Atlantic Sailing: Daggerboard Control, Watermaker Maintenance & Speed Secrets
There’s a version of offshore sailing that looks like one continuous, deliberate passage plan. The reality, most days, is closer to a string of small problems solved in real time — and a good tradewind leg across the Atlantic tends to produce exactly that kind of day.
We were 20-odd knots into a solid trade wind run, sailing close to square downwind, when the boat needed a bit of help holding a straight line. Confused seas were slewing the stern around — not dramatically, but enough that without help, a wave would pick up the windward hull and push the boat sideways faster than the rudders alone could correct. The fix was dropping the windward daggerboard partway, not for lift, but purely to give the rudders something to pivot against. It’s a small, specific piece of technique, and if you want the fuller breakdown of exactly when and why this works, we’ve written it up properly in our Daggerboard Placement Guide.
The rig itself was set up for the conditions rather than left at a default configuration. With the fourth reef in and not much mainsail area up, the topping lift was pulled on hard enough to function as an improvised backstay, and the mainsheet was likewise kept tight to help support the rig with minimal main up. That freed the boom up to act almost like a fixed bar, with the reef line itself doing the job of a sheet — easing and tightening it directly to control boom position, rather than relying on a conventional mainsheet setup that wasn’t really needed with this little sail area flying. It’s not a conventional-looking setup, but it’s a stable, secure way to keep a spinnaker flying safely without overloading a mast that’s carrying very little mainsail to begin with.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, the watermaker needed attention too — a five-micron filter had picked up a serious amount of contamination sitting in Las Palmas harbour, not exactly ideal conditions to be running a watermaker in the first place, but sometimes unavoidable. Cleaning it mid-ocean meant improvising: with no real spare water pressure or fresh water to spend on the job, the filter went over the stern on a line instead, getting a genuinely thorough scrub from nine knots of boat speed dragging it through the water. Effective, and a good reminder that boat speed is a resource too, not just something you’re chasing for its own sake.
Oliver had his own contribution to the day’s speed hunt — rigging a tiny sail, originally built for a 16-foot dinghy called Ghost 16 back in Valencia, cut from a scrap of old America’s Cup Persenk cloth. Set forward where the staysail would normally sit but wasn’t quite clearing the jib properly, that small scrap of sail picked up a genuine extra knot of boat speed. On an eight-ton, 42-foot boat, one knot from a sail built for a 16-footer sounds almost too good to be true — but the maths checks out, and the practical difference is real: a full day saved off a multi-day passage, just from paying attention to every bit of available speed rather than dismissing anything that looks too small to matter.
None of this is what most people picture when they hear “champagne sailing” — bubbling spray coming off the bow at speed, everything trimmed and working in harmony, rather than a glass in hand on the bow. But that’s a fairly accurate description of what a good tradewind day on Paikea actually looks like: steering technique, rig configuration, system maintenance, and even the kids’ own experiments all working together to make a long ocean passage a little faster, and a little more interesting, than just watching the miles tick by.