2 spinnakers out of service within 12 hours
Take Off
Jörgen Wennberg
Thu 11 Dec 2014 20:03
On the 6th of December in the morning we met our real first squall. The night before we had been precious taking down the sails back and forth all nigth without entering any squall. This morning we entered weather which we thought was rain, so Jörgen got himself well prepared however not for the rest. The wind speeded up to 30 knots and then steadily went down to 17 knots. We thought we had gone through the worst part when extremely hard wind came from nowhere. The broach was inevitable and the spinnaker went off flying behind the boat. We managed to pull in the spinnaker, however the ropes were gone. We then saw that the wind instrument at the top of the mast was hanging loose and after a while it was gone to into the sea… so no wind information at all for the rest of the cruising      Nils got the honour to climb up the mast and check out if there were any more damage. Thumbs up, everything was ok! You can tell that we were pretty surprised by the squall as Johan is still only wearing his underwear being abruptly woken up to handle the broach.   Nils got a lovely picture from the top of the boat! Look at Nils’s shadow, he seems to climb up the mast while Nils himself is coming down! A proud Nils after his adventure up above    Once we pulled ourselves together we set our 2nd spinnaker. The sailing was smooth and we had to manage navigation and sailing without any wind instrument. That night Olof was stearing, the wind blew at approx 15-18 knots and the sea was relatively calm. At around 22h00 we heard a big band and the spinnaker fell down. Undramatically the halyard had loosened. We managed to bring in the spinnaker and found this….  …. due to share och too weak sail? This meant 2 spinnakers out of service within 12 hours. Luckily we had a 3rd spinnaker! However it is spinnaker for very light winds, 0,5 mm and considering the very strong winds earlier we were not quite sure this one would hold. However if we had to bring 2 spinnakers to the sailmaker, just as well bring along the third one ;-). So we went for it. We had now reached down South after taking a strategic decision 4 days earlier which then showed to be a winning one! We dived South to meet up with wind change and have a better angle towards St Lucia. This gave us a 3rd place in Division D passing Ellina6 and BombyX who arrived 7 hours after us. |