Today was a really good day. The wind and waves have moderated and we
took the opportunity to put up our angel. This is our beautiful
gennaker - you can see the design on one of the webpages. It took
some sorting out, getting all the right ropes in the right places and
we were distracted by a visit from a playful school of dolphins.
There were about a dozen of them - clearly the whole family was out in
force and they played beneath the boat for well over half an hour.
They were smaller than the dolphins we saw, a soft brown underneath
with long beak like snouts. We will have to check what kind they
were. They have inspired me to think of a story, particularly for
Grace and Angus about Dolly the Dolphin and I will send it separately.
The gennaker looks really fabulous and makes a lot of difference to
the speed. The wind direction has changed and Elemiah was not keen on
a dead run so we tacked down wind, sailing first to the south of our
course and then to the north. This was really exciting: the first
time that we had been on starboard tack since we left Canada, now
some 800 miles away.
We spotted a couple of problems: the staysail had a tiny tear in it
which Hannah cleverly repaired for us. The runners on the foot of the
mizzen had started to come away from the sail. I had noticed this
when it was very windy but that was not the time to do anything about
it. So Curtis and I hung out of the back of the boat and tied the
mizzen to the outhaul in a different way so that the load was taken
completely along the foot of the sail and not up vertically except
through the leach line. It took a lot of balancing, but was
successful. We will need to get the runners re-stitched in Horta if
possible.
We finished off a happy day with a meal of sweet sour chicken.
Rosemary and Ian
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