Hello all,
I'm sorry if my post was a bit unclear.
Upon reading what I wrote, I see that there is plenty of room for misinterpretation:
First of all, though the picture says that the wind angle is 65, that was by no means what we had for the majority of the trip. We had it on the nose the entire time. I consider 30 - 50 on the nose. I understand that some forum members feel differently about what's on the nose, but if they normally sail on a sharper angle than 30 to call it "on the nose", I'll be very impressed ... and I'd also like to know what's propelling them besides their engine(s).
I was not impressed about hoisting the
sails and lowering them 51 hours later, but I was impressed that we didn't need to use the
engine, even when we had ridiculously little wind to
work with (4 knots).
The
gennaker was in the air for a total of 15 minutes. Then we managed to tear it, through good old bad luck. For the remaining 50 hours and 45 minutes we were flying
mainsail and
genoa.
Gideon touched upon the
current: it was slightly in my favor when we took the picture (and when we had the great sail doing 11 knots in 13 knots of wind) .. about .8 knots at the time of the picture, slightly more when we were really kicking butt. Having said that we had currents against us, with us and on both starboard and port side, but I don't think it severely impeded our journey.
Since we spent two full nights in the
boat under sail, we were able to really test out the cabins. I was very curious as to how the two protrusions would sound and feel. It honestly wasn't an issue. Maybe a wave hit it now and then, but it wasn't any more out of place than a wave hitting the outside of the
hull. Put it to you this way, I definitely didn't lose any sleep over it and neither did the other two guys either.
Alan seems to be unimpressed with the average speed we did. Well, I for one am impressed, especially when you remember that the three of us were inexperienced multi-hullers. The other two guys are also inexperienced sailors, so I was super pleased with the speed we did. If doing 8 knots in relatively light winds is a terrible deal, then by all means be unimpressed. I wanted a fast
boat not a flat out
racer. I felt safe and comfortable the whole trip and to me that's very important, especially when I achieved an average I'm happy with.
JamuJoe --- I've started sailing around in the fjords now and I'm very happy to be here. Though I'm really looking forward to seeing the World from a
catamaran, starting with home is fantastic. I'll post some more pictures as soon as I snap some I'm happy with.
If there are other things I wrote that were easy to misunderstand, please let me know and I'll try to rectify them.