Dream On
Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Tue 13 Oct 2009 05:24
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Yesterday the 12th of October we set of from
Gibraltar after giving our novice first time crew a safety briefing, with a
forecast for easterly winds freshening to 30 knots through the straits over
the next few days. We tried contacting a couple of marinas to the east of
Gibraltar but they were either on siesta or couldn't take us. So we ended
up in Estepona at 36:24.9N 005:09.4W which is a busy fishing port and a marina.
The wind was about 18knots near Gibraltar and we were able to beat upwind and
had a pleasant sail which was good for the first timers. Having woken
up just after six this morning I decided not to lie in as I have been
having some very strange dreams, these are without the influence of
alcohol or drugs but must be from the disturbed sleep pattern I have been
having. Well I did not really want to say very much about these dreams but it
seems I am not the only one. We recently had a senior member of Discovery staff
aboard and he ( obviously because I had put them under so much pressure)
confessed to a dream/nightmare which went like this: he said that they were
under a lot of pressure from me to get everything ready with the yacht and for
everything to be just right and that finally I had asked for a sliding door in
the hull. This gave them great problems and they could not find a
solution so exasperated he left it to our project manager to find
a solution. His nightmare began when he came back to work and realised that the
sliding door from a transit van had been fitted in the hull of an otherwise
beautiful yacht! I also met another cruiser a few days ago who told me that it
happened all the time and that on a recent sojourn ahore to stay with friends he
had got up naked thinking he was on a catamaran and that the anchor was dragging
eventually taking a sight line from a couple of lamp posts from a balcony
outside.
I have had several weird ones and here are a
couple: while trying to try out all points of sail on Rhiann Marie with a very
experienced racer from Discovery in attendance we decided to get the spinnaker
out and were sailing down the motorway at speed with me trimming. When we
reached a roundabout when I was initially furiously sheeting in to enter the
roundabout ( the points of sail of course dont work - but then neither does
sailing a 67 foot yacht down a motorway) and then instructed to ease the sheet
to round and exit. Of course not being up to rounding marks as our racing
friends are I eased the sheet far too much and caught the spinnaker on a
lamp post and ripped it in half which of course would have been a very expensive
humiliation for my lack of spinnaker experience. More another
time.
We have aboard Rhianns friend Aimee and Craigs
friend Stuart who's mum Mairi should be joining us somewhere along the Spanish
coast on the 14th and they will do some more guest blogging soon. Today we have
a day of jobs on the tender, boat cleaning and bike puncture repairs to be done
before decing whether we carry on up the coast to Marbella before returning to
Gibraltar for Friday.
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