Frankensails 9th day and he has a brother...
It’s been some days since you’ve heard from us @teamtigress. This isn’t because we haven’t wanted to write but due to the sheer exhaustion of sailing and having no time on our hands.
Skipper Sue here....
An initial decision to go north ultimately meant we were forced south due to the more southern passage of the low pressure system that affected the northern sectors of the grid last week. Initially heading into this to then tack and come down with more favourable winds we somewhat inconveniently at this time seriously ripped our mainsail with a full leech to luff seam tear above either of the reefing points. This forced us to take the sail down and dramatically slowed us down meaning we couldn’t stay north and had to get south to evade some big winds and big seas on the beam. For three days we had the tri sail and small jib up while we tried to repair the main passing some big squall banks day and night. Our progress will have seemed very laboured as we tried to get south heavily under powered.
Tigers and tigresses as you know have fight in them and despite the heavy weather and our lack of main sail we worked our way through. By Saturday conditions started to subside and Willie and I set to a proper repair to the main. The main is now up in the sky again FRANKENSAIL 2 IS BORN.
On Sunday we saw flat seas and light winds and the boat had a domestic clear up with sheets and mattresses out and aired and a welcome break from having to hold on to everything to get anywhere on the boat or have goggles adorned to go on deck.
We are now down at latitude 19 and finally heading west with our S4 spinnaker zipping along in 15-18knts of following breeze.
The crew are settling Into the systems aboard, for some it has been hard, for others easy. We have three great day time spinnaker drivers in addition to the full timers. Joel, Gonzalo and John have all shown some excellent talents in this department which gives us a little break during the day.
An instalment here from John:
New observations from John
1. However hard you try you can’t destroy sails
2. As a Brit you can convert any nationality to tea (minus the French)
3. Finland has over 100,000 islands (about 200,000 lakes over 500 sq metres)
4. Squalls in the Solent have nothing on squalls in the Atlantic
More soon,
ARC Crew of @teamtigress 2017
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