Day 10

We had to un-goose and luff up 20 degrees to keep clear of a ship yesterday morning despite the skipper agreeing to pass to starboard of us. While handling the sail, the sheath on the sheet partly stripped and concertinaed up the core.  We have a plastic tubes taped to the sheet at the sail end which are there to protect the sheet from chafe at the pole but despite many innovative attempts to eliminate it, it always slips in the end and the sheet gets badly damaged and progressively shorter.

Anyway once we were safely passed the ship, Matt tried to pull the sheath back but could only get it so far as it was still through the pole.  We were left with an un-sheathed bit of around half metre.  He sewed the sheath in place at that point and re-taped the plastic tube to the end of the sheet and we re-goosed.  All of this was done up on the foredeck with seas of around 3m – not an easy task!   Hopefully that will last until we get to Rodrigues where we can make a better repair.

We continued with the genoa poled out for the rest of the day with winds of around 18 – 20 knots but the seas never really reduced in size.  At around 10pm there was a wind shift and we un-goosed and sailed on a 2 sail reach for a couple of hours before having to re-pole out the genoa.  For the first time on this passage we had squalls ranging from 10- 30k through the night which gave us wind shifts of +/- 30 degrees and rain to wash some of the salt off the boat!  Not terribly comfortable as we had the waves on the beam and other places quite a lot.

We’re still poled out and have just negotiated another large bulk carrier on its way to Singapore. Had a chat with the skipper and agreed to pass green to green. This time he did change course and we passed one mile apart. We have around 50 miles to go so we should make it in late afternoon as Rodrigues is 2.5 hrs behind us (UTC +4) – I can almost smell the bacon….. 

Date and time: 25th September 10.15 local (GMT + 6.5 hrs) 

Position:  S19:29:321 E064:14:014

24 hours distance:  193 nm