Sailing around the world.
A Lady
Stephen Hyde
Sun 23 Jan 2011 10:53
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SATURDAY 22nd JANUARY
2011 ( our position as we type this
blog. 16 degrees :00' S 13degrees:32' W
)
Our new friend , the
Bird , remained on the boat for the whole night ( he looked
like a dipper ) and eventually took off
at sunrise, ahhh, sure it was lovely to have a
stowaway for the night,
05.00hrs Aileen decided to make a loaf of
brown bread, and it was delicious, as soon as the rest on board got a taste,
it vanished very quickly.
talking about making things on the boat, Emily used
to have a chocklete making factory in a previous life, however ,despite all
the skippers best efforts, he could not get the
Girl to make chocklate on board. saying " It would make us all fatties,
"
mind you, Sham could do with a bit of weight, in
fact a good few stone would be a start.
We get our weather from 2 different sources, one
from a US based weatherstation employed by W.ARC and the other
from a Grib file from our own " Mailasail "
satalitte system.
It is interesting to compare both and make our own
decisions about what course to take etc.
However, they never get the currents right, and we
still have an adverse current, despite all predictions, books, charts, and
our weather forcastors. its frustrating , as the
difference between having a 1 knot current against us or with us is
48 miles per day,
09.00hrs " Tucanon " was radio net controller
today, Only 5 boats have left St Helena so far, and there are even
some boats which have not arrived there yet from
Cape Town.
" Wild tigress " is 47 miles ahead of us at
present, mind you , thats after they motored for 24 hours,
We travelled 188 miles in the last 24 hours, since
09.00 yesterday.
Around midday, the generator stopped suddenly,
crikey, its after overheating again, there has to be something wrong with
the
feed pipe from the expansion tank, so we took the
covers off the engine and dismantled the feed pipe , it was choked at
the entrance to the manifold, so it took us about
15 minutes with sewing needles to clear the blockage.
We filled up the system with coolents, switched her
on, and off she went again , purring sweetly.
However, we do think our batteries are goosed. they
are not holding a charge very well, possibly caused by letting
them get too low before running the generator and
charging them up again.
Gawd, Boats, boats, they would drive you bonkers at
times, one thing for sure , never a dull moment,
In mid afternoon, Sham asked skipper if the " Bag
of Fear " always had holes ,, There are no holes in it skipper
replied.
Ohhh, maybe you should take a look. so skipper
walked up to the bow and took a look, Oh Shit. !
there are at least 6 holes in a row across the top.
Lets get this thing down before it explodes, as the
wind was a good 25 knots and growing.
35 minutes later, we had the spinniker in the
saloon , up over the table and executing a repair to the sail,
It is obviously snagging aloft somewhere, and to
think we paid a proffesional rigger in Mackay to check all the rig
at the top end of the mast for snags, as we have
had this problem before, !
Skipper cant express himself properly here, as he
promised the Royal Cork YC, that he would curtail his use of flowery language,
but you can guess what !
Repairing a sail thats 23m long in a small cabin is
difficult, but rebagging it into its sock is even more difficult,
but we eventually got it all sorted, and were happy
bunnies again, we decided not to put it up again
as there was too much wind, so we set up a goose
wing arrangment. and maintained a speed of 8 / 9
knots.
We have actually circumnavigated the globe, we did
this by St. Helena, but forgot to mention it.
So far, we have sailed over 29,000 miles since we
sailed out of Crosshaven on the 24th of June 2009....
and still lots more to go....
Dinner was more lasagne, and it tasted just great
with freshly made bread,
the wind was SE , and now 25 / 30
knots, we took reefs in the main and jenny, before starting the night watches,
Thats it for today,
Signed :- Stephen Hyde ( skipper
)
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