People think of the doldrums as an area of light or no wind (it can, indeed, be like this), but it is violently stormy, equally often, with wind from any direction. Moreover, it is not an evenly wide band stretching across the oceans just north of the equator as the school atlas shows. Rather it moves north in the northern hemisphere summer and south in winter; it is also T-shaped with the head of the T oriented north and south, giving a much thicker band at the eastern side of the great oceans.
We were sailing down the head of the T when things began to go wrong. The mainsail outhaul snapped; the frayed end disappearing into the boom – a quick fix was to put a reef in; as each reef point is in effect a separate outhaul – a more permanent solution was affected, during a lull, by feeding a spare length of rigging through the boom with a mousing line attached and reattaching a line.
The port genoa car snapped in two (the starboard one had broken on our previous passage to the Cayman Islands; at least this time the block did not hit me in the face). The headsail roller reefing, which had been allegedly fixed in Shelter Bay, jammed with the full sail out, not good with the wind gusting six to seven.
Risks and worries
It was too risky to keep the headsail out, so we performed the hard task of dropping it during a calmer moment. Progress would now be via
