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Ayama - AYAMAS first blog



WORLD ARC 2015 Yacht Ayama's Blog

11/1/15 Well here we are about 180 miles from St Lucia sailing wing on wing doing about 8+ knots in quite rolly seas. We had a busy 2 days after Per and i arrived in St Lucia on Thursday. Stefan and Anna - who own Ayama- were expecting their daughter Sofia to arrive at the airport just after us. Unfortunately her flight was canceled so she was stuck in Chicago for another day. Friday morning Stefan dropped Anna and I off in the dinghy and we went and did a final stock-up shop. Per and Stefan went to the skipper's meeting.

Anna and i had a good shop and found almost everything we wanted but then had 2 taxi drivers fighting over us: it nearly came to fisticuffs and we had visions of all our bags of groceries being torn in half by them. Girl power won and our lady taxi driver, Cecelia, drove us away alternately chuckling to herself and cursing the other driver.Stefan and Per turned up at the boat absolutely drenched having been caught in a St Lucia downpour.

Poor Sofia's flight from Chicago was delayed by snow so she missed her Atlanta connection..fingers crossed third time lucky tomorrow. Friday evening we all went for the farewell social and indulged in rum punches, delicious nibbles with the steel band playing in the background. It was interesting meeting the other crews, all very cosmopolitan and multi-lingual. The star of the evening was a 10 month old French/Irish child who fell asleep on one of the sofas between his father and grandfather. It is a shame he is too young to remember the next year he is going to spend on his parents catamaran.

Saturday morning great news Sofia is in the air; Nicky, the yellow shirt helped to speed up her arrival and smooth out the immigration as Stefan wants to check us all out at the airport. It all went very smoothly and they were back on board by 4 pm and after a big bowl of spaghetti bolognaise we left Rodney Bay Marina only 5 hours behind the official start. Sails were set wing on wing before sunset ..so much easier in daylight as one forgets how dark night can be without any lights around. No sooner had we all relaxed when Per had a feeling on the back of his neck and sure enough on the radar there was a squall approaching so we reefed the genoa. Being the only non-Swedish speaker on the boat can be interesting especially with little details such as the jib being called a fock.

Saturday night passed peacefully for the watch-keepers 3 of us do 3 hours each through the night. Stefan had 2 passing ships, i had a big cruise ship, Per had nothing. Sunday we have all been relaxing, dozing and eating with Sophia and me feeling a bit queasy as we are rolling quite a bit. I feel more relaxed if there is a bucket handy so Anna kindly fished one out for me (not had to use it yet). At 5 pm Stefan was a very happy skipper as we had achieved an Ayama record, 176 miles in 24 hours. We also spotted Allegro, another Arc yacht who we were passing! So we all had a big tot of rum, followed by Anna's excellent cuisine. But never take anything for granted. Stefan was doing his checks and discovered a support bearing on the prop shaft started making a noise and has to be changed so we had to take in the genoa and were still doing 6 knots so took the fock in as well. Now we are under way again.


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