33 04.22n, 09 37.12w

Libeccio
Tue 7 Oct 2014 18:28
In this edition: McGyver is back; the great Libeccio Bake Off continues; we introduce the music quiz.

Greetings!

As you can see from the map, we are making our way down the Moroccan coast having passed Casablanca last evening and in approx 3 hours we will have reached 295nm which is the half way mark to Lanzarote. We are also taking a much direct route to the Canaries as the weather so far has proven to be very comfortable as are the wind forecast for the next few days (famous last words??!). If we continue at our current pace we should arrive at Lanzarote on Friday. Depending upon the weather forecast, we may stop over night or keep going to Las Palmas, our final destination on this leg.

Our great hopes of gliding along under sail last night lasted until about 04:30 when the winds died down so that we were making less than 3 kn progress. Sadly, the iron wind lasted the better part of the day- despite our best efforts. You would think with such little sailing there is very little that could go wrong— well, you would be wrong. We had one line completely chafed through (connecting the tip of the square top of the main sail to the “cars”), one partially chafed (main sheet halyard) through and a broken batten connector (on the main sail) to show for very little sailing.

Inspired a little by a favourite programme when i was growing up— McGyver (sp?)— we managed to jury rig solution for the line completely chafed through which had threatened to put our main sail out of commission for the duration of the trip. Result! It is clear that the rigger in Las Palmas is going to get some work from the mighty Libeccio— we now need to replace the topping lift and the main sheet halyard. It is a bit perplexing to understand the reason for the main halyard chafing through as quickly as it is now given that we have had no problems in the almost 2,000 nm we have sailed this year. Much better to find this out now rather than half way across the Atlantic.

We did try to get out Izzy (our parasailor — or spinnaker with a hole in the middle of it)— but, the winds were too light to make her fly.. we are hoping that the winds freshen a bit (sailor talk for getting stronger— cool, eh) so we can make use of her over the next couple days.

I know you are waiting for the update on the Great Libeccio Bake Off (for those of you not in the UK, there is a baking competition called the Great British Bake Off)… building off the (near) success of the French bread from yesterday which took the better part of 4 hours, we (rather Jane) tried the ECO white bread recipe today— the appeal of this programme is that it takes less than half the time of the French bread. Voila, the bread turned out very nice indeed. It looks like the ECO programme has won the contest.

We managed to complete the repairs to the main sail just prior to dinner and so we raised it (with 2 reefs in just to be safe over night) and unfurled the genoa fully (it is quick and easy to reef if it gets windier than we expect). With the sails up, the engine was turned off and so we could enjoy our dinner listening to a play list from Spotify (thanks Kels).

Mike was the chef du jour (keeping the French theme going) and produce a piece de resistance (don’t worry I am going to run out of these soon) pour la diner cest sour (ok, so I had a couple more hidden way). It was a family recipe of chicken bake- obviously, chicken, penne pasta, bacon (Sean, you would approve, peppers (don’t tell Jane- she had these saved up for another meal), celery all with a chopped tomato sauce. Magnifique! (ok, that was the last attempt at the french theme).

As a treat we had apple pie that had been purchased in Gibraltar- very nice indeed.

The official sunset photographer for the trip, Andy, is busy capturing this evening’s edition as dusk approaches. The moon is already up and the debate over whether it is a full moon or not continues— can anyone help us out?

As we close the day, we are wrestling with many of the bigger unanswered questions in life— who performed “Marrakech Express”… if you could help us out it would be appreciated! No googling allowed! (we suspect Paul will get this easily).

Thanks to Lorraine and Diana for their emails— great to hear from you.

Hope you are well,



The crew of Libeccio