Mrs. G - 1000 miles done

Mrs.G 1000 miles report

After crossing the 1000 miles line today in the morning it is time for
Mrs.G and her crew to give a short report about how it went until now.

We are on an Amel 60, a double handed crew, or better in the manner of
knowing what and how to do a single handed one :-)

Our Mrs.G is rather new - although scheduled to be taken over in April
2020, we, thanks to all the Covid restrictions, managed to do so only in
April 2021.

All our plans changed because of Covid - there was no way to sail north of
La Rochelle in May this year.

Since we were in the last 20 years mainly
sailing in the Med, with shorter passages on the Atlantic coast and the
Caribbean, we decided end of May to sail from France to the Azores and
back to get the feeling for longer passages. Afterwards we knew that our
double handed passage to the Caribbean can start.

We have never sailed any race before; so already the start on Sunday was
„interesting“. We hardly found the starting line and an Amel is not a boat
for quick manoeuvres. And usually we try to avoid being in the middle of
the crowd with boats coming from everywhere around.

Soon after the start we heard a strange noise - and almost 100 meters of
anchor chain were in the water in less than 2 minutes. It took quite some
time to get it back on its place :-) Las Palmas was our first harbour
with Mrs. G with mooring lines. On an Amel 60 you need mooring winches to
deal with them properly. Our moorings winches are the anchor winches. And
we forgot to secure the anchor properly after leaving. Which is an
explanation, but no excuse :-)

We headed South (all the time beautiful sailing), but in the afternoon of
the second day all our data prognosed lots of diesel jib on that route. We
decided to follow the data, and turned and went northwest. Our gennaker
did an excellent job and we loved every moment for two days, until on the
fourth day at 16 hours it made „bang“ and the gennaker was flowing in the
water. The halyard was broken. It took us two hours to get the 230 square
meters of sail back on deck and in its place :-) And that was it with
downwind sail.

The feeling of knowing that we have no usable downwind sail any more
reduced our looking forward to be in the trade wind zone soon.

The evening
however brought the need to use a reefed genoa and we got 24 hours of
rough see, with the first squall, rain showers, loads of wind and a lot of
waves breaking on our deck.

The last two days we are having beautiful and fast sailing towards west -
with one more „small“ problem - our electrical port genoa winch broke. We
are now using the starboard one with the sheet crossing the cockpit - it
is a perfect place where to lean the wet cushions to dry .

At 10 o’clock this morning we passed the first 1000 miles on this trip. We
are looking forward to write our next report after making 2000 of them.

Sonja, Norbert and Mrs.G