Mouse in the mast
A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Tue 16 Aug 2011 09:54
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48:01.58N
011:23.94W
It has been a speedy 24 hours and we've covered a
good 130 miles. Helpfully, these miles have been in the right direction as well.
We began yesterday on a broad reach with main and poled out gib. But the skipper
reckoned we'd benefit from going more north to get ahead of today's forecast
winds, which will force us to go due east or even slightly southeast, towards
Brittany, not Britain. We decided to run with our twin headsail arrangement,
both poled out on opposite sides of the boat like a giant kite, dragging us
along.
Elise and I thought we could rig the thing by
ourselves, but it wasn't long before we ran in to problems. First the gib
halyard stuck fast, so we couldn't winch the sail more than halfway up - with it
flapping and snapping in annoyance. Then the spinnaker halyard, to raise the
pole, also jammed. It took just a few minutes before all the lines running up
the inside of the mast were refusing to budge. the only clue as to what was
wrong was a small tail of fine line looping out of the bottom of the
mast.
This line, I recognised, was the one Graham had
used to mouse the main halyard - a trick that meant we could put a new rope up
the mast in case one of the existing ones broke - something which had happened
to Alex during his Caribbean crossing. Over the last year, this fine line has
stretched and looped and become a thorough nuisance, but I kept putting off the
problem. Today, the spare line had managed to get firmly knotted round three of
the crucial ropes inside the mast. For a grim moment it looked as if we'd be
sailing home with just the genoa - putting our arrival time back to September at
the earliest.
But after an hour of wheedling and muffled cursing
from Chris and I at the mast foot, poking about with knives and tugging ropes
back and forth, we managed to cut away knot after knot until all the lines were
running smoothly again. We finished by hoisting the second genoa and poling it
out - a sail change which had taken a stately three hours by the time everything
was sorted out. We feasted on a late lunch of onion soup and tinned
salad.
We ran ahead of the wind most of the night, surfing
majestically down waves at a good six knots. Then at dawn, Alex's nice
southwesterly wind died and in less than 30 seconds had sprung up again from the
north, sending us south towards Galicia. As a cold damp morning emerged from
ther gloom, foggy moisture clinging to anything left outside, we wrestled down
the genoa we'd spent so much time putting up the day before and are now
installed on a slow beat slightly south of east - as the forecast predicted.
There's so little wind, though, we may later turn the engine on to keep up our
progress towards home.
It seems all we can think of is log fires, baths
and square meals with fresh ingredients. Summer
Song is now just 270 miles off the Lizard, so it shouldn't be too
long.
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