Day 2
Digiboat's "Product Testing"
Simon Blundell
Thu 20 Oct 2011 01:36
20/10 0825LT
An exhilarating first day and night's sailing. The predicted 12-18kn
pushed us along under our asym kite at speeds up to 13kn, with our
present average so far at over 9kn.
Some excitement - and luck - at 11pm when our spinnaker halyard snapped
at the masthead. Our luck was that it didn't turn into an oversized sea
anchor and rather chose to drop into the sea nice and neatly along our
leeward side, making retrieval actually quite a simple process. Thinking
of developing this as our standard high-wind kite dropping technique!
(We did use this once before in the Red Sea in 30kn when a shackle
broke).
Unfortunately this meant we sailed half the night without our kite which
dropped our avg speed around 1.5-2kn.
Evan did his Burmese Monkey impersonation this morning taking a new kite
halyard to the masthead. Although we have a spare kite halyard, it's
only suitable for lighter winds.
Otherwise all our crew are well rested after a comfortable night's
sleep. The cappucino machine is firing away this morning and straws are
being drawn for who's to be the breakfast chef - bacon and eggs seem to
be the only entry on this morning's a la carte Special's menu.
Blogs are so far a bit rushed as we are playing radio relay vessel for
the fleet and have to fit the blog in between the skeds and weather
reports. Ian is standing over me with a whip as he needs to retrieve
today's weather for transmission.
SJB