38.54.83N 001.27.30E

 

Arrived Ibiza and anchored about 11:00 Saturday, so just a tickle over 3 complete days at sea.

 

Every so often I reread my blog postings and think gee I ought to proof read these things and then I think hey I said that last time, and then I simply admit that I’m too lazy.  Anyway did anyone else notice the pun?  Deliberate of course, about being wrapped with our bimini, lol, clever eh!.  Rapt!

 

So 3 days on passage, mixed bag of weather and a bit more motoring than we wanted but here safe and comfortable.

 

The kids were fantastic, school every day, no squabbles, dishes done and they even did some baking for us, love them!   If only they’d be that good all the time.

Cornflake and nut slice on the way.

 

Spinnaker up, so with the wind right behind again at 10-15 knots we opted for the Parasailor.  Clever these sails see they have a red strip down one side and a green down the other so you can’t fly it backwards.  But hey this is a symmetrical sail so that can’t make any difference except a backward logo or something.  Ah, right, the something...  See a Parasailor is a pretty special piece of kit, in the middle it has a kite (like kiteboarders use) and there’s a big hole in the middle to let the wind through to fill it.  See the kite helps keep the sail filled in the lulls and gives added stability and the slot gives the big gusts a handy escape route.  Once it’s up it’s is the kite in the middle needs to fly out the front, down she comes, two red ships left port, red on the left up she goes again an looking very nice this time.  We are really pleased with ourselves, in all the time on Moxie 1 we never bothered with the spinnaker because it lived in one of the girls cabins at the back, was usually covered in other stuff, didn’t really fit through the cabin door without being unpacked and was quite unwieldy to lug up to the bow.  Now she lives in the anchor locker and we have about 200 square feet of trampoline area to sort everything out, plus with a 24 foot beam we don’t need to bother with a pole.  A good but short lived start as the wind came round and it was approaching dusk.

 

Parasailor in action, please someone buy me a bigger one you can even have your logo on it, how about a nice big green Becks Beer Parasailor.. please...  I’ll even product place for photos and stuff like that.

 

8:00am Denise went off watch for a sleep and the wind was behind, she’d be well impressed to get up and see the spinnaker flying I figured and single handing it can’t be that hard right.  So anyway I get everything set up, sheets out (red port), guy lines attached up the halyard she goes, all looking good, off with the snuffer.  Right now there’s a few things that need to happen in a hurry, trouble is I’m on a dog leash, it gets me to within 3 feet of where I need to be for 30 seconds and I keep forgetting so coming to an abrupt halt I have to backtrack get the new lifeline clip on, unclip old one, fiddle, back to old clip swap over fiddle more, back to helm – caught short gain yanked back, swear, swap to 3rd clip back to helm, unclip down to winch at stern, winch sheet in, flog flog flog goes the tangled blue mess at the front, swear, clip on and back to mast head, now the bow – yank, swear, bloody dog leads! swap clips, stand Titanic style at bow to admire flogging blue hourglasses above – Uh bugger, admit defeat, back to mast, yank , !!##, swap clips, down with snuffer, jammed, back to stern undo sheet, back to mast, snuff sail, down halyard, de rig, drag all back to cockpit.  Spend next hour untangling 140sqm of nylon cloth and string.  Drag all back to bow, 2nd attempt – I’ll spare you the details but you can reread the above if you like – dejavu.  Denise got up after 3 hours kip (somehow despite the comedy happening on deck), she finds me a little short of breath, a lot short of patience and the spinnaker in its bag again and in tangled mess again. 

 

Untangle number one

 

 

3rd time lucky, good god it’s nice to have my best mate to help.  Up she went around lunch time and stayed there till 8am the next day.  One thing we learnt from the spinnaker experience is that the navigation light that I had moved forward because it was placed to not give the correct beam on visibility is now very susceptible to whipping sheets so we had to do a Blue Peter with whatever we could find and lashings of sticky tape to make a new lens cover.

 

We’d been getting the odd hit on the rod with a givaway single click from the reel but no fish, probably little guys that are just having a go but are too small for our hook size we thought.  About 9pm spinnaker still up we finally hooked one, I got Asia up out of bed to help and we landed a nice 3.7kg tuna.  note (3.7kg tuna seem to have about 4 gallons of blood and it goes everywhere)!  Fish passified, I spot our health and safety approach to fishing may have hindered the catch rate.  See fishing with nasty sharp hooks on a moving vessel would clearly be quite dangerous so one must prevent the possibility of any nasty incident by sheathing the point and barb, luckily enough they come packaged this way right from the factory.  This time Denise can’t sleep through the fun and comes up to see Moxie painted red and immediately sets to with sponge, soon enough we are back to a less slaughterhouse looking pale pink.  Seawater wash down hose at cockpit on the to do list.

 

When photographing fish they always look best held closer to the camera than the fishermen are.

 

Health and safety and tuna conservation department approved hook.  Mind the mess.

 

Sushimi and school

 

Fresh 1.5 inch thick tuna steaks on the barbie, am I happy?

 

 

Dinner time.

 

8am exactly the wind simply stopped and the Parasailor collapsed, it had been flying OK in just 8 knots for a quite a while but progress was slow.  After a few hours of motoring a light wind came in on the beam so we got out spinnaker number 2, the big red asymmetric.   Hoisting it went well but eventually once the wind came round too much on the nose getting it down was a different story.  Lots of flogging ropes and sail, running around and even a go at purse seine fishing we wrestled it back aboard and stuffed the soaking and tangled mess back into the bag.  Trouble is there is no snuffer with this sail, what I have invested in though is a furler so once that is rigged us I expect we’ll be flying the red one quite often, and essentially, single handed furling will be possible.

 

With the weather as it was there were quite a few spells of Mediterranean rig but then we noticed a disturbing vibration on the starboard side, something is amiss with the propeller so we were reluctant to use the engine.  When motoring we run on just one side to save fuel, and the port engine felt fine but having previously thrown a blade suspected due to electrolysis and combined with our missing anodes it seemed prudent to take a look rather than chance wrecking the other propeller.  So once the daylight and becalmed opportunity arose I went swimming 30 miles offshore.  Comforting to know that land is actually only 1500 metres or so away?  Timing was not ideal as there were jellyfish everywhere but thankfully it only took a couple of minutes to clear the weed (bamboo roots?) from around the prop.

 

As we sat eating dinner in the cockpit an enormous sunfish swam past about 10 metres off the boat, his big grey fin looking dangerous protruding from the water until the tell-tale lazy side to side flopping confirms that he’s no shark.

 

So, another great passage on Moxie and all the sails used, still a lot to learn about this new boat though.