20^th November D-2

Up and more organising of the boat. Bill & Mike distinguish them selves by carefully splicing a rope to put a quick release shackle onto it, a lovely neat, tidy and strong splice, but they were too concerned for the quality of the splice and just neglected to put the shackle on whilst they did it.

Richard & Nick were shopping for fruit &  vegetables, for a long time. General belief was that they were in a bar having breakfast, but this was proven wrong when the boxloads of fresh stuff arrived, to be unpacked & washed on the pontoon. There are massive cockroaches around on the island. We’ve been lead to believe the eggs are in cardboard & in soil or in the fruit & can be brought onto the boat & so the crew have an obsession to prevent taking any unwanted stowaways across the Atlantic. Hence the care with which the fruit was washed. The crew were ably assisted in this task by the girls…

Then after this we went out for a brief sail. Not much wind. Gloriously sunny. Motored out of the harbour and put the sails up. Tragedy, when we found that the Twistle rig (which hadn’t been used since the channel in mid-summer) wasn’t engaging properly, a bit of force and a bit of twisting bodged it for the trip, but it’ll need some attention tomorrow. We sailed awhile and then returned to port where the bloody porthand gennoa winch (which had worked on the way over from Lanzarote less than a week ago) was spinning freely allowing the foresail to flap loosely. Another task for tomorrow. Back to port and crew uniform: smart white shirts and dark trousers on and then time for a leaving party.

Breakages: Julie (the elder Baines’ wife) who was is suffering the effects of too much  gin & red wine the night before who still came for a sail!

The port hand genoa winch

The twistle rig