I’d just sat down to write this blog when we were interrupted by a large pod of bottlenose dolphins (the first of this type we’ve seen this holiday) swimming around the boat, then they went off and we could see then about 50m away, clearly feeding. Very nice to see.

 

The big story for today is the cruising chute, and our incompetence in using it. The winds today have been getting progressively lighter and lighter and so after breakfast we decided to put up the cruising chute to get a bit more speed. To cut a long story short, it ended up getting horribly tangled up in the line connected to the snuffer and we had to drop it again. Therein followed an hour and a half on the foredeck for me trying to unwrap the sail from the line and untwist it. Got there in the end though, and we tried again later with success and it is now proudly flying 5 hours after we intended. The problem was having the main sail up whilst we were trying to put up the chute. This created a low pressure area behind the sail that the cruising chute was being sucked into. Once we took down the mail sail things went much more smoothly.

 

We have just put the apple crumble in the oven for this evening and hope to have a particularly yummy dinner later.

 

Hamsi

 

40:36.39N 48:08.34W