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Seren Wen - Day 4



Friday 30th

Yesterday we may have spoken a bit too soon. After sending through yesterday’s log we frantically got our things together, closed all the hatches, and stowed the last few things away. We went to put the bathing platform up in order to attach the tender but guess what?! The other hydraulic system that controls the bathing platform also decided to break down! Jon Crouch came back to rescue us once more and 6 hours later we had fixed the problem. We decided to get a few hours’ sleep and then head off at first light the next day.

So, we were all up at 5.30 this morning and raring to go! But then at around 6.30am, the fridge decided it didn’t want to work anymore! Luckily we have a fridge out in the cockpit and we weren’t going to waste any more time. The essentials went in the outside fridge and off we went!

We had a great first few hours, the sun was shining and we were comfortably cruising at an average of 8.5 knots, even reaching 11.7 knots with Dai Lewis on the helm! After only 6 hours we had done over 40 miles. The crew was in high spirits and we were so glad to just be on our way and to start catching up with all our friends!

At around 1.30pm the winds changed and so we went to furl the genoa in but low and behold, the hydraulics failed once more!!!!! The repairs that had been done on Wednesday were still intact so it looks like it’s a whole other problem.

Once again Seren Wen was forced to turn around and head back to Gran Canaria. It was a rough and depressing journey back (one of the sofas even came out and went flying across the saloon!) and we are now anchored just off Maspalomas in the south of the island. Words cannot even describe how absolutely and unbelievably gutted we all are and we are in the midst of discussing what to do going forward. It doesn’t seem fair, none of our crew are superstitious but with all these things going wrong it’s as if we’ve been cursed!

I think it’s right that we all blame Hannah from Peregrine as, when telling her all I had to do to reef in a sail was press a button, she said something along the lines of, I hope your hydraulics fail and you have to do it manually all the way! If we could have carried on manually then we would have, but it’s an extremely slow process on this boat, and not practical when you need to take sails in quickly during a squall!

Whatever happens, the general consensus is that we WILL get to St. Lucia, even if we have to cheat and fly there! 


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