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Starblazer - Starblazer 6 December Not a good start to the day



Within 15 minutes of going on deck for my 0500-0800 watch it started to rain, heavily! Fortunately there was no wind squall associated with the rain though often the wind shifted. I went below to check it on radar, to find there was a succession of showers, some heavy, in our path. Every time the wind shifted the autopilot beeped to tell me it had altered course, if more than a couple of degrees the beeping was incessant. I had to scramble on deck to stop the alarm then wait to see if the autopilot had overcompensated. At 0745 I shot on deck to cancel the alarm, took my regular scan around the horizon though the radar showed nothing, and noticed something was wrong with the pole holding out the genoa and dawn was just breaking.

I woke John and we discovered that the pole uphaul had chafed through; the only thing holding the pole above the water was the sail and the tension in its sheet. Between us we rescued the pole, rolled away the sail and made everything secure. By now the sun had finally put in an appearance. Racers will cringe, yet again. Instead of immediately putting a different uphaul on the pole we stopped for breakfast. I thought porridge was in order. By 0930 the pole was up, the sail was out and we were going again. To be fair we had been making an adequate speed with mainsail alone.

The rest of the day got better. We made water again so I did some washing and had a shower, not just a brief rinse with half a bowl of water! We decided to alter ship’s time by one hour overnight, putting our watches back one hour on Friday morning. Yes we had an extra hour in bed, but that was half an hour each by extending the first two watches by half an hour. We will be confused for the next few days as we try to juggle with dual times, mealtimes and watches by ship’s local time, radio net and log book entries by UT or GMT.

I was even more confused, trying to work out the implications of an altered watch start time, getting it very wrong and organising for dinner to be on the table by 1730! The cassoulet was very tasty though not quite the consistency of a French one. I’ll have to find a recipe. My first attempt at yogurt this trip worked OK but there seemed to be quite a lot of whey trapped in the set Greek style yogurt. More experimentation is needed.

Joyce


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