forecasts, the wind forecast for last evening and all today was 15-20Kts so after the gybe we had kept the spinnaker below decks and continued with main and poled genoa (“wing-on-wing”). Yet frustratingly we rarely saw the actual wind go over 13kts, leaving us cursing for not being ballsy enough to put the spinnaker up yesterday before dark.

By 1am this morning I had just about enough of slow progress wing-on-wing and decided to put it up in the moonlight. But first I needed to recharge the batteries, and that’s when we had our first real failure to deal with. The generator had shredded the impeller blades on its water-cooling pump, and it shut down within 5 mins of starting, complaining of over-heat (I know the feeling!). It was a relatively quick job to replace it, but not without discomfort due to the boat movement. Plus, it’s always extremely sweaty to work in the engine room at the best of times, let alone at 3am when the batteries are running low and they need the generator fixed!
After that I decided sleep was more important than spinnaker.

For the rest of these 2 days, Monday and Tuesday, we wrestled with spinnaker decisions and spinnaker practice. It seems each time we put it up in steady 12-13kt winds, the wind would increase a few hours later and we would chicken-out and take it down again, only for the wind to decrease again the moment it was packed away down the fore-hatch. It felt like a conspiracy! And it’s not a simple thing, or a particularly safe thing, either deploying the spinnaker or taking it down, especially when it’s already beyond the wind threshold of 20kts.
But the times when it was up and pulling nicely it never failed to put a knot or two on our speed and a huge smile on my face. Especially so at sunset with the colours radiating through the thin material and at night with the stars all around the impressive shape of this huge sail. And its silent power always seems to make for a smoother more peaceful ride than the sail-&-rig clattering of a wing-on-wing setup.

The other good thing about these spinnaker-up, spinnaker-down days is that we got very used to handling it and increasingly more confident to hold on through squalls rather than panic and drop it. Above 18kts TWS, I can sense Cloudy starting to get overpowered, and the speed at 9-11kts confirmed this, yet the Parasailor didn’t seem to mind, not one bit. It was like a rock of steadiness up there giving the boat a much smoother ride, but at the price of the sheets being iron bar taught and my knuckles whiter than white! Suffice to say, previously I started twitching at 15kts. That threshold is now up to 20kts 😁
And finally, we also fine-tuned the set up. The sheets we got with the spinnaker seemed awfully thin for 228m2 of canvas. Plus, they chaffed very easily. So we swapped them for 16mm lines I had for a backup gybe preventer set. Those made me feel much safer, knowing they could never break. Then we swapped the sheet sheaves for some much stronger ones, that didn’t chafe. And finally, we put bungie (elastic) onto the tacklines that run down the side deck to the winches. These tacklines are constantly taking and releasing tension and as they do so they would slap hard on the deck, making for an awful sound inside the boat. The bungie elastic now makes them silent.
So, all in all we have learned a lot that had not been possible previously, when only occasionally using the spinnaker. Maybe we should write a how-to for using a Parasailor on a monohull! Would you buy the book? 😁