Day 23 - Day 10 at Sea - Chicken Pie and Sails

Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Fri 17 Jul 2015 14:04
You will be pleased to hear that Ant's '24 hour chicken and leek pie was a great success last 2 nights ago. Also, we had a cracking sail overnight and were well on target for another 200 mile day.   Things were looking good.
 
I was off watch sleeping around 10 am, when there was a knock on the bedroom door.  The reason that Paul wanted me out of bed was to see a tear in the main sail, between the 2nd and 3rd battens, before we furled it away. I went to the stern to have a good look, at which point I noticed that we had a tear across the genoa, about 2/3rds of the way up.

We furled the main just past the 2nd batten, furled the genny away and put out the jib. We have gone from a boat with 3 sails, to one with a jib and a handkerchief of a main and our speed had dropped to around 5.5 knots.  After further consideration, we partially unfurled the genny, so we are sailing with the jib poled out on the starboard side, and heavily reefed main and genoa on the port side.  
 
I am pretty certain that the mainsail has simply unstiched down a seam between the 2nd and 3rd battens.  This is largely due to UV damage, and it a problem that we have encountered previously.  If this is the case, we should be able to repair that ourselves fairly easily, although it does involve removing the 5 battens, dropping the sail, taking it ashore in the dinghy, finding a suitable location that is big enough and flat enough to lay the sail out, restitch and tape the seam, check the whole sail for any other damage (UV or otherwise), take the sail back to the boat in the dinghy, hoist the sail and then replace the battens.  All in all this will take 2 of us at least half a day.
 
We then need to do the same with the genoa, but at least this doesn't have battens in which should make the dropping and hoisting easier.  The big unknown about the genoa is whether it is the stitching, or whether it has torn.  Either way, we need to repair the sail and, if it has torn, need to determine the reason for the tear eg is there something sharp on the forestay which has caused the problem?  this means sending somebody up the forestay to check it all out.  This will take us at least another half a day!
 
We do have a new genoa on board, as we have already had the existing one repaired, and I didn't want to set off on a 15,000 mile journey without a backup plan.  However, I don't want to risk putting up the new sail until we have checked that nothing is wrong with the forestay. Also, as the seas are quite rolly,  I don't want to send somebody up to check this out so it will have to wait until CK.  We are still managing to trundle along at 7kts in 20kts wind speed, so we will hopefully arrive Monday afternoon rather than Sunday afternoon.
Anyway, we have just had an extremely healthy lunch prepared by Sam, of pitta bread, hummus, guacamole, onions and tomatoes, I didn't know that they knew how to cook without lard or deep frying in Yorkshire. I have to say that it was extremely tasty!