The Irish Sea. Sea Stallion is sailing with a ‘half wind’ (beam reach) on starboard tack (the wind is coming across the ship from the starboard side). The wind is strong, 11-13 m/s, and the sea is between 2½ - 3½ m high. We are sailing with two, then three reefs (out of a total of five) in the sail.
Well over half the crew is seasick, and a handful of them are inactive. Sea Stallion is doing well despite the swells and waves not coming from the same side, so it's a strange restless sea on which to sail. But we are taking a lot of spray over the side, especially in the bow, just in front of the tack (the front corner of the sail), and the crew in the bow is getting a lot of water down their necks. Spray also is coming on board just behind the mast shrouds.
Some waves are coming in over the stern, up in the navigation box and VHF radio.
Once the sail is reefed (reduced), we want to downhaul the parrel harder and farther behind than usual to relieve the drag of the yard on the middle of the mast, causing it to sway forward in an arc. This happened when the ship came down hard on a wave. We choose to proceed without downhauling because it would be critical to take the sail down across the ship in order to mount the parrel again in this weather. We'll get the sail down when it should, with the help of the braces and buntlines.
I’m sitting aft on the starboard navigation box (opposite the navigational equipment) and wondering if I should propose to the skipper to take in one more reef, but the ship is doing fantastically as it is being hit by waves and twisting in the sea. Through the many miles we have sailed, we have become accustomed to the fact that Sea Stallion is a very flexible ship. When the ship sails out of a wave and immediately knocks down the next, the whole bow moves 20 to 30 cm back and forth. If one sits at the mast and looks fore or aft, you see Sea Stallion move up and down and to both sides. Even with the reinforcements we set in the ship before the trip to Ireland, it is still flexible. The new reinforcements amidships on the gunwale that were added in Dublin before leaving (see podcasts from April 28), also seems to hold.
The ship that we have reconstructed holds on without problems in relationship to these issues, but it is also very worn out after such a trip where it constantly twists and is hit. Based on calculations of when the Sea Stallion's predecessor, the Skuldelev 2 find, was built, the ship ended her days as part of a blockade at the bottom of Roskilde Fjord, and was around 20-25 years old. And as the Sea Stallion has given so much during this voyage, it is easy to understand that such ships quickly wore out.
The wind has increased and the waves have grown. We are really pleased that we decided to reconstruct the Sea Stallion with a loose extra strake (the red top splash board) for open-sea sailing. Several times it has saved us from getting a wave in the ship. But later that night, we found out that the splash board was not always enough. Some waves are significantly higher than average, and when such a wall of water comes across a ship, hundreds of litres of water will pour over the side and drench the crew sitting to windward, keeping the vessel balanced. After which the wave turns the ship towards port, and a load of water will come in over the opposite side. Besides spray and waves, many litres of water also come in under the flaps that cover the oar holes and the holes where all the rigging is attached to the sides of the hull. In the 21 hours it took us from leaving the shelter of Ireland to reaching Lands End, and could sail with the sea behind us, we pumped about 18,000 litres of water from the Sea Stallion, with 4-6 pumps working almost constantly…
The rudder withy is also on trial now. On starboard tack the rudder is drawn away from the hull, so there is a steady hard pull on the birch withy. However, they withy is doing really well: it has been pulled a little further out from the ship, so it now sits 5-7 cm away from rudder boss instead of 3-4 cm. We should tighten and inspect it when we come into port again. The withy still looks good, however, and it'll keep for the next day’s sail.