Tuesday 6th January 2009
SPINNAKER TIME, MOVE OUT THE WAY YOU YANKEES!!
Overnight the wind dropped and yes you guessed it, the wind backed round to the South East. The wind does have a tendency to oscillate in direction and speed which is what we experienced approaching the east coast of South Africa and rounding the Cape of Good Hope (ooh we're such name droppers). But overall the wind dropped to about 8 - 13 knots by 0800. And that means only one thing on this boat. NO, NOT THE ENGINE TIME ! BUT SPINNAKER TIME!!
So up she went, 1500 square feet of red, white and blue lightweight nylon, newly stitched up from her previous melee with the wind. And boy she looks good, billowing out at the front of the boat, increasing our speed to 6.5 - 7.5 knots. But no sooner had she been hoisted and trimmed, the port side block, which the guy runs through, snatched in to the air having been released from the jaws of a shackle. We needed to take the tension off the spinnaker guy in order to reattach the fittings (readers when I say guy I mean a rope so please banish from your mind any thoughts of a handsome bloke, especially you ladies out there!). All done with nimble fingers and focussed minds within the space of 5 minutes.
The wind is picking up as I type this log and we're now cweaming along at 9.5 knots.
For the nerds out there, and you know who you are, the origin of the word spinnaker is a little unclear. There is a school of thought believing it to be a derivation of the term "spin-maker" but others believe it can be traced back to the yacht Sphinx, which was the first boat to set the sail, which was called a "balloon-jib" way back in the year 1866. That'll be the discussion over lunch then!
Gosh I'm boring, I'll sign off.
(Lindsey writes) I have sneaked onto the boat computer to write a few lines. JB is at this moment sitting on the aft deck with sextant in hand. She is taking sun sights which entails working out the altitude of the sun at a precise time. I, ready with pen and pad, quickly take down an accurate time from the GMT clock. The reason she is doing this is that in the event of a catastrophic melt-down of the GPS satellite we would be able to accurately plot our position in the ocean. So with times duly taken JB will than consult the nautical almanac and sight reduction tables to work out the position of the boat based on the geographical position of the sun. Alas, to explain how you arrive at the geographical position of the sun would take 4 days !! So I am not going there !!
Position @ 0700 utc 29.08S 11.52E