[Greyhawkupdates] Fickle Winds

[Tim Allen GREYHAWK]

Fickle winds -- that sums up last night.

What happens when a bird flaps its wings? It flies, right? Well I don't know if you would call it flying, but this old bird Greyhawk does seem to propel herself along when the sea causes her to flap her wings.  We always had just enough water flowing over the rudder that the autopilot was able to keep the boat aligned to the desired magnetic heading. Of course, the direction the boat is headed has no relation to the direction the boat is actually moving. Fortunately we were generally moving more or less in the right direction, at least in the same quadrant (except for that one time when we were going south). But the winds would tease us every now and then. We were flying the light staysail "windseeker" but at one point I thought we had enough wind to roll out the genoa; then it looked like I needed to put it out on a pole, but by the time I got that all done (in the dark), the teaser wind had gone away, and I had to take it all down and set the windseeker again. I was not so easily fooled the second and third time the wind teased. The official race log book asks us to give the wind direction and speed with each entry, so we have a couple question marks for direction and 0 to 1 for speed.

With the lightening sky of early pre-dawn a gentle breeze began to fill in from the SSW, slowly clocking to SW as it built, and now with the sun up we are making 5 to 6 knots on a close reach aimed for Newport. We can't see any of the competition, which means either we're ahead or they are ahead, or they've fallen off further west, or they've snuck behind us to the east, or.... We will download the latest position report with this round of e-mails and find out just how the night went.

Tim and Wendy on GREYHAWK now 108.9 miles from the Brenton Reef Buoy off Newport with a bearing of 347° - the finish line!


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