Simon Says Wait For It
Catmojo
Matt
Tue 9 Jun 2020 23:16
Simon Says we have to tack towards Lanzarote sometime, but not too soon. If we turn too soon it'll go to rats, no wind and all dreadful. Whereas tacking at the right moment will be Much Better. Obvious I suppose. Tomorrow the wind turns from SSE (as it was all day), back to the East or SE, direct from Lanzarote. In fact it just did that right now. So we can sail north-to-northwest, or south-to-southwest for a while. Hm. Simon is forgetting Mr and Mrs Yanmar are waiting in the wings to plough straight ahead and rumble away until the Right Moment, and off we go. Much easier than the sailing malarky.
I wrecked the first reefing line. Dang. Well, it kinda wrecked itself I suppose although Anna did point out the issue a week ago and I said Oh It'll be Fine, and obviously it wasn't, dang. So I can't blame Anna, not really. Except I suppose she COULD have said Oh No it WON'T be okay Matthew! - and she didn't! And now this! Tsk!
The reefing line (which holds the back of the sail a bit lower than normal) goes through a plastic pulley on the boom that has been made or fitted by a slightly-muppety engineer - the pulley wheel is too deeply-grooved, or it was until the edges got ripped off as there is sideways force on it - the line goes on to route through another pulley/shackle not quite in line with the pulley wheel. Deep-grooved pulley wheels are great fun to make on a lathe, but with any sideways force the edges get broken off, and then the sharp edges left over eventually saw through the line. The pulley wheels should have shallower grooves and hence stonger shoulders. Fortunately I know an ace engineer in Lanzarote who knows all about this sort of thing and much more. We'll have to use the second reef overnight (but which gives a too-much-smaller sail and slower speed) until we can get to the boom safely and rig something temporary for first reef line.
8pm local: So what with the mad sailing speed with full sail, and the busted reef1, we put in two reefs and are motorsailing towards Horta, ready to turn right when Simon Says.
Sam is very into the sailing thing, and might think about doing Yachtmaster qualifications so he can rent boats and so on. I asked him to tell me the location of a waypoint the other day and he said it was at "35degrees North and 30inches". That's "minutes", Sam, not inches. He'll be fine.
Ampi asks that we remind everyone that the messaging system sends a limited number of characters. In some operating systems it automatically send two messages as 1/2 and 2/2 but for Ampi's Mum in Argentina it doesn't. Ampi has several messages that end "and don't forget to" or "and please tell Matt that h". Maybe use Google Chrome to fix this, or another option might be to