Battling with my inner voices
Tonight I have been battling with my inner voices having sailed into a big hole and spent the second half of the night just flopping around waiting for everyone to catch back up or sail away from me again. It's such a horrible thing to have to deal with and I have never been good at managing my mind when stuck in a wind hole.
Yesterday was about getting south, trying to reach down to where the trade winds are starting to form south of the Canaries, but with the loom of a light wind hole creeping ever closer. It's starting to get warm now and so sailing is in shorts and t shirt which is great, it was a dry day so I used it to do some small jobs around the boat including changing my hydrogen blades so both units are back up and running on each side of the boat. Though I had been more focussed on maintenance yesterday than squeezing every mile out of the boat it felt like I might be winning the battle, we inched across my computer screen towards where the wind arrows actually have barbs, and when night fell I thought I might have got away with it.
But at midnight the wind shut off and for the last six hours I have been slopping around in hell. There is always a temptation to change sails, change tacks, hand steer, trim this and that in the desperate attempt to get moving. All this might gain me a couple of miles in the general scheme of things but exhaust me at the same time so I have had to learn to think big picture in these circumstances, what is the best thing for me to do? And quite often it is to chill out, to keep the boat going on pilot in roughly the right direction, yes to move the weight around the boat to maximise any movement we have but after that to rest, wait for change and be ready to act when it happens.
Meanwhile my mind is mercilessly hounding me..... am I the only one to be in a hole? Is all that work I did to break away going to down the drain? Did I miss something in the navigation that put me here? If I can't sleep I listen to audio books, anything to keep my mind under wraps. This is just one moment in time on a long, long race and I need to take it and move on.
It's also been good to spend time outside, there is no moon at the moment and with the calm seas, the night is an utterly seamless 360 of black silk, punctuated only by the brightest of stars. It's incredible.
I am suffering a little at the moment with a sore back. I pulled a muscle in it a couple of days ago and am in pain when I wake up and having to be a little bit careful moving things around the boat. Before I left my amazing chiropractors gave me a couple of massage balls to bring with me and taught me some techniques for alleviating things like this. I put the two balls in a sock, place it under my lower back and my buttocks, find where it is sore, lean into it and gently roll the ball around. It's a really effective treatment. I now also need to do some conditioning exercises to try and activate the muscle that has been strained, all a lot simpler in the warm weather of the Atlantic.
Today I am hoping the breeze will fill in properly and I might get the first wiff of the trade winds south. It's only been a week but it does seem like this has been a long journey south.