Today’s Update

And onto the home straight.

As you can see, we had a great time crossing the halfway mark. First beers of the trip!

No sooner had we opened our beers, than the shackle on the outhaul, pulling the mainsail along the boom snapped. All hands, and we had to bring the head sail in swinging the boat into the wind, and bring the main sail in as a matter of urgency. Not clear why the shackle would have snapped. It wasn’t under that much pressure, as the winds are no greater than we’ve had for the last few days. We effected an emergency repair with a fresh cut to the line (as the splice had been damaged), a halyard knot, and reversed the process bringing the mainsail out. We returned to our beers and congratulated ourselves at a speedy calm response.

Supper was chilli con carne and mashed potatoes. I think it was the first time that Dennis has made mash potatoes! No sooner had we sat down to enjoy our supper, then the knot on the outhaul undid, and the mainsail flew again. The same process again of sails in, but this time in the dark.

As soon as the panic was over, we then realised that the doughnuts, (terribly expensive pieces of insignificant plastic, that stops the knot on the outhaul rubbing with the pulley wheel on the clew of the sail), was missing, causing the line to chafe. We lost two doughnuts yesterday in the various line breakages, and have no more on board, so we had to improvise, and cut some of the ply boards that we carry, drill a hole, and add that to the line. So the same process, head sail in, main sail in, outhaul off, new wooden doughnut in place, and reverse. Again in the dark, and then increasing wind speeds up to 20 kn, so we were both tied onto the mast while we did it.

Then we relaxed for the night, unfortunately surrendering our lead over Voyager II with our faffing.

We had had a leisurely day. The only thing we had to do was AGAIN replace the water pump with the spare and clean the old one. Another piece of plastic jammed it from the watermaker installation. That’s 4 times I make it now. Cheers PR Systems Plymouth.


Just before we left the skipper of Tam Lim said he’d had the same issue and had added an inline filter to catch the debris. We didn’t get one in Las Palmas. I will definitely get one in St Lucia. Ironically I had two spare on my last boat but they didn’t make it onto this boat.

We caught a big fish! It broke the line so technically we didn’t. We then caught another and it broke that line. Finally one didn’t break the line. A skip Jack tuna.


Lucky we have space in the fridge as tonight we have Thai Green Curry and curried lentils. I went over the top on the spice in the lentils so have to calm it down with the last of the yogurt.

On the grocery front, last of the lettuce went for lunch, our supply of peppers carrots, potatoes and bread all gone. A few oranges, lemons and onions left!