Sailing the Bahamas

The Bahamas provide a great training ground for working on sailing skills, whether knocking off the rust, learning new skills or learning a new to us boat, well for us all of the above. The winds generally have an east component while the islands roughly run in a NW/SE direction so there is always a sailing angle. We have been sailing on the banks the past month, thus seas are 1-3 ft chop so very stable and easy conditions. 

We have never used a spinnaker or asymmetrical spinnaker on any of our previous sail boats. Tenacious came with an asymmetrical spinnaker. We had brought this on deck in Annapolis to see if we had the bits and pieces required. We had a nice down wind run in the past week that gave us the perfect sub 10 knot winds to give the spinnaker a try.

We were able to make 4-5 knots with an apparent wind of 6-8 knots. The sail was reasonable easy to handle with a sock to pull down/dose the sail. The sail is big and all 3 crew members were fully engaged to manage her. 

For avid readers of this blog, you may recall that back in October we tried our old faithful method of downwind sailing with a wind and wing configuration, ultimately leading to a backwinded Genoa, broken mast track fitting and a pole lost or thrown overboard depending on ones perspective. Well we had another chance to try this configuration - especially as we would pole the Genoa out on the starboard side, the only side we have a pole at the moment. 

Winds were light again 10-14 knots, and the set up worked well. We still need to run more lines to steady the pole. We were able to recover the rig and avoid any catastrophic issues this time. Ultimately though the sensitivity to this set up is helm and our autopilot is just not up to the task, at least if there is any significant sea running. 

Lastly, we had some nice close hauled sailing, holding about 40 degrees apparent (light sea state helps). We find that the sail area on Tenacious is very generous more so than any boat we have had before. Therefore we are taking in reefs (reducing sail area) much sooner than we had before, yet largely able to maintain boat speed. We are looking forward to our new main sail, the better shape, and also the sail is slightly smaller than our current main thus maybe a bit less touchy as the winds come up.