Now less than 500nM (nautical miles) to go and the nerves start to get shot to pieces. It’s the time in between position reports that does it, we get an update every 6 hours and it’s amazing what an overactive imagination can do.
It’s been a very changeable 24 hours. I’ll start with last night - I didn’t put in yesterday’s blog as I was running late.
We were smoking along under Code 3 (heavyweight spinnaker), our smallest kite. The wind was gradually increasing and it was getting close to that point of “this can end really badly”, so I decided it was time to get it down and just blast reach along under yankee and Main. I wanted to gybe so it would be kite down, gybe, yankee up, and Staysail would be up in the interim.
All briefed, and all pumped, it was going to be the first heavy night take down. I had just come on deck but rather than jump on the helm, James Wrightson, who had been doing a sterling job on the helm, stayed put. I usually like to helm at night if we are doing a manoeuvre just in case something goes wrong - I will react quicker - but I still had my sleepy head on
We had a problem with the tack not firing so, issue one, Thomas Stanley was going to have to go out on the prodder to spike it. On his way back to the bow though, it tripped itself, so issue one solved.
Next, kite was coming down then not coming down. I went forward to the mast to see what was going on, at first, we thought it might have been caught between the main sail and the spreaders, moved the main and that was not the problem. At this stage, the halyard had only come down to just the first spreader, that means it is still a long way up.
A million thoughts, well ok, only two, go running through your mind. This either has to come down or I will have to go up the mast and release it. After a fair amount of swearing and re-hoisting the halyard back up and trying again, whatever had got caught cleared itself and it came down. It was a very dry mouth time for a while. I want to congratulate the guys on the cabin top who were doing the take down, it was text book. The idea is you take in the bottom part of the sail first (easy-ish to see as it has red tape on it), then you sort of bear hug it, as this collapses the sail and with no wind in it, it comes down easier. All the time the helm has to stay deep downwind otherwise the kite fills and crew go flying with the kite. Hi Geoff (and UBS Wild Thing crew) remember that time at Hamilton Island when I was doing bow and I couldn’t spike it quick and we had to come up and the kite refilled? Well we were lucky, we had plenty of sea room not a silly island we had to avoid in front of us.
During the daylight hours, Glenn Manchett had a trip up the mast to see what the issue had been - all sorted a tiny bit of a broken soft loop. Thomas Stanley sorted out the tack so it will trip normally next time.
So that was last night, it’s all a bit easier now, but I must say heaps more stressful, so the other boats have more wind than us. Are we where we should be etc etc etc?
Time will only tell, a few more hours before we are back into good wind again. Keep your fingers crossed for us.
How’s the serenity? Great here, just with a bit of nervous tension though.
Thanks for the support.
Big hugs, Wen