Down wind sailing
Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd March, 2025
(When we arrived at Ragged island there was no cell service at all. This turned out to be due to technical issues with the local tower, which appear to have now been resolved.)
Over the course of this Caribbean trip, we had done a lot sailing on a beam reach. When traveling north and south between the Windward and Leeward Islands, the prevailing easterly winds result in some lovely sailing. However, as we have started to make our way back toward the US (north-westerly direction), we are experiencing a lot of travel with the wind coming across the stern of the boat. While this arrangement of boat and wind seems like it would be easy, we have always thought that Cotinga is very slow down wind. In reality, there is a fundamental problem with down wind sailing, If the wind is blowing at 10 knots and the boat is moving forward at 5 knots, the effective wind on the sails is only 5 knots. Usually, for us, that’s not really enough to keep the boat moving at a decent speed. When we are faced with a long passage, say 130 nautical miles, moving along at three knots seems unacceptable (we have limited patience). Often we have resorted to motoring when going downwind in fairly light breezes. Another option would be to wait for stronger winds. The problem there is that stronger winds lead to bigger waves. Big swell taken on the stern of the boat can lead to some pretty unpleasant conditions aboard. So we have been trying to work on our down wind sailing techniques.
When the wind was fairly strong and the distance not so great, we have sailed with just the genoa. Often we have both the main and genoa up at once. There are two problems that can occur with this arrangement. The first is the problem of keeping the mainsail from gybing across the boat as the waves come from behind and roll the hull. Typically we use a preventer (a line from the boom to the deck and back to the stern of the boat) to mitigate this risk. The second issue is that, depending on the angle of the wind to the boat, the large mainsail can block the wind from filling the genoa. So in recent sails, we’ve been trying different approaches. On our passage from the DR to Great Inagua, we tried sailing “Wing on Wing”. In this case the genoa is out on the starboard side of the boat, while the mainsail is out on the port side of the boat (with the preventer locked down). In calm waters or for short trips, you would usually hand steer the boat while the sails are out in this fashion, to ensure that both sails stay filled. In our case, we attached the spinnaker pole to the genoa and let the auto pilot steer. Eventually, the wind started to come more from our side so we moved the genoa to the port side (still poled out). Of the 33 hours of the trip, we motored 22 hours.
On the most recent passage from Great Inagua to the Ragged Islands, we were determined to sail more. We put up the main sail while still at anchor. We motored out of the harbor while Mike set up the Gennaker (also known as a "code zero” sail) on the foredeck. We shut off the engine and sailed. Even though my brother Rod refers to this sail as the “Storm Gennaker” it had us moving along smartly in about 12 knots of breeze. For the first seven hours we averaged 6.6 knots per hour. We started to get worried that we would arrive on the shallow bank behind Ragged Island in the dark (going too fast!). Another concern was that to quench that sail, you must get onto the foredeck and pull down the “sock”. Then the sail gets packed into a large bag on the bow. This didn’t seem like an operation that should be carried out after sunset, so we took down the “Code zero” at five pm. We chose to partly unroll the genoa, as we were still moving along quite fast. The night was quite a different thing. The wind went lighter and lighter! The sails were banging around as we rolled. After midnight we were averaging something like 4.5 knots per hour. As Mike pointed out, it was better than on some earlier trips when we were barely making 4 knots! It did feel slow and our fears of arriving in the dark soon dissipated. It was light about 6:30 am but took us until about 10:30 am to enter Coco Bay off Little Ragged Island. We sailed the entire 130 nm at an average speed of 5.4 knots. We did run the engine for 1 hour, every 8 hours or so, to drive the fridge compressor and charge our batteries, but we never put the engine in gear.
As it transpired, Coco Bay harbor is not the best. There was a lot of swell, I managed to get some sleep but Mike couldn’t sleep. We had some lunch and quickly got back underway. Now, we are anchored off Hog Cay about six miles north. It was quite a circuitous route, about 10 miles in total, so I was glad to have had some down time before making the extra trip. The seas are flat! Marvelous!
Gloria
22 14.543 N, 75 45.276 W
We have no photos from the passage, but here are some photos from our final day in Man of War bay, Great Inagua, along with a single photo showing our current location off Hog Cay, Ragged islands. More to follow in the next blog!
Wow, that sunset photo is beautiful! Jo
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