Day 4

Today felt like a meditation retreat. Last night I was tacking to windward, and going slowly.
In the rush of preparations, I had installed a chart app on my phone, figuring it to be a good back up, as I probably couldn't print off charts for all the places I'm not planning on going but may need to bail out to (Gisbourne, Napier, etc) but then I ended up not getting any new paper charts. So here I was navigating using OpenCPN... So now I was sailing, using buggy, frustrating, software... exactly what I go sailing to escape. This brought many thoughts of all the land-and-internet based frustrations that I was sailing alone away from to gain perspective on. At least, I knew there was something like that, that made me want to sail away. At 0130 I tacked and was heading south west now, towards land a bit, but after a while the wind slowly veered so I was sailing straight south. In the morning the wind had died down further, I wasn't going fast, but at least I was in the right direction.

Frustrations had past, and I think I had adapted fully to life at sea (appetite was back). Started a few fix-it jobs that would be easy while I wasn't moving much. One was repainting the bottom of the dinghy. I had scraped the paint off the bottom by dragging it along a beach before the paint was fully hardened. The paint was needed to protect the epoxy from ultra violet light, when I'm at anchor, of course, the sun doesn't get to the bottom, so it's not that bad. But now it's gonna be upside down for a solid week - but also, this is the perfect time to paint it, since I know I'm not gonna need it for a week.

Then dolphins came! Normally dolphins come when you are traveling fast, but also I regularly see dolphins do things I've never seen them do before. The came and then came back again. Since we where going so slowly I figured this was my chance to swim with them. Tying on to the boat with a rope, and flippers and mask, even though we were going less than 2 knots, it was slightly faster than I could comfortably swim, even with the flippers. But I could easily pull my self along the rope. The dolphins didn't come very close but they did swim under me, swimming side on to look directly at me. Because the self steering was activated, the duckboard wasn't the best way up. I managed to pull my self up the side into the cockpit without much difficulty (good to know I can do that)

After a rest, I started to repair the sail from yesterday. First I sewed the tear together flat. First, sitching one side of the tear to the other - this wasn't to hold it together, just to hold it in place. I had to do most of this twice, because when I got near the end it wasn't flat. Then I glued on two strip of silver, heavy duty, tarp over the tear, on both sides of the sail. Finally, I sewed around the edge of that, though both strips. I was running out of sail repair thread, so I broke apart an old rope and used a polyester strand from inside it. I got down one end and the needle broke! The eye broke off. I suddenly realized I was rather short of suitable needles. I had a number of too small ones, and two that were maybe big enough. If I broke those I'd have a problem... I'm doubtful that a needle is something I can improvise!

I wasn't expecting that this meditation retreat featured a workshop on high-stakes sewing. Sewing very paitiently and carefully I managed to complete the repair without breaking anything.

Maybe tonight or tomorrow I will get to find out if the repair was good enough. The wind is currently still light enough for the genoa. But the forecast is to turn south and rise to 20 knots.