Norwegian Steam: Noon Report -- Kauai

Monday, July 23, 2012

Noon Report -- Kauai - Neah Bay, Day 11

For the last two days, I have been unsuccessful in making any connection to Sailmail. Those of you familiar with High Frequency radio, the technology used by Sailmail, know that in the frequency range assigned (2 MHz -- 30MHz) successful communication at any given moment is almost entirely dependent on the reflectivity of the ionosphere, which changes constantly. I hope that the problem is just the ionosphere and not something gone wrong with the transceiver, the antenna tuner, antenna conections, etc. You may read this post as early as this evening or you may not be able to read it until after we get to Neah Bay and get a WIFI connection. I wish I knew. In any case, I will continued to write these daily reports, queue them up for transmission, and hope for the best.

Pete Libbey brought stuff to bake bread along on the Mexico-to-Hawaii voyage, but never got the opportunity to bake anything given that being on watch 50% of the time left little time for much else. Pete generously left his bread kit behind. Two days ago when we were nearly becalmed and again today when we are not, Jean has used Pete's sour dough bread mix to bake bread in the pressure cooker. Delicious. Thanks Jean! Thanks Pete!

I had been hoping for wind to carry us north through the space temporarily vacated by the high, and today we got it. The wind had been building all day, but by 10 at night it had gotten to be too much for the yankee, which was the only sail we had up. I called the crew on deck and we brought the yankee down, alright, but when we tried to hoist the staysail in its place, we found that the sheets had gotten very fouled up. It was too dark to straighten this out, so we sailed the rest of the night under bare poles, averaging 3 and half knots. Rangval could not keep the boat going straight, so Jon and Jean spent the rest of the night in the cockpit, each steering for an hour and a time and trying to sleep in the cockpit when not steering. At first light, we raised the storm jib and have been sailing that way ever since.

At UTC 2200, July 23, 2012, we are at 40 49.929 N, 156 51.165 W. Our day's run was 94 miles.

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Norwegian Steam, the vessel

Norwegian Steam is the name of our 35' sailboat. She was designed by Ted Brewer. About 40 hulls were constructed by Miller Marine on Bainbridge Island, Washington between 1976 and the early 1980s. It is rumored that additional hulls were constructed in eastern Canada. Because many of these boats were completed by owners, there is a very great diversity in the fleet. To learn more about the basic design, you can find information about Ted's Jason design on his web site.

NS was completed by Alan with the help of friends, some of them professionals, over many years. She has been sailing since 2001. She differs from most (perhaps all) other instances of the Jason design in that her mast is 6 feet taller and she is rigged as a racing cutter, with large overlapping staysail. This rig design was inspired by the work of John Illingworth, the great English yacht designer and sailboat racer.

Norwegian Steam, the name

The phrase, Norwegian steam, may originally have been somewhat pejorative. When a vessel was powered by sails or by oars instead of by a steam or diesel engine, it was said to be powered by "Norwegian steam", the implication being that the Norwegians were so poor they could not afford engines for their boats. As time passed, the Norwegians themselves adopted the phrase to indicate a "can-do" attitude or doing whatever it takes to get the job done, even with limited resources or under adverse circumstances.

During the great era of America's Cup racing in J-Class yachts, the term took on a slightly different meaning. Many of the American defender boats had Norwegian crews and thus were said to be powered by Norwegian steam. A website has been dedicated to this bit of history.