Mr. Toad's Wild Ride!
Sulana's Voyage
Alan and Sue Brook
Tue 7 Dec 2010 19:23
As at 18:15 UTC, we have made great progress in the last 24 hours, recording our first 200+ mile day of the voyage so far, with 214 logged, noon-to-noon.
We appear at last to have risen again up the ARC Fleet Position report list, to a more acceptable 50th, and we have now put our own clocks back another hour. So we are now 2 hours behind you all in the UK and currently running 'wing-and-wing, with our big genoa poled out instead of our spinnaker. But that is another story.....
Alan has an admission to make......
Bad Mr. Toad kept the spinnaker up a tadge too long last night.
And, in the early hours of the darkness of morning, a stealthy Triffid crept up on us from astern, unnoticed in our radar blind spot (even our super-duper, new Raymarine digital radar cannot look through the mast) until it was too late. And why not? We hear you ask. Why not, indeed!
We had been looking ahead and off to the weather beam for their colourful red and orange blotches, not astern, silly us!
The squall overwhelmed us suddenly with an extra 5 knots of wind and wrapped itself all around us on the radar screen, with no escape. Prudence dictated we should not try to run through this with full sail on, but how to reduce it was the question?
"All hands on deck!!", went the cry and all turned out right smartish, properly attired in their jim-jams, lifejackets and safety harnesses, but it was to no avail!
We made the fatal error of trying to snuff the kite down in our spinnaker squeezer behind the mainsail. But there was quite a difficult sea running and Sulana was hard to keep safe downwind. With the pressure of 25-26 knots true wind in the sail, this was a job too hard to handle for our trusty foredeck crew. The squeezer 'bucket' would not budge without the pressure in the sail taking it back up again, out of their willing hands. We should have gone for an old-fashioned drop and left the squeezer at the top of the sail.
What happened next was the disaster of all disasters, so well-known to all offshore racing crews. The spinnaker started its inexorable wrap around the forestay, oh nooooo!
Now we could neither drop it nor unwrap it. It is really stuck up there; we have no easy way to get it down and it is still blowing hard! Good job St. Lucia is not just a couple of miles ahead, or we might run smack into it out of control, or sail past the finish line unable to turn to cross it!
We should have unfurled some genoa first and done all this in the lee of the big sail, so its spread within the foretriangle prevented just this happening. But that is all with wonderful 20/20 hindsight.
The team of James, Ben and Fiona, all on the foredeck together, did stalwart work in getting to grips with the situation. Things must have become really dire, though, when 'Mother' appeared in the cockpit and, with all the power of a mother's love, offered her services up front with her two offspring, too!
It is unheard of to see Sue out of her bunk for a night watch, so it must have been extreme! She was forbidden to leave the cockpit, but did have the presence of mind, though, to go fetch the camera and remember her duties as Sulana's official ARC reporter and cameraman.
After many a long hour unwrapping the sail and its squeezer from the furling genoa (no small task in 26 knots in the darkness on a heaving/pitching foredeck!) we finally managed to unwind the last bit of halyard and, with Peter on the helm and Alan helping James on the retrieval line, we were able to pull the squeezer 'bucket' down over the last of the spinnaker.
At last we could lower the spinnaker and drag it inboard, or so we thought. But, oh no, the halyard remained firmly stuck at the masthead, trapped in the top of the genoa. By this time, fortunately, it was daybreak, so it was safer to ask James to go aloft and fit the spare halyard onto the sail, so it could be lowered down and then to check the top of the furler and genoa for any damage.
James did a fantastic job, in very difficult circumstances, and reminded the Skipper of himself as a young foredeck hand with his willingness to get on with the job in hand. He returned safely to the deck with the old halyard intact and the good news that there was no significant damage aloft.
The team returned aft, exhausted, but triumphant, but not unmarked. Fiona was clutching her thigh where she had been hit by a flying fish whilst pulling the spinnaker down! James was sporting a few extra bruises and marks where he had gamely hung on to the rig whilst swinging his way around up the mast.
Oh - and by the way - to the team at Dolphin Sails:
Please can we have another squeezer 'bucket'? This one's split!
The spinnaker itself has also suffered some damage from being flown like a flag far too long. We are not yet sure exactly how much, as we have spent the afternoon recuperating and re-gathering our strengths, to get ready for another night of squalls. We will be having a go at self-repair on the long tear we know about in one seam tonight. We think we might need this lovely sail again before the finish, when the winds are due to drop.
All the best again for tonight, from Alan and a tired, but happy, Sulana crew.
