Another Break Day
Dubbel Zout at Sea
Nik Ormseth
Thu 2 Feb 2023 21:34
Light air days seem to be our undoing — although with more than 3000 miles under our keel since Portugal, it’s surprising we haven’t broken more. (I knock on wood as I say that.) Today we had a masthead block fail on the spinnaker halyard. No damage beyond the block itself, as we noticed it almost immediately and were able to get the chute down before there was any chafing on the halyard. With the lighter air and cross seas, it had been sort of an awkward spinnaker set, in any case, so we left it down and have continued on the genoa for the afternoon, but tomorrow I imagine we’ll go back to the spinnaker using the alternate halyard. Unfortunately, we also lost the drone today, though not before Damian got some great shots of DZ with the spinnaker up. In fact, the spinnaker was really the drone’s downfall. The drone had a “maximum flight distance” limit — which we assumed meant maximum distance from the controller, i.e. from the boat. Unfortunately, it apparently really meant “maximum distance from the GPS coordinates the drone took off from”. So, as DZ sped downwind and the drone followed, eventually we exceeded its maximum range. It couldn’t fly to us, and we couldn’t beat back to it before the battery conked out. :-(  |