Current position "19:30.9N 32:17.5W”. Reasonable progress by day and disappointing by night – the wind dies down. We’d do better with the spinnaker still up but we’re cautious about keeping it up at night lest we tear it in a squall – by the time one realises one’s going to get hit by a squall one may not have the time to get the spinnaker down (safely at night). We’re still doing well overall versus the fleet but falling behind the racing version of our boat, not unsurprising but we’d like to keep in touch.

 

Lots of other things to talk about. The principle one is most recent. Things got rather hot and slow this afternoon so we tried out surfing behind the boat. Graham, James & Byron had a good conversation about what could go wrong, principally that instead of surfing on top of the waves one goes down instead. So the technique was to go in feet trailing, holding on to the line ahead of you to keep your upper body above water. The back-up in case that didn’t work was for the crew to cut the line, turn the boat round and pick you up. All went great – and you can see from the attached Graham and then James and Byron trying this out, and then James getting a pic of the boat up ahead with just the spinnaker – but powering along at over 6.5 knots.

 

Meanwhile Chris had been dozing down below and heard all this commotion, came up and concluded he had to try it out after Byron. Unfortunately we hadn’t realised that Chris hadn’t been a party to our earlier risks discussion, so when he went in he did so by jumping off throwing his arms backwards – he immediately became an underwater torpedo being pulled by his waist and under a plume of water. We dropped him back to give him a chance to recover, which he partially did, but then he lost control again – so we cut the rope and initiated our man-over-board drill. Chris later expressed amazement that we had the spinnaker down and boat turning round within a couple of hundred metres. You can then see Chris being pulled back in using our man-over-board recovery line. All in all he was back in 10 mins from jumping off, but a good lesson for us in risks management, as well as man-over-board practice, or reality. Chris is feeling fine, but we’re watching him closely to make sure this is sustained.

 

Back to the more routine, Chris and Byron have been doing a nice job making the bench seat in the centre of the saloon better supported. We found there was some play in its base, which was addressed with new bolts being put in to the floor structure below. Similarly, some noise from the self- steering had Graham and Chris investigating in one of the cockpit lockers (see Byron’s pic) and finding some more to address there – all sorted now. James also did a top-of-the-mast check and found a bolt had come out fixing the block at the top of the spinnaker halyard. We dropped the spinnaker and James went back up to put this back and, hopefully, we’ve also fixed the root cause. See pic from the top of the mast...

 

So all back to normal, but clear we need to keep watching for things going wrong, whether reactively or proactively initiated.....