30:05.2N 39:45.9W

 

Skipper ran out of words yesterday so we missed a blog post and crew are taking over today!

 

We had our first rain on Monday night which meant some very soggy watches and slightly damp beds. The wind also did a complete 180 flip on us, changing from a nice south westerly that gave us speedy downwind sailing to being close hauled into a north easterly. Unfortunately this was also the direction we were going in, so the tacking game began.

 

Dob noticed on his afternoon watch that we’d had a loop of the genoa furling line caught around the anchor windlass that had got badly chaffed, so Ollie and I were called out from our ipad screening of The Alpinist (great film!) to quickly furl the sail. We then had several hours of faffing in the rain with a few different sail configurations. Initially we hoisted the storm gib, but were going so slowly we could barely steer. Decided we really did needed the genoa and that we didn’t trust ourselves to replace the furling line without dropping bits of the furler into 4,500m of water, so that left fixing the chaffed section as best we could. The plus side of this was that it meant we were sitting sewing/bandaging/begging the rope back together in just the right place for our first whale sighting of the crossing!

 

The good news was that our sewing/bandaging/begging worked, the line held and we were able to get speeds above 1kt. The bad news was that the wind was still north easterly and we still couldn’t sail in the right direction. Wind finally started to shift round to the north early this morning so we were able to tack and get back on roughly the right course.

 

All crew deck party this morning to deploy the last of the three Sofar Ocean buoys (that collect ocean and weather data to improve shipping routing) and shake out reefs in the main. Party ended with a round of porridge and tea, and Raven (finally!) happily sailing at 6kts in the right direction.