Robinson - Day 3: Parasailor Day

After the first days, which we spent adjusting to our 'new' roles, today was the day to seriously start playing with 'Robby', our Parasailor. During the course of the day we fiddled with all possible ways of sailing this beautifully stable spinnaker. Now, in the deep of night, we have settled on a somewhat complicated, but very stable, system: we have poled out the Parasailor on the spinnaker pole, which itself is kept in place by the usual topping lift and further by a forward and an aft downhaul. This gives us the freedom to ease or tighten the sheet without moving the pole. On lee, we have the boom out without the mainsail, but ready to roll the main out at any time to make a wind shadow if necessary. Then we have both luff sheets on the Parasailor from the bow plus a barber hauler on lee. Pff, if this sounds like half as much work as it is to set it up, you will know what we have been playing around with. No surprise that I describe this as Parasailor day ;) Result of our efforts is however a very stable set-up which has us merrily flying along at around 8 kts.

Enough about the sailing now, what else goes on aboard 'Robinson'? Well, we spent an hour searching for a spare impeller for the generator of another yacht, just until yet another yacht had found one. We might just as well have completed our search, because just 2 hours ago our own generator's water pump failed. This is probably due to the fact that our suction in surfs is so strong that it empties the water inlet for the generator. Without water the pump runs dry and guess what it is that pumps generally don't seem to like? Thus we have to start a new search for our impellers the coming day and then exchange the impeller in the water pump. If no other problems play a role in the stopping of our generator, we should have it up and running again by noon. In the meantime we can of course use our main engine for power, so don't think we're sitting in the dark right now.

Atmosphere on board is great, which was even enhanced by dinner in the cockpit under Parasailor doing 8 knots and, later on, some jumping dolphins under a moonlit sky. Life can really suck, don't you agree?

Looking forward to the sun coming up, so we can start the day which might later be referred to as Generator Day..

Love from Robin, Annika and Bojan