“Friday night is Movie night”
14:59.50N 44:25.40W
Friday afternoon 11th January 2013. Day 13
As Tony has previously mentioned it came to that dreaded “engines on” time – yuck. Noisy, slight scent of diesel in the air, constant vibration – we’d much rather be sailing.
We did turn the engines off at about 6am, had the genoa out for a bit but the winds died back further so it was cruising chute time again – yay!
Winds really were very light only 5-9knots so it certainly wasn’t going to be too tricky getting the sail to behave. Ian and Tony donned their lifejackets and went up front to unpack the sail, Jane helmed so I sunbathed – I mean supervised.
The sail is attached to the bow of the boat via a short sheet and then another sheet is fed back through the fairlead via a cleat on the starboard side of the boat, I then passed it around the winch and the boys let the sail out of the snuffer. (To all you non-yachties out there, especially my Mum, a bit of rope is tied to the front and another length of rope goes down the right hand side of the boat through a bit of metal and to a winch next to where I sit). The sail inflated really well and pulled us along nicely at 5.5knots in about 6.5knots of wind. We did a bit of fiddling around, this seems to happen an awful lot, sails are being constantly tweaked depending on creases, flogging, flapping bending, being too baggy, not being baggy enough, honestly just pull them up and leave them!
The cruising chute behaved impeccably until the winds eventually died completely and we were struggling to maintain any speed so it got snuffed which was a damn sight easier than yesterday.
Sail nicely packed away in about 10mins, Jane conjured up a superb lunch and back to sunbathing! We have glorious weather at the moment, 32.1degrees clear sky and sunshine, sea temperature 32.3degrees, have to make the most of it though Tony downloaded a weather report and outlook is more light winds, cloud and the odd shower of rain.
Movie night tonight, watched Bernie last Friday – weird.
Love to all, and a belated happy birthday to my little sister, 41 eh?
Claire (competent crew with the certificate to prove it) xxx