Robinson - Las Palmas Saturday 21th : Bits and pieces

Just a short note to inform all that we are doingwell and are almost ready for the big leap..   The odd little things that always remain on thetodo-list are the only ones left, so basically we're cool!   Looking forward to our journey.   Robin, Annika &Bojan Las Palmas. read more...

Robinson - Day 2: Almost eventful

After a light wind start yesterday, which made us look for free wind at the East side of the fleet, we sailed a number of lovely hours with 'Robby', our Parasailor. With increasing winds and a crew still needing slight adjustments to life at sea, we decided to go conservative and sail into the night with our white sails. We took a southerly course to avoid the lee of Gran Canaria. With lovely surfs once in a while and always some yachts or cargo ships around it was quite an enjoyable first night.Today we started playing around a little more. First a stretch straight downwind with only the genoa, still doing 8 kts. Then as the wind decreased we fiddled around more which led to us now sailing under full main with Gyb'Easy on, poled out full genoa, steered by 'Windy', our Windpilot. Apart. read more...

Robinson - Day 3: Parasailor Day

After the first days, which we spent adjusting to our 'new' roles, today was the day to seriously start playing with 'Robby', our Parasailor. During the course of the day we fiddled with all possible ways of sailing this beautifully stable spinnaker. Now, in the deep of night, we have settled on a somewhat complicated, but very stable, system: we have poled out the Parasailor on the spinnaker pole, which itself is kept in place by the usual topping lift and further by a forward and an aft downhaul. This gives us the freedom to ease or tighten the sheet without moving the pole. On lee, we have the boom out without the mainsail, but ready to roll the main out at any time to make a wind shadow if necessary. Then we have both luff sheets on the Parasailor from the bow plus a barber hauler on. read more...

Robinson - Day 4: Generator Day

As predicted yesterday, today was the day of generator repair. Quite a simple job if you have the water pump on your work bench on land, exchanging the impeller while surfing at 8 kts, hanging upside down in a hot and small engine compartment is a different cup of tea. Light, working position, ability to get your hands on the bolts, etc is all much more 'interesting' the way we had to do this simple job. Nevertheless, within an acceptable time frame of 1,5 hours the generator was smoothly running again. From now on we will take more precautions to make sure we don't let the pump run dry any more. All good now, batteries full and fresh bread in our automatic bread baking machine. For those of you unfamiliar with this device: you throw 1/2 a liter of water and bread mix in and push the. read more...

Robinson - Day 6: Tucanon Day

While the yeast situation continues, as does the zero count in freshly caught fish, our minds have been occupied with a little race within a race today. Notwithstanding the fact that the other yacht involved is a catamaran and therefore only distantly interesting for our own position, sailing within a maximum distance of 3 NM for over 36 hours brings to life racing spirits in the most laid back type of cruisers. 'Tucanon', a Lagoon 440, first appeared on our port quarters 2 nights ago and hasn't been out of our sight since. At first she appeared to slowly but surely sailing away from us, but then we decided we wouldn't want any of that, not on 'my watch'! Therefore we upped the efforts, pulled out the main next to our beloved Parasailor and put the pedal to the metal. This then proved to. read more...