Morning
I had charted an almost direct course to St. Martin, which meant that I’d be 30 or miles away from any given island at any time. This meant that as soon as I’d lost sight of St. Vincent the previous day all I could see was water. Even the other ships remained out of sight.
I slept in the cockpit and due to the lack of traffic I’d set my alarm to 1 hour. Even as I write this, from belowdecks on Zanshin, I still have the timer going so that I can at least do a scan of the instruments and horizon.
With 180NM left to go my regular check of the bilge 4 times a day showed that there was water in there, and pretty ugly dirty water to boot! I tracked down the cause of the leak to the “dripless” shaft seal which was leaking with a very slow dribble, but more than just a couple of drops a second.
This worried me a bit, since it had never leaked before and I was afraid of a burst like event while at sea. At least the rubber gasket seal to the left of the arrow was cool. Some checking online told that I’d neglected to grease the seal over the years and that either it has started coming apart or just needed the special grease. The recommendation is to use a drinking straw partially filled with grease, then flattening the end and slipping it deep into the seal before squeezing out the lubricant. I don’t have straws but tried using a syringe without the needle, but I don’t think it penetrated sufficiently. At least the leakage rate has gone down.
The weather was, for the most, perfect and I had some very fast sailing with 1 reef in both sails for much of the day. The previous 24H distance was 170NM, so I was 30NM short of doing a 200NM day. I had several holes in the wind in the lee of the islands where the wind died to next to nothing and I motored through those stretches, since I’m on a schedule.