Day 56 - Leg 4 Day 8 at Sea 'Sails, battens and Rolling Seas'
Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Wed 19 Aug 2015 17:47
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We had a couple of great days sailing with just the
genoa. However, this meant that it was almost 2 days before the wind
died down enough for us to unfurl the mainsail to check it over. The good
news was that the mainsail looked fine. The downside was that, as we
couldn't put any mainsail out to counterbalance the waves, we have had a couple
of days of rolling which makes everything difficult from cooking, sleeping,
showering or simply moving round the boat. It is times like this when a
man has got to sit down to pee - it is either that or clean the
heads!!
We disassembled the vang and it was pretty obvious that
the gas strut inside had failed. We have ordered a new one which Jane will
bring out next week. This should be an easy fix.
On the other hand, we have broken another batten and
there is another small tear in the mainsail, so we need to figure out when we
are going to fix this. It looks as though the stitching has come undone
between 2 battens. Unfortunately, as we have been sailing in warm climates
for much of the past 5 years, UV does an awful lot of damage to the boat, and
sail stitching is one of the areas that seems to suffer the most
damage.
We caught our biggest fish to-date, a tuna weighing in
at 17.3 KG which is a pretty decent size. We will put the fishing rod away
until we depart for Cape Town as the freezer is now full!!
There have been a few individual sightings of whales
but, until it has been seen by at least 2 people, it doesn't
count!!
Apart from that, we are now around a day from the South
African coastline, which means that we are a day from the Agulhas current which
means that, although we have completed the long offshore part of this leg,
we now need to be more careful in monitoring the weather as the next 6 days is
potentially the most challenging section of our entire trip from Oz to the UK,
due to the rapidly changing weather patterns and strong currents.
More about this in the next post.
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