Cassini's blog - Blog#48 The Rally ramps up

Blog#48 The Rally ramps up

Cassini's blog

Simon and Sally, Nigel and Catherine

Mon 30 Oct 2023 13:23

The Rally ramps up...

Since Sally and Catherine left for the UK on Tuesday last week, we’ve continued with some of the boat jobs that need to be ticked off before we leave Las Palmas on Sunday, and joined in with fellow ARC+ crews as the party really ramps up ahead of the Rally start on November 5th.

World Cruising Club are fully operational in the marina now; their distinctive yellow shirts can be seen everywhere on the waterfront. Once we managed to get the boat officially checked in on Wednesday, we were given our date and time for the full Safety Check. It’s something all participating yachts have to do before they can leave on the Rally. A mixture of showing the staff that you have all the various man-overboard devices, flares, radio beacons and lifejackets etc for the boat and all the crew is combined with a conversation about how you plan to be safe and manage emergencies.

We were provided with plenty of checklists in advance, to help prepare and to ensure we’d got all the right kit before we left UK. Nigel and I had done a full muster in Gosport before we left, so we felt quietly confident, and thankfully it all went off without a hitch. We were congratulated on our thoroughness, but I honestly hope that we’ll never need any of the kit for more than an exercise.

The grand parade of sailors took place yesterday with everyone walking behind their respective national flags. It was quite a spectacle and very noisy with Samba and Brass bands.

There are still some jobs that we’ve been ticking off. The biggest of these has been addressing the creaking and clicking noise in the rigging. Domingo from the local rigging company arrived to take a look on Wednesday, and after some banging and thumping of the shrouds, looking up and down the mast, he couldn’t really see anything wrong. We arranged for a test sail with him to try and replicate the issue. Of course, once we were out on the water, and in fairly perfect sailing conditions, the mast and rigging behaved perfectly! Domingo suggested some changes in any case which he made the following day, giving us more balance in the tension on the two fore sails and compensating with some further changes in the shrouds and back stay. Fingers crossed there will be an improvement and the strange noises are gone for good. Having done something rather than nothing to the rig, I feel at least that we are more likely to have cured the issue than if we just left it and ‘hoped’ all was well.

Chatting to Domingo while he was going about his work, it turns out he’s a bit of a legend in these parts. He was an olympic gold medalist from Barcelona - his picture is on the wall in the very posh yacht club here. He competed in two different Olympics in two different classes of boat, was part of the Spanish Admiral’s cup team for some years, and today sails with a group of friends on 45ft racing yacht in which they are current King’s Cup champions. He’s quite a guy!

Ronan our Doc for the trip joined us on Friday and was immediately set to work helping to repair a tear in the main sail bag (sewing is after all one of his specialities as a surgeon!), and adjusted all the main sail battens which had variously worked themselves a bit lose over the last 2000 miles.

This week, we’ve got to finalise all the provisioning and get it all variously vacuum-packed, frozen down, washed (in the case of fresh fruit) and stowed away. There are a series of seminars to attend tomorrow, ranging from how to manage emergencies to satellite communication. There’s even one on fishing. The skippers briefing is on Saturday and includes weather and routing advice. Everyone here will be watching the forecast over the next few days though and hoping for the trusty Trade Winds to push us quickly on down to Mindelo in Cape Verde.

Simon