Friday 13th November:
Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Fri 13 Nov 2015 16:47
We had to motor-sail through much of the night as the winds were light, again avoiding shipping in the giant game of "chicken" (but it's one way to stay awake on the night watch!) but the early hours brought us some sailing at last.
However currently conditions are good and we've enough wind - top end of F4 / bottom end of F5 - from dead astern so we're going at a good pace but the boat is rolling and twisting in the swell. We're running with the jib poled out and the main lashed up with a preventer to stop an inadvertent gybe. However we had the yankee sheet to the pole rigged through the normal car on the starboard side of the boat and we noticed just after lunch that the starboard job sheet had almost chafed through on the broken edge of this car. Normally the position of the rope would not be an issue however with the pole pushing the rope sideways it's almost like a blunt knife has chomped through the sheet. We've now re rigged with a new sheet (stolen from the spinnaker) lead through the car as normal plus a guy. This goes by a different block (aka pulley) and the lead is fair and should be without chafe. James is kicking himself that he didn't rig it this way in the first place.
The old jib sheet is now useless for its original purpose: we'll have to hope that new can be obtained in Madeira or in the Canaries. The car also needs replacing but it's obsolete so we could have a fun time sourcing a replacement. It has been said that long distance ocean cruising is 'maintenance in paradise'!
We'll post pictures in port in a couple of days.
However all's now fixed for now and it's a lovely day out here. There really IS a colour of "Ocean Blue" and photographs don't seem to do it justice somehow; it's almost luminous in a way. The chart here off the coast of Portugal shows the topography of the underwater world below us. There are sea-mounts (underwater mountain peaks) with exciting names such as; Ormonde and Gettysburg, and other shallows which are called "banks, We are passing just S of Gettysberg sea-mount at the moment. There's also Unicorn, Lion, Josephine, Coral patch and other romantically named places as we head SW. We'd not realised how close some of the sea-mounts come to the surface, some to only 30m or so, rising from the abyssal plain at 3000m or deeper, so we hope for fish. The tuna fish lure is out, but so far no bites.