Day 3 Saturday 19th Nov
Where to start?
We blew the cruising chute :(
We were flying along on the cruising chute last night - we had figured out earlier where the rips were coming from, and had repaired (badly, but best we could do) a third one. The wind was rising so we were mid-discssion after dinner about when exactly we'd take it down and go white sails for the night, and then midway between a WHOOSH and a BANG, down it came of its own volition, in quite a few pieces. We managed to get it back into the boat, and We tried to stuff it back in its sock, but that just turned into a giant boat-sized game of cats cradle in the dark, so we stuffed it in a locker and said we'd have a proper look tomorrow in daylight.
Then tomorrow happened.
I was woken at 7am to find Conor with his head down the loo (almost literally), as Dermot was required as an able assistant to try and fix whatever had caused a fatal blockage in the toilet system. Yuck!! I gratefully legged it up to the wheel and took over, and watched as the two of them grappled with whatever plumbling goes on in there. Disgusting job, and fair play to the two of them for tackling it. Unfortunately the loo is still non-operational - not sure how permanent the fault is (or even what the fault is) but 12 days without a loo is a fairly depressing prospect!
Meanwhile up top, the weather Gods had decided to have a hissy fit. It was hammering down rain - Biblical-style - and blowing 20+kts. This must be one of the famous squalls that they spent so long warning us about in Las Palmas! Sure enough the wind had changed direction, meaning that for the moment we had to sail further upwind which made things a lot more rock'n'roll. It calmed down for a while, but as I'm typing the wind is back up again and there's no sign of the sun anywhere to be seen. I had shot out of the bunk to take over from Dermot so just stuck all my wet gear on over the PJ's - next time this happens I'm going to put my togs on and bring out the shower gel - make the most of the free fresh water!
We've just done our radio net hour, and it's cheered us up considerably! We seem to have almost drawn level (as we head west) with the back markers of the fleet, and we made great progress yesterday, until the spinny calamity (thankfully we still have another full spinnaker, but I think we'll have to excercise a bit more discretion in its use, or we'll start running out of sails!!!)
By the way, if anyone who's reading this wants to send us an encouraging email or news (only good news, please! We've enough bad news of our own to be going on with!) then we can receive emails on
[email protected] (don't send pictures or any big files! text is fine though). Conor sends a big shout out to all our younger followers, especially Mark Dempsey from Barna in Galway - Any other young (or otherwise!) followers of the blog out there let us know who you are!! And feel free to send us any questions you have - answering will help take our minds off this MISERABLE weather we're having!!!
From a dripping Endeavour - over and out!