last day @ sea
Heerenxvii
Sat 11 Dec 2010 10:32
And here we are, without wind again :( motoring, 2000 revs a bit wobbly.
But the good news is that we had the PARASAILOR back up, and without any issue. This is quite a relief as we were pretty sure it was a mess inside the 'sock'. Hoisting it was easy, it did unfold beuatifully, and has given us an average speed of 7.5 knots out of an average 12 knots of wind, so pretty good.The only thing that has happened is that some pieces of the sail are 'burnt'. This is likely caused by the friction of forcing the sock down over the sail with brutal force when we ended up in a storm, but the sail itself is not harmed by these 'looks'. And maybe it was there already before, obviously we have been scrutinizing the sail layout.
E again almost got a fish, but this time the fish took all the gear except for the rod :) but we probably go eat out tonite to celebrate our arrival. In his efforts around fishing in general, E also managed to stick a pole in the steeringwheel. This is in itself no problem, except in those cases when the autopilot is on. Today was such a day, and the autolpilot failed as it was completely blocked rotating the steering wheel. But then E went investigating below decks and eventually smiled when he found and replaced a fuse. And talkign abot E and his activities, he discovered that 1 of the 4 PARASAILOR lines almost snapped. We had used this line as a preventer for the boom, but apparently it did shafe a lot, resulting in a big white plume popping out of the red line. E went in repair mode, looked up the perfect knot, sewed it together and then burnt the ends nicely. If you did not know better, this line looks like a line with a special feature :)
We put the clock back an hour, the last one, and we will therefore have no jetlag on arrival, other than lack of sleep in general. But sleeping is for nobody a problem on board, even in foul weather. if you are on deck it is sometimes hard to imagine how someone else can sleep with the boat moving so much, but apparently you adjust to that. Not sure what will happen next time I sleep in a normal bed, but after my previous trip I have been wandering in the house in the middle of the night, trying to find out who was on steering duty :)
After our happy hour, with extra consumption yesterday, we had again pizza this trip, self made, very nice and of course too much, but baking selfmade pizzas is certainly something we should do more often. Yummie.
St Lucia here we come, expected ETA 1300 local time, assuming the wind indicators in the grib file are correct and give us in a few hours 14 knots of wind again....