Race 12 - Day 15
Crew Diary - New York, USA to Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland
05 July

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I'm back in my drysuit and back on deck. Yay, except this is because Cynthia (our sewing machine) has had a nervous breakdown and we cannot resolve her tension issues on board. (Not an uncommon problem!).

Janine's injury has meant that she has been my new sail making buddy for the past few days, and it has been sail making rather than repair. The mood amongst the crew when Patchy failed the last time was low; I'm not sure anyone wanted to tell Michelle, Tamsin or I as they let us sleep in the day after the marathon repair. We had done what we thought was a great job. Michelle & Helen had even lined up the individual squares on the blue tape rip that ran from foot to head. We stood at the bottom of the companionway, fingers crossed as she went up and if I do say so myself it looked great - for an hour.

We're still not quite sure what happened but the bottom line is that she did her Anne Boleyn impression again. After numerous post mortems & an email to Martyn at Hyde who said that the repair should have held we again found ourselves camped in the sail locker fuelled by m&ms (sorry stbd our need was greater than yours!) sticking her back together again.

The problem might be that due to her age and the battering that she has seen around the globe (and a few damp months on a clipper container) the fabric just isn't up to it anymore. It's quite soul destroying to keep finding that the fabric has just disintegrated around a much stronger repair, but we need her and so we go again. They say the definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again expecting a different outcome, and so we have gone big. Luckily the 4:30am thought that we could just replace the panels left as fast as it arrived and instead 3ft patches of new material now cover the full width of the sail. Certainly it doesn't look like any other repair I've seen, but then at least we will know it’s ours, and when the sail is used for training, if it makes it that far (which it might not poor girl) people will ask what on earth did Mission go through to make that much of a mess of the sail? And our response? 'Just another day in the office!'