Osaka Cup-Smiling again!

Southern Cross have had their fair share of challenges since departing Melbourne. They are underway again and full of optimism-read Yasu’s report from this morning.

"Sailing is great that’s for sure - I’m revived after the last few days.

Its very humid like Tahiti – 17°, Fiji -18°, Port Vila – 18°, New Caledonia – 21° and Melish Reef – 17°. We are getting very close to the equator where the ocean surface temperature increases along with the evaporation. Around here the sea surface temperature is probably very high and evaporates well. When does the wind blow – the daytime or night time? Most probably the air is warmed in the daytime and the wind blows towards that area. Then at night clouds tend to form.
Because its so humid now I’ve changed from a blanket at night to a towlkett. ( It’s a large blanket made from toweling )

Yesterday for the repairs at Melish reef, we found a sheltered place to work. Since the inner side of the lagoon island was so shallow, we were not able to enter. There is a sand bar at west end of reef and so I dropped the anchor near there. In yesterday’s photo I’m looking towards the east. The sand bar is a good place for seabirds to rest and there were many of them all probably wondering who we were !?

We’re once again travelling in the northward flowing ocean current which will take us past Rossel Island. We’ll then pass Laughlan Island and Bouganville Island in the Solomon Sea at 5° S. From here to the equator it’s about 900 mile and @ 6knots that's 150 hours which will see us there around Apr 15th. Both Masa and I are doing fine.'
Yasu

Melbourne to Osaka update 7/4/13

 by Robyn Brooke and David Taylor

The Melbourne to Osaka Yacht Race teams are now tackling light and squally conditions in the tropics with the lead boat positioned north of the Solomon Sea and Southern Cross managing rig damage at 17 degrees south. Boats are reporting their position via radio sked with Kordia at 0600hrs and 1800hrs EST daily on HF radio, as well as confirming their position and race conditions via SMS from their Satellite phone. The Yellowbrick trackers provide followers with a visual update of the race by automatically updating boat positions every four hours.

Escapade, still at the head of the fleet, are moving although it looks like the west-flowing current is dominating the light wind conditions. The ‘peleton’ or ‘pack of hounds’ as Robert Bradley (Escapade) so eloquently labelled them, are now in between the Louisiades and Bougainville. The Hounds, Wasabi, Spirit of Downunder, Cadibarra 8 and Turbulence are starting to look like a cruising group all bunched together and making their way through the islands of the Solomon Sea. Cadibarra 8 talks about the marathon getting to the Solomon Sea:
“The enormity of what we are undertaking is starting to sink in. The distance and time element is quite phenomenal really. We have been going 12 days and still have one more day until we reach the 2,000nm mark (of a 5,000nm total). Fatigue and weariness have kicked back in with the trade windsailing chipping away at our energy reserves. By anyone's imagination running in 20 knots for four days straight sounds like heaven. Reality is a building sea, lots of distance/speed (yesterday we did 260nm I think averaging over 10 knots).
We are closing in on the bottom of PNG which is exciting. Its getting really hot though, sweat dripping over the PC as I type.”
Spirit of Downunder had a similar experience in the approach to the Solomons:
“Only 186nm to our first turning point since leaving the Queensland coast, Rossel Island is the eastern most point of the Louisades.
All was well until Wednesday evening when it rained and poured and stuff happened as well. We decided to drop the mast head kite after the 6pm sched. The wind was around 20-25kts and the kite socked easily enough but after getting it on deck the tack caught a wave and in the drink it went! Took us about 15 min to get back on board with no fish or prawns to be found. Luckily no real damage to the kite but let’s hope it is still in the same shape. About two hours hrs later we got hit by a rain storm which has been fine otherwise but this one had 40+kts in it and a 50 degree wind shift. Auto George couldn’t handle that and a chinese gybe ensued. A bit of mayhem for a bit which was sorted out by the time the squirt went through which was a half hour or so.
Damage report- main fine, boom vang - 2 hose clamps used around crack in boom end section, headsail - which is a heavy 1 which reefs to a 3 had the reefing zip part company for about 1/3 length, it has webbing tabs so have to tie it up instead of zip so still functional. The log said 234nm in 24hrs this morning so not a bad run as we had two reefs and no.3 last night. “
Funnelweb, 150 nm behind Spirit, also reported a 40 knot squall but they were prepared with 2 reefs in the main and 800kg water ballast on board. Unfortunately, their auto pilot has stopped working and they are therefore hand-steering, possibly all the way to Osaka. No auto pilot will add a huge pressure to both sailors as every manoeuvre will require all hands on deck night and day.
Kiss Goodbye to MS were about 200nm to the SE of 'the Hounds' when she reported ongoing power issues, having lost her wind generator early in the race. Their solar panels are not working as well as was hoped and so are having to use more fuel to recharge their batteries. From the tracker position, it appears she may be heading to Giso to pick up some fuel as a safety measure. They are also having ongoing autohelm issues. Stopping will give them an opportunity to try to repair it.
Optimus Prime are continuing out to the East of the Solomons on what they have called "the scenic route". Although longer in distance from the middle route taken by the Hounds, they have calculated that there may be wind and current advantage and they have taken the gamble to make up time lost when they went in to Sydney to repair a broken forestay.
They sent this brief message, “In other rum-worthy news, we have finally passed Santa Ana Island at the East end of the Solomon Islands. It didn't come easy, at first she greeted us with 22knots and rain by the bucket then gave us and hour of 2-3 knots from every direction! Painful”.
Gusto have left Southern Cross in their wake and are continuing to catch those ahead. But where are they going? This could be an interesting one to watch.
And finally, Southern Cross sent in this photo from Mellish Reef this morning where they sought flat water to replace their broken stay.

Mellish Reef.Photo from Southern Cross.

And to finish today’s update, a word from the Samurai Jack crew who are now safely back in Australia, having retired from the race with structural damage.
“An exhilarating and final sail in to Gladstone was fun at 20+ knots boat speed but also hard for Michael and I, a tough but easy decision to retire was decided after the question was asked "would we trust her on the back end of a cyclone?" No. We had fixed one load bearing section of the keel however it wasn't quite distributing the appropriate loads through the rest of the frame.

Race over.
Our prep over the last 15 months saw us getting 2nd in the Fairway Challenge, double handed against fully crewed boats, the delivery from Brisbane to Melbourne and the Melbourne to Hobart West coaster all double handed and without reliance on auto helm.
We can only thank the many people that have helped and supported us along the way. We've been humbled. If anything we've both come out of this race stronger personally and having done the hard part by simply making the start. Many lifetime friendships have been established with a friendly rivalry!!!
To all the boys still charging; all the best, when things are tough look on the bright side, have a laugh and remember you do this for fun. I'll be following the tracker all the way. I expect 3 sake's per person for me, Mick and Samurai when you've made it!
From the Greyhound bus en route to Mackay from Gladstone, and on behalf of my two team mates who I've established a longing relationship with, Mick and our girl Samurai Jack.

Samurai Jack in Gladstone

AM Storms - Melbourne to Osaka Race  by Robin Hewitt

An interesting weather phenomenon is where differential heating during the day between land and sea in the near tropics gives rise to post midnight storms. For anyone curious, here’s how it works.

The land heats rapidly in the clear morning sky and the rising warmed air over it cools with height causing contained moisture to form liquid and even higher to ice. The latent heat released provides temperature to drive the system higher with updraughts that can be up to 10 m/s. So high that jets have to fly around them. The systems can float away from the land in upper atmosphere wind clearing the way for another warm bubble to form and so on. Thus a chain can develop. As the sun sets, the systems begin to cool such that by midnight the updraught has ceased and gravity takes over with drenching rain and squalls.

 

 

It has been measured that one cubic metre of air can contain 3.26 mls of water and that therefore a system can hold aloft 3 million tons of water. Having a watch from midnight to 4am means one cops all the drama. A similar process drives a bubble of warm rising air in the ITCZ (Inter Tropical Convergence Zone) whereby the cooling aloft occurs to dump heavy rain about 4pm.

Becalmed in the tropics? Why not take a dip? Cool off?

 

Optimus Prime- on to the Solomons.

Friday morning update from Trevor aboard OP.

Hi,
Thanks again for those that sent something back after my last effort. Comments ranged from don't lead with your chin to just another line on an ageing face, some where happy for me with my clean jocks and others just wished us well. Sorry I haven't responded to them individually but I do appreciate the thought and effort you have gone to with your replies. I did find the knocking although it turned out to be a clicking instead as the relay that works the main winch was clicking in and out. We had wondered why that particular winch would start up on it's own from time to time and had shut down the power to it anyway. Will have to use man power for that winch from now on.

Day 10 - Tuesday (part 2)

The breeze lightened off a bit so the kite went back up for 3 or 4 hours in the afternoon but came down again when it got back to the 18 – 20 knot mark. It does seem strange getting it down that early. Some of the normal crew are only just getting interested when it gets to 20 knots and look forward to when it kicks into 30. Different circumstances now though. If we blow up a kite going to Geraldton for instance, we can throw another and another if need be and take them in for repairs ready for the next outing. No such convenience out here though, so being conservative will have to do.

Day 11 – Wednesday

Wind still a bit towards our new top end for the kite so our current weapon of choice is the Jib Top. For the non salties and sailors amongst you a jib top is a jib obviously but is cut differently to the norm and is used to fill in the gap between going up wind with a standard jib and going downwind with a spinnaker. They are good when the breeze is between 12 and 30 knots and once the wind is more than square with the direction of the yacht. I hope that makes sense. Anyway this morning we decided that is was time to dig it out, throw some battens into it and bung it up. It has been up ever since.

I am so glad that we put the generator in for this trip to not only supply 240v power if we want (air conditioners!!) but to also charge the batteries that run all of the systems – instruments, chart plotter, winches and fridges etc. The number of hours (6-8 a day) we have to run it to keep the batteries topped up is a lot more than I had anticipated and had we been using the main motor to do that we would certainly be chewing into the fuel. The genie uses about a quarter of the number of litres per hour at a bit under 1 an hour so we will have enough fuel but if we ever have to use the other motor for any reason we may have to take over from Otto (the auto pilot) more often that we do at present. As we are nearly at the end of the fresh food we have switched the freezer off and everything is now in the fridge. Should save us a bit of power need.

The current is starting to give me the whoops. We had been able to do a bit of ducking and diving through the back eddies further south and got onto some positive current from time to time although, not as often as we would have liked. You get to a point though, where you run out of alternatives and have nowhere to hide. That is where we are at now and are stuck with having to bang into 1 to 2 knots of current consistently. We can only hope that it is the same for every one else.

Another lovely night to be at sea with mainly clear skies and lots of stars. Pretty special.

Day 12 – Thursday

I woke up with a bit of a bowel issue this morning. Not sure if it is a side affect to the anti-biotics but it got quite hectic there for awhile. Due to the fact that our new electric dunny doesn't work properly and the spare manual one gave up the ghost after only a couple of uses, we are now using the Disney method when having to do jobbies. It is simple but effective. Hang you butt over the side, hold on tight and let her rip. It took a few outings until my troubles stopped but thankfully as the day wore on I was able to fart with a little more confidence.

Weather is much the same – 18 to 20 with the odd spurt of 20 plus knots from the SSE or thereabouts. The now ruined fractional spinnaker would have been nice but no-good grizzling. The jib top is doing OK. Had a little rain about mid morning as a little rain shower came threw. It also dropped off to 5 to 8 knots and swung a little towards the E which with the moderate seaway made for an uncomfortable hour or so. The weather eventually moved on and the SE kicked back in at, you guessed it, 18 to 20 knots. Oh for the fractional. Stop grizzling!

As the day wore on we sailed alongside a reef system out here in the middle of nowhere and needed to make a decision on where we would cross through the Solomon Islands. It would appear that every one else in the fleet is heading to the Western side near Papua New Guinea. Wasabi has been heading that way since she turned the corner at Gabo Island, hugging the coast all the way North to Fraser Island before leaving the coast. Cadabarra 8 and Funnelweb perhaps had a bob each way but now it appears that they too will be following her up that way. Spirit of Downunder has probably been heading there all along as well although she came away from the coast earlier than Wasabi

OP on the other hand with Daniel doing al sorts of "what ifs" and constantly upgrading the latest weather forecast into Expedition, our race management software, is considering heading still further East to pass at the other end of the group. It means doing and extra 300 miles or so but the thinking is that we will be clear of any wind shadows from the land or any other effects the land may have on the weather. It should also enable us to get into the NE trades sooner with the hope that whey will give us a better start on the run up to the equator and then across to Osaka.

At about 2100 hrs we arrived at the northern end of the Chesterfield and Bampton Reefs where it was time to finally decide on whether to head NNE for the Eastern end of the Solomons or NNW to the Western end with rest of the fleet. We talked it over and Dan did a few more checks before we both decided that we would stick with what had always been plan A, depending on the weather forecast at the time. Now all we can do is sail as best we can along the course we have chosen and see what happens.

Dan Taylor seen here helping to pack the container of goods for Osaka with Terry and Nick.

 

The corner is a little under 500miles away so we should be there Sunday evening or thereabouts. Last night we had a great run doing a bit over 120 miles north between radio scheds for a little over 220 nm for the 24hrs. Unfortunately some of the others did a little better at 230 for the day. Not to worry, our gains will be made coming away from the Solomons if all goes to plan.

That will have to do for now. I am on watch so I had better get organised and head up to keep an eye on things.

Catch you next time
TT and Dan.