Day 3
Shalan
Wed 23 Nov 2016 05:31
Good Evening all!
It's 4:30am here at time of writing on Wednesday morning.
Last night (Monday night) we had a lovely peaceful nights sleep. 5 knots of wind and we carried on through the night managing a speed of about 3 to 4 knots. It was flat calm and we had a very civilised dinner up top with a cold beer. Since leaving we have only used the engine for 30 minutes so thats really good. Our hairbrain idea of buying a projector to watch a film on the main sail could have been done last night, but sadly I ruled that expediture out in Las Palmas along with the harpoon. Due to my regret in ruling it out I now have a new nickname....Captain Hindsight!
The wind picked up this morning and we were stonking along with a dolphin escort for around 20 mins at 09:30. The main and code 0 hurled us along at about 10 knots for most of the day. We had to reef the main on a couple of occasions when the wind got up to 22 knots but apart from that it was great.
We had a few boats appear back on the AIS and enjoyed hunting them down all day. One of which was Lillith. Last time we heard from them was when they put a safety call out to say there was an object in the water and announced the coordinates of which was about 10 miles behind us. Yet somehow through the night they managed to leapfrog 20 miles infront.....we're guessing the diesel afterburners must have been on! Two other boats on the AIS in front were Fourth Dimension and Amoenitas. We were hunting them down to as they were doing about 7-8 knots. We overheard them on the VHF discussing how many engine hours they'd done up to now. Can't remember who said what but one said they had logged 18 hours and I think the other said that they'd done more. So considering our position we've done really well!
Tom shone in the kitchen today, serving up a lunch and dinner double header (cured meat sandwich for lunch, chicken fajita for dinner)both of which went down a treat!
Fish Update::: Still no fish, there's more in the med.
So we carried on into tonight chasing down the boats infront under main and code 0 averaging 10 knots. There was a fair bit of northerly swell which was bouncing us all over the place, so much so that Oli litterally dropped into my bed aftr the boat was on it's side.....bloody queer! We decided to gybe, head south and run with the swell. When we furled the code 0 the jammer broke so we were all hands on deck trying to get it down. Not sure what caused it to fail but the continuous line probably went back into the jam and snapped when furled it in on the winch. We thought we'd better check the furler to see if that was ok, and upon checking we noticed that the main shackle pin on the tack had come completely undone and was hanging on by millimetres. Had that gone we could have had the whole code 0 broke away with no tack which would have been a nightmare. So it was a blessing in disguise! The pin is bent on the shackle and we'll have to take a look in the morning to see if we've got any spares or if we can fix it. In the meantime we're now running under main and genoa and still achieving 10 knots with the swell right behind us, a lot more comfortable!!
That's it for now and we'll update you again later on today hopefully.
Andy
P.s. We love getting your email onboard, however please remember the following rules: keep it to text, no pics, no signatures, no attachments, no emoticons and if replying to an email please do not include the previous email chain.
Pic of the day us is us two idiots writing this at 4:30am!
