Monday 11 Jan 2016. After petty much motoring all the first night, we
had enough wind at 07.00 yesterday morning to pole out the genoa and enjoy drama
no. 1. As we were unrolling the genoa with the sheet, i.e. now the guy
through the end of the pole, there was a big bang as the mast end of the pole
detached itself from the mast but pulling out the screws holding the goose neck
fitting to the plate on the traveller. We are not entirely
sure why this happened, but the pole was promptly taken down and we went back to
slow progress under mainsail alone, while we set up a different sort of fixing
to the plate, involving a cargo strap and some dyneema. This was
successful enough to carry the poled out genoa until the wind became very
variable during the night with anything from SE to ENE and steering became too
challenging to keep the jury rigged attachment on the mast without high risk of
further damage. We made rather slow progress under main alone with the
staysail sheeted in to minimise rolling, but we would rather keep the goose
winging for the daylight when steering is much easier and the risk of putting
excess strain on attachment much less.
At about 7.00 this morning, we gybed and set up a new attachment for
carrying the pole on the starboard side and set up for drama no. 2. As we
were winching out the again, the load on the winch suddenly increased and there
was another bang as the guy flew out of the turning block leading it to the
cockpit winch. Luckily only the block was damaged and this was quickly
replaced by a spare and the genoa set on the starboard side, pushing our speed
up towards a consistent 7 knots. Definitely a lesson to be learned about
not just looking forward during winching with an electronic winch and not to
continue winching as the winch gives its “I’ve got a very big load here” noise,
regardless of whether there is an obvious reason or not.
So now we are running on the starboard gybe, with the wind being a little
unkind and settling more on ESE than the E which what we had at the start of the
exercise. As we are to port of our course at the moment and with the
current making this leading tack, we will continue on this gybe and hope for a
bit of a northerly that might or might not materialise.
Now the sun is shinning, the sea is blue and there are lots of flying fish
and the odd bird keeping us company. There are no other boats in sight,
but from today’s roll call and position reporting on the SSB, there are several
boats not that far away. The Ship’s Boy is now suffering from fish envy
after hearing the roll call and our line has been put out. Not sure
whether we really want to catch something, as the Ship’s Boy is down below
reading and none of the rest of us has ever caught anything bigger than a
mackerel, so we are quite nervous about how we are going to deal with it,
plus the Skipper hates having blood and scales on the deck and got quite
agitated when we caught a small fish off Guadeloupe 2 years ago!
Alcedo