At rest

The boat is now tied up safe and sound behind a house on a canal in Ft Lauderdale. Pam Wall helped me find this and the people that live there are super nice. I met Pam a few years ago at a John Kretschmer class at the prestigious JK University :-) Sometimes things just fall together.

Gulf Stream

Here's a picture of the chart plotter as I crossed the Gulf Stream. The current is very strong so while the boat was pointed the the southwest, the direction of travel was almost due west.

Off track

My track shows me turning into the wind to drop the main before entering the port of Ft Lauderdale. It was dark and a wild ride turning into the wind. Looks quite unexciting from this view though.
Before I turned into the wind, the steep swells were pushing us along nicely at about 7-8 knots and the wind felt about like 15 knots from directly behind. Pretty nice. But doing a 180 and going bow-first into the wind plus a couple knots to maintain steerageway and the wind suddenly jumped to an apparent 25 knots - that's windy. And the bows were plowing directly into about every third wave as it was quite choppy. Lots of spray went flying each time that happened. But I got the mainsail secured and promptly did another 180 and immediately relative calmness returned.
(FYI; most of the purple blobs are the radar return overlay)

a wet sendoff

I'm headed toward Fort Lauderdale and am now preparing to cross the Gulf stream. I've been cleaning up the boat today but it looks like mother nature thinks the decks need a freshwater rinse.

Enzo

Enzo finally passed me just now. For the last hour they gained extremely slowly then when they were parallel with me, suddenly accelerated past me quite quickly even though they were in my wind shadow.
I'm not sayin' they switched their engine on... I'm just sayin...

Hourglass (part 2)

Just noticed that anything it type after inserting a picture in an email doesn't get posted...
Hourglass post continued: Basically, one half is wound one direction and the wind has wound the other half in the opposite direction. My weight made very little impact on trying to pull it loose and the wind was whipping it around with abandon to make it worse. It took about 45 minutes to finally coax it free. My hands and arms were exhausted. Felt great to get it resolved.
This happened to me one other time on the way across the Atlantic on one of my middle of the night watches. I managed to resolve it eventually then so I had some reason for confidence that I would get it worked out eventually. Altering course to have the mainsail blanket the wind helped a bunch.
Today I've had a big sloop, "Enzo", a 70 foot yacht on my tail most of the afternoon. Initially they were 6 miles behind, but they chewed that down to 3 while I was struggling with the gennaker. They're certainly a much faster boat overall but I've felt good to be holding them off so long.
I'm glad I was spared the embarrassment of them blowing by me with my sail looking like tangled laundry :-)

Hourglass'd gennaker

Well I had an exciting event this afternoon, probably by my earlier gloating about successfully hoisting the gennaker. After a beautiful downwind run I needed to furl the gennaker for a few hours while I close reached northward before taking a turn to the west. The first part of the furling went fine but there was quite a bit of tension on the furling line for the last half of the furling process.
When I tried to deploy it again after making the westward turn it hourglasses on me. I didn't take pictures as I was too exasperated/exhausted with trying to resolve it. Here's what an hourglasses gennaker looks like: