Oct 30, 2012 Tuesday at sea

1am, my watch.  It is cold.  Time to put on the layers, tights and t-shirt for the first layer, then fleece pants and jacket followed by deep sea overalls and my LA County Fair high point jacket.  Woolly hat, fuzzy mittens and my japanese sock/shoes.  Over all this goes the safety harness which clips onto the safety line.  Nice and cozy.  The only problem is that I have to take it all off to go to the bathroom.  Technically I don’t get to go to the bathroom while I am on watch anyway.  Once I am all suited up I crawl over to the cockpit to relieve Alan.  He has the wind vane set so I should not have to do much but watch for other boats.  It is so beautiful with the full moon.   The wind vane is not really holding the right course so I end up hand steering all night.  It is hard work but also a chance for me to finally start to get a feel for how to balance wind and sail.  Of course the direction that I am supposed to go is not the direction that the wind wants to take me.  5am, I am relieved and fall into bed.

Morning brings our first roll call at sea.  The Baja Haha has a roll call on the radio every morning to check in with everyone, see where they are and be sure there are no problems.  It turns out we are way offshore, away from all of the other boats.  So the day is spent with Alan fussing with the wind vane, trying to get it to hold the right course so we don’t have to steer every minute.  He gets it right for a while and then loses it.  Meanwhile, it is still cool.  A couple of layers come off but most of the day is spent in fleece jacket and pants.  We have a large school of dolphins with us during the afternoon.  Once they are gone I throw out the fishing line and within 1/2 hour we catch a fish, a yellow fin tuna.  That’s our dinner tonight.  We get the wind vane to hold for long enough  to eat dinner together in the cabin.  Time for me to sleep and Alan to watch

Sleep is not nearly so restful tonight.  The wind has picked up, along with some swells and the sails keep crashing from side to side with a loud crash as he tries to hold a course downwind.  At one point he decides to change the course to hopefully bring us back closer to the rest of the fleet.  This is accomplished with much crashing and grinding of winches.  The cabin acts like a sounding board and amplifies every noise on deck.  Eventually we will get used to the normal noises of sailing but right now every one sounds like something is wrong.