41:51.2N 17:42.0E
The Snark on The ARC
Ben Little
Tue 28 Jul 2009 21:49
|
Hi there,
Writing now from the centre of the Adriatic, we are
out of sight of land and mid way between Hvar and Corfu which is our target for
this leg of the journey. Unfortunately for this latest leg we have very
little wind and in order to get to our destination in anything like a sensible
time we have resorted to the old Iron mainsail (engine power). The trip,
around 250Nm looks like taking us around 35 hours without flogging the engine
too much.
Since the last update from the Kournati national
park (very windy stop over) we sailed south to Hvar in quite windy conditions
up 30Kn of wind from NNE, we had our Asymetric out for quite a
time but I took it in (with some rope burns) when the wind hit 20Kn as my
crew are not too experienced and there was quite a swell coming up. We had
a couple of unplanned jybes as well which caused us to break 2 mainsail
track cars All in all quite a fun days sail if a little brisk at
times.
Hvar is a very pretty walled town well worth a
visit if you have the time or are in the area. We took on fuel but could
not find a berth for water, while the water maker is working it kills the
batteries to fill up the tanks completely with it and since it is conflicting
with the engine water intake we cannot run it at the same time as the
engine. It works well to run it every day to top up the tanks however and
we will be doing that from now on. Hvar was very crowded and the fight for
a good anchoring position put us off spending another night there so we headed
across to the local ACI marina and spent the night there tied up in comfort,
gave the batteries a good charge and filled our water tanks. There was
very limited supply of chandlery goods in either Hvar or the marina so we have
had to jury rig some fixes for the broken mainsail cars. I hope we
can find spares in Corfu.
So back now to the centre of the Adriatic, I guess
we are around the half way mark. It is pitch black we have no phone signal
and so far we have not seen any shipping. The coast guard has been calling
out all day about firing practice for the Italian Navy, I finally managed to get
the area co-ordinates which are miles from here and marked on the Italian coast
in any case we were relieved to find. Flipper and his friends were
with us for quite a while and we got some video footage of then
dancing in our bow wave. Sadly however the Bonito which
I guess they were hunting did not bite on our line so we were
on pasta for dinner tonight. Maybe dwan will show something on
our line.
Hope to check in again in Corfu where maybe we can
add some photos.
Ben, Ben and Sam in
the Adriatic.
|