A 12 nmi long trip from Pender Harbour to Ballet Bay...

A 12 nmi long trip from Pender Harbour to Ballet Bay on Nelson island(in a straight line) turned into a 25 nmi long sail.

When the wind comes out of where you want to go (15-20 knots out of the NW on the nose), sailing long stretches from one side of the channel to the other is the only way to go forward. It works well, but it adds a lot of miles to a journey...

We are properly tired now.

Like 7 May at 22:30 | Open on merveilles.town

3 comments

R E K

Sailing into the wind is actually low-effort, because the boat steers itself (until we have to tack, that is), but having wind in your face the whole time is tiring. Our wind meter doesn't work so we don't know how strong the wind was, but thinking it was mostly at 20 knots the whole way. We had some good waves on the transit, a rare thing for the waters between the mainland and Texada (in the summer it's often super calm and flat here).

At least it was very sunny today :>...

7 May at 23:15 | Open on merveilles.town

Apostolis

@rek don't you have automated steering, meaning something that keeps the speed vector at a specific angle?

Also, if you let the wind steer the boat, you lose speed.

Maybe for big voyages, it doesn't matter..

8 May at 4:28 | Open on social.coop

R E K

@apostolis we don’t have automated steering , no.
We were going at 5-6 knots yesterday, close-hauled, that’s way fine for us. Our boat handles that point of sail really well.

8 May at 14:46 | Open on merveilles.town