10 15S 131 00W
Libertyatsea10
Sun 11 Jul 2010 11:54
This is Liberty's favourite sea, dead flat. Light winds of 15 knots and off she goes.
Because she is rather rotund, once the sea gets choppy she tends to be pushed around a bit,
but this sea suits Liberty beautifully. For the first time ever, I took a book on watch last night and today had a five hour sleep.
Tonight we watched L o t Rings part two. It all gets a bit much after the first two hours but Benj. is really enjoying it.
Regina is only 200nm from Fatu Hiva so we have sent on our order for barbecue so it will all be ready when we get there, if it is raining I will scream.!
If it stays like this we will spinnaker tomorrow. I love seeing the big blue sail flying, Johan and I always opt to get the spinnaker out, when conditions allow, Graham and Jeurgen
tend to vote for the reading and cooking option as you cannot do both at the same time on Liberty, so they quite like to goose wing. Usually I call in the SKippers vote, and they very good naturedly, get the spinnaker out. It does involve a lot of jumping around the foredeck but we are not bad at it for a bunch of old cruisers.
The sock (which looks uncannily like the long ,thin, nappy sacks that came in that bucketty thing for "hygenic disposal of your babies nappies" and very useful they were too!), well the sock is a godsend, it makes the spinnaker possible, whereas before ,it was a nightmare, I recall, getting the thing up the mast and flying was one performance and then one spent the whole time it was up there with one's heart in one's mouth waiting for the blustery swearing session whilst it came down like a flying heebee jeebie, making pirouettes around the forestay and diving into the briny whilst pulling the whole boat over on a broach. Then, finding its way under the keel and hey presto, a couple of sheets round the propeller and the sail in tatters....
Then there was always the couple of hours afterwards while folks counted their bruises and rope burns and silently blamed each other for getting it wrong and the berating by the racing Skipper which took on torturous proportions. It often took a number of hours in the nearest hostelry and copious amounts of the local brew to bring everyone together in a slurring, sloppy mess and all was forgiven until the next spinnaker hoist! Happy Fastnet memories!
If anything in the world will force a team to "storm" it is taming the spinnaker (without a sock of course) . The spinnaker sock might be responsible for sailing world peace, if only such a device existed for the rest..
.xxx