Mouse in the mast

A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Tue 16 Aug 2011 09:54
48:01.58N
011:23.94W
 
It has been a speedy 24 hours and we've covered a good 130 miles. Helpfully, these miles have been in the right direction as well. We began yesterday on a broad reach with main and poled out gib. But the skipper reckoned we'd benefit from going more north to get ahead of today's forecast winds, which will force us to go due east or even slightly southeast, towards Brittany, not Britain. We decided to run with our twin headsail arrangement, both poled out on opposite sides of the boat like a giant kite, dragging us along.
 
Elise and I thought we could rig the thing by ourselves, but it wasn't long before we ran in to problems. First the gib halyard stuck fast, so we couldn't winch the sail more than halfway up - with it flapping and snapping in annoyance. Then the spinnaker halyard, to raise the pole, also jammed. It took just a few minutes before all the lines running up the inside of the mast were refusing to budge. the only clue as to what was wrong was a small tail of fine line looping out of the bottom of the mast.
 
This line, I recognised, was the one Graham had used to mouse the main halyard - a trick that meant we could put a new rope up the mast in case one of the existing ones broke - something which had happened to Alex during his Caribbean crossing. Over the last year, this fine line has stretched and looped and become a thorough nuisance, but I kept putting off the problem. Today, the spare line had managed to get firmly knotted round three of the crucial ropes inside the mast. For a grim moment it looked as if we'd be sailing home with just the genoa - putting our arrival time back to September at the earliest.
 
But after an hour of wheedling and muffled cursing from Chris and I at the mast foot, poking about with knives and tugging ropes back and forth, we managed to cut away knot after knot until all the lines were running smoothly again. We finished by hoisting the second genoa and poling it out - a sail change which had taken a stately three hours by the time everything was sorted out. We feasted on a late lunch of onion soup and tinned salad.
 
We ran ahead of the wind most of the night, surfing majestically down waves at a good six knots. Then at dawn, Alex's nice southwesterly wind died and in less than 30 seconds had sprung up again from the north, sending us south towards Galicia. As a cold damp morning emerged from ther gloom, foggy moisture clinging to anything left outside, we wrestled down the genoa we'd spent so much time putting up the day before and are now installed on a slow beat slightly south of east - as the forecast predicted. There's so little wind, though, we may later turn the engine on to keep up our progress towards home.
 
It seems all we can think of is log fires, baths and square meals with fresh ingredients. Summer Song is now just 270 miles off the Lizard, so it shouldn't be too long.