Walvis Bay is at about 250 miles from Luderitz and we decide to leave early in the morning to be sure to arrive in day time at the new anchorage. The weather forecast is good with wind and wave from the back and we all really want to sail the new asymmetric spinnaker.
It does not take long to have the perfect conditions to hoist it. I am the only one on board that hoisted it before with the help of three people from the sail maker with plenty of experience with it.
The passage is very comfortable and fast, we soon sail for quite long time at over 10 knots speed and often at 12-13 knots sometimes going faster than the apparent wind. It was amazing to go so fast while remaining flat on the sea. Broad reach is clearly the best wind direction for Eidos.
Being our second passage with Eidos we are still learning how to simplify all the manoeuvres and we often have to experiment new setups. We are finally happy with the setup of the mail sail preventer, we replaced two shackles with snap shackles to move lines faster and added redundant soft shackles for safety. We are also happy with the process to take a reef and go back to full sail with wind from the back without having to go into the wind, it works nicely as they told us – I was quite sceptical about it. We still need to practice with the spinnaker; with 20-25 knots of wind we were four people to hoist and lower it. I hope we will manage to use it also when we are just two, at least with light winds
We drop the spinnaker in the afternoon as the wind becomes stronger and the boat is going too fast, the gps registered 17 knots speed. We continue with only the main sail with on reef for all the night still maintaining a good average speed.
The second day the wind gradually drops and we go up to full main and genoa keeping our average speed above 8 knots. We have to change course to avoid a cargo ship and before arriving the wind dropped further, we motor for the last few hours and anchor in front of the Walvis Bay Yacht club around 4pm. Just in time for a cold beer.
We heard that at the anchorage the wind can be very strong, so we drop more than 40 meters of chain in less than 4 meters of water to be safe, we plan to move to a mooring buoy the next day.