Moondancer of Cala D'or - Log Day 4 First time aloft at sea

This our first ARC log, we had a dramatic start where we were placed by Andrew very neatly on the line in a reasonably sized hole between some very large boats, (think large Oysters) a hole that was large enough for a cat to sail through going the other way! but after that it just kept shrinking.  Fortunately it never got less than about two feet, well not much less, but there was too much going on to the capture the moment on camera. Well today we set yet another first for us on this adventure Fiona volunteered to go up the mast to retreive a halyard, we have another spare, but we realised that we should do this while we had good conditions rather than wait until essential. Fiona happy 2  All now safely retreived, spinnaker up and making some reasonable progress in fairly light air. read more...

Moondancer of Cala D'or - Moondancer too much excitement in one go.

After a dorado yesterday we were keen to be fishing again, and were somewhat delayed this morning by the minor matter of getting our spinnaker up. The boat was settled down and the rods out, twenty minutes later I noticed our duogen, jumping around and saw that it had picked up a large rope, two seconds later both rods went off with a double strike. We lifted the duogen and saw that the rope was streaming from behind the boat, it had just been knocking the duogen. We also saw that it was no ordinary rope but a six inch anchor warp. So we had two fish on and had a potentially serious problem with the rope. We got the 40 feet of trailing rope in the boat with the other end still attached somewhere underneath and I was ready to let the fish go when Andrew said no, he had control of the. read more...