Ruby Rose - Day 12- Half-way!!

Yee-haw, we’re over half-way!   We passed this exciting milestone at about 6am this morning, and are todaycelebrating with fish and chips for lunch (the chips part of things being everso slightly fraught with danger in this rolly swell, but Nick seems to bemanaging with only a minimal number of oil burns) and steak for dinner, completewith a (small) glass of red.  However, even though we’re half-way in terms of miles, we think we’reprobably over half-way in terms of days spent at sea, our rationale being thatwe’ve used so little diesel so far that we’re not going to be shy about puttingthe engine on to keep our speed up if the winds drop off again.  But no need to worry about that just yet- we’re sailing along at 7 knotswith a couple of reefs in at the moment, which is. read more...

Ruby Rose - Day 9- Settling into life at sea

The last few days have given us much lighter winds and we’re takingadvantage of the calm conditions to get some jobs done, catch up on sleep andcook up some delicious meals.  We’ve tried a variety of sail configurations over the past few days to tryand keep us heading in the general direction of Saint Lucia. Our Parasailor hasbeen up a couple of times when the winds get above 10 knots or so, and inlighter winds we’ve had the code zero out, which served us fairly well. However,we’ve not been able to avoid turning the engine on a few times.   We’ve been heading further south over the past few days to take advantageof the wind angle- what little wind there is- and because our GRIB files showthat there should be a return of the trade winds infilling from the south onTuesday. We. read more...

Ruby Rose - Day 6

Greeting from Ruby Rose,   750 miles from Las Palmas and we spent this morning preparing for a day ofloafing around and reading. we’ve had a couple of lazy days getting us back intosteady sleep patterns..   Firstly, our watt and sea generator isn't working properly. We think its awiring problem, and so we will rewire it tomorrow and see what the news isthere. Its a conduiting job which i hate. Never tried it at sea , so there's funand games to be had there.   In other news: we stupidly took the advice from Tomas from Parasailor aboutour spinnaker halyards. He advocated a crane and block, not our system that hasworked flawlessly for 3 years. So off we trotted to Rolnautic  (AKA therichest man in Spain) and purchased blocks and shackles.  Anyway, wehoisted the. read more...

Ruby Rose - Day 5- Rock 'n' Roll

Yep, it’s all about rock and roll on yacht Ruby Rose- and not in a goodway.  Swell and a constant 20-25 knots, gusting 30, has made life on Ruby Roseever so slightly tedious. Dare I say it, but these are not the conditions Isigned up for! Especially since Nick and I are very much ‘fair weather sailors’!No-one on board has been getting any decent sleep, and meals have been a bit hitand miss in terms of quality. Not easy producing a gourmet feast when you canbarely keep your footing in the galley!  However, I’m thrilled to announce that this morning has heralded a changein the weather. The swell has reduced markedly and the sun has come out, soeveryone’s in shorts and t-shirts for the first time since leaving Las Palmas!John and Neil are already on their second books- not sure. read more...

Ruby Rose - Day 3- Brisk start to the ARC

Hello from Ruby Rose!   What a start! As I’m sure everyone else is reporting, conditions werelively for the first day of the ARC. Swell was pretty big (I couldn’t tellexactly how big- maybe 10 metres at times) and we got some excitement looking atthe speeds we were doing as we surfed down the bigger waves. Our previous recordwas 11.5 knots- well, we smashed that with a whopping 15 knots! We chose to gooffshore to avoid the worst of the acceleration zone, but not sure howsuccessful this was: we still had gusts of 40 knots within the first few hours.Unfortunately, we lost an avocado, a couple of mandarins and a mango off theside, probably joining a fruit medley from many other yachts who didn’t securetheir netting quite tightly enough! Far more tragic was the loss of our bean bagover. read more...