Force 9

It was all going so well on Monday afternoon. We had a brisk F7 and were sailing towards our destination. There was plenty of weather 'action' both to the north and south of us, but, somehow we were managing to go right through the middle and avoid it. The latest weather update indicated our luck was about to run out. The large low that we'd had our eye on for a few days was now coming right for us without any way to avoid it. Trying to go north meant moving towards an F10 (storm) in the Denmark Strait. There was another low coming from the south. The wind was supposed to pipe up after midnight (we've found the grib file data to be incredibly accurate on this passage) to an F8 (gale), so, we decided to take action sooner rather than deal with a rising wind and unfamiliar equipment later in the dark.

Gjoa came with a Jordan series drogue. We hadn't used one before, so, before we left we carefully flaked and repacked it to be sure it would run out freely when the time came. We also lashed it to the pushpit ready to deploy. We had planned to do a test trial run at some point in this passage. There hadn't been an opportunity before now. Unfortunately, we were about to perform a 'live' test where the outcome really mattered. We got ourselves in position and were thrilled when the deployment went perfectly. We had deployed in only about 25 knots of wind, expecting the stronger winds to come later overnight. Given the relatively light winds we were shocked at the absolutely horrible motion we were experiencing, the boat yawed back and forth, rolled and snatched terribly. We were dreading the night ahead, this couldn't be how it's supposed to work, could it? We soon learned that wind speed is a significant factor in keeping tension on the drogue and the boat steady. As forecast, the winds kicked in after midnight. When it got to 35 knots things got a lot more comfortable. When they reached their peak of a steady 44 knots (F9 Strong Gale) we were actually very comfortable. The gale blew for two whole days and only started to dissipate late today (Wednesday). We knew drogue retrieval was going to be hard work. We got it in, in 25 knots of wind, in about three hours.

While hanging off the drogue for 48 hours we travelled 109 miles back towards where we started. A little frustrating, but, we're underway again now with a few good days of favourable winds forecast ahead of us before the next round of low pressure systems come our way. We'll get there eventually...

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Force9 2/7/2014 12:00 56°25.3'N 025°49.7'W