Fast in Light Airs: Caribbean to the Azores
Some passages start with drama. This one started with a countdown, a somewhat vague sense of “not the Caribbean,” and a weather picture that was changing daily enough that the plan was simply to leave and see what showed up. Saturday, June 3rd, departure finally locked in, boards up, bound for the Azores.
Setting Off with No Fixed Forecast
Committing to a departure date without a settled forecast isn’t ideal, but sometimes it’s the only realistic option — the forecast itself had been shifting day to day in the lead-up, and waiting for a perfect picture to emerge risked waiting indefinitely. The approach instead was straightforward: leave, and adjust as the actual weather revealed itself underway.
The boat left in reasonably good shape for the crossing. Starlink had proven itself genuinely valuable for weather and communication mid-ocean. The fractional spinnaker — nicknamed Frankie, previously blown out on the leg from Green Island back to Falmouth in Antigua — had been properly repaired in St Martin and was back in service. The mainsail had picked up some attention too: chafe repairs on the batten pockets, retensioning work at the leech end where a failure had been developing, and new luff receptacles fitted on the battens.
Light Air Sailing and Daggerboard Trim
Conditions for the first stretch were genuinely light — seven knots of true wind, boat speed sitting around four to five knots, among the lightest air experienced on the whole crossing so far. In conditions this soft, the daggerboards came mostly up, left down only a fraction purely for a bit of grip rather than any real lift, with the expectation they’d likely need to come up entirely if the breeze kept fading.
Working Out a Watch System That Actually Works
Crew scheduling on a passage like this isn’t something you set once and leave — it’s worth experimenting with until you find a rhythm that suits everyone. Different combinations were tried across the early nights: the younger crew taking a nine to midnight shift, the parents splitting midnight to three and three to six between them on different nights, deliberately mixing it up to find what gave everyone — including Shayne — a genuinely good night’s sleep here and there, not just survivable rotations.
Busting the “Wind Speed Boat” Myth
Worth addressing directly, since it’s a claim that gets thrown around a lot in marketing copy: what does it actually mean for a boat to be a “wind speed boat” — one capable of sailing at or near true wind speed rather than some fraction of it?
The distinction that matters most here is between true wind speed and apparent wind speed, and just as importantly, making sure boat speed over ground and speed through water are properly calibrated and reading consistently with each other — a small discrepancy, even something as minor as 0.3 of a knot from a bit of buildup on a paddlewheel sensor, is worth knowing about and accounting for.
Paikea isn’t, strictly speaking, a true wind speed boat — but in sub-eight-knot conditions, she’ll get close, sometimes touching true wind speed in the right circumstances. Genuine wind speed boats are a different category entirely — think IMOCAs, MOD70s, Ultime 60s, America’s Cup boats — vessels built specifically and exclusively to chase that benchmark. Even well-regarded cruising catamaran builders — the likes of Gunboat and HH, both genuinely fast, well-built boats with real racing pedigree behind their design — struggle to consistently achieve true wind speed across a range of conditions. They’ll nudge it in certain angle and wind speed combinations, but they don’t sit there as a matter of course.
What’s worth being genuinely wary of is marketing language claiming “wind speed” performance as though it’s a simple checkbox — carbon fibre construction, daggerboards, a carbon mast, laminate sails. None of those features alone make a boat a wind speed boat, and in some documented cases, water speed sensors have been found deliberately miscalibrated to over-read — one boat measured at 9 knots actual speed while displaying figures suggesting an 11-knot overstatement, specifically to support a wind-speed marketing claim. This exact confusion — apparent wind speed mistaken for true wind speed — is common enough that it’s worth understanding properly on its own. We break down the mechanics of it, including a real example where the two readings differed by almost 3 knots, in Apparent Wind vs. True Wind: The Biggest Misconception in Sailing.Building a genuine wind speed boat is a serious engineering achievement, not a spec-sheet bullet point, and it’s worth treating bold performance claims with healthy scepticism until you’ve seen the actual polar data.
A Mystery in the Night
Somewhere in the small hours of an otherwise uneventful motoring shift, Shayne heard a distinct metallic sound — a ting, ting, ting — followed by something landing on the cabin top and dropping into the water. Not the kind of noise you can simply dismiss and go back to sleep on.
The following morning, with the breeze still light, Shayne went up the mast to investigate — a proper rig check while conditions allowed it safely, even though nothing obviously wrong turned up aloft. The mystery got solved from the deck instead: Oliver spotted the culprit — a grub screw, fallen from somewhere up the rig. Exactly where it came from and what it means remained an open question in the moment, a reminder that even on a boat you know intimately, there’s always something new to learn about — sometimes literally falling from above to prove the point.
Experimenting with Spinnaker Halyard Position
With breeze still light and the fractional spinnaker set from the starboard bow rather than the bow pole — using an adjustable tack line arrangement that lets the tack position move without anyone needing to go forward and physically reset it — the crew worked through a genuine bit of on-the-water experimentation.
The spinnaker was initially flown from the masthead halyard position, right at the top of the rig. In very light air, that’s tempting — full hoist, maximum sail area exposed — but it comes with a real structural tradeoff: rigged that high, the mast has very little effective leverage to resist the load, since there’s minimal distance between the halyard attachment and the masthead itself to work against. Moving the halyard position down the rig increases that lever arm, giving better support and control, at the cost of a small amount of sail area.
In practice on this particular morning, the initial masthead-halyard setup wasn’t performing well — visibly unstable, collapsing repeatedly rather than holding a clean, powered-up shape. Switching back to running the kite from the fractional halyard position, with everyone hauling the sheet on together, resolved it almost immediately — a nice example of theory and on-the-water reality confirming each other, with the boat picking up to nine knots of boat speed shortly after the change, a genuinely good result in conditions that started the day struggling to hold five.