Here are the crew sorting things out after arrival at Port Maturin, Rodrigues. Jenny Martin polishing the gunwales, me fiddling with ropes in the background:

Note the piece of blue tape on the deck. This denotes a piece of rubberised caulking (the black strips on the deck separating the individual teak planks) in need of repair. Such repairs are done by me at night, with the remainder of the crew safely locked up downstairs so that they cannot inadvertently stand on the wet caulking and traipse indelible black marks throughout the boat. A lesson learned the hard way, of course.

And here are Robin Martin and me, busy servicing our parachute drogue. This is a big bag thrown over the stern in really severe weather to stop the boat going too fast, and keep the stern into the waves. A real lifesaver, and thankfully one we’ve not felt the need to use yet. It is for survival conditions, but like everything else it needs regular maintenance, in this case polishing the fittings, checking that the shackles work and are properly wired shut (to prevent the pin coming out under load - if it can, it will!), redoing some whipping holding an eye into the warp (the big rope).

Note the size of the gear. VS weighs about 35 tonnes in cruising rig, so the loads on a stern drogue are truly enormous. Deploying it requires a bridle onto two cleats as one alone would probably get ripped out of the deck.  The rest of the gear piled on the stern is some of the contents of the stern locker, all rousted out in order to get at an irritating leak which I had at long last just tracked down.