Light Wind At Sea

Somewhere

No LL

I wrote before about how we hate being out at sea when there is no wind. Watch this video and you'll see why.

I took this video during our recent offshore passage from Florida to the Carolinas. The point of the video is to see what happens to our Windex.

For the benefit of land lubbers, a Windex is a very sensitive wind vane that sits at the top of the mast. The arrow points to where the wind is coming from. In today's world, a Windex is perhaps the most ubiquitous bit of sailing gear after sails, a mast, hull and rudder.

In this video, the Windex is seen to spin around and around. Imagine what our sails would do in those conditions. They flog back and forth. If the main sail is up, the boom flogs from side to side. It is very tiresome and it is hard on the equipment. It wears boat things out, and it wears out the crew too.

In reality, what is happening is that as the boat rocks in the waves, the top of the mast is waved back and forth. The waving motion is faster than the wind speed, so the Windex arrow flops like a flag on the end of a waving stick. For Tarwathie, we usually need more than 10 knots of relative wind speed to overcome the rocking action.