Falcon - Crossing Day 6

Distance run last 24 hours, 165 nautical miles. Miles left until Grenada; 1179.

By noon, the time we start/finish a cruising day,we had just failed to reach our half-way point of the crossing, so our mid-Atlantic celebrations have been delayed until tomorrow.

The main event of the day has therefore centred around executing ‘the gybe’ to put us back onto the favoured side of our rhum line to Grenada. For readers less familiar in the technicalities of sailing, the gybe is a potentially violent manoeuvre where the sails (and heavy accoutrements such as the large slab of heavy metal called the boom) pass rapidly from one side of the boat to the other powered, in our case, by the full 22 knot force of the Atlantic trade winds! Central to this merry dick dance of a rig change, is sending two heroic idiots to the bow to wrestle the spinnaker pole (another slab of skull-seeking hardened alloy) and vast array of sheets and guys (rope to you landlubbery folk) into a mirrored position on the opposite side of our ‘leisure’ vessel. It’s the maritime equivalent of the ‘hokey cokey’; it’s all in, out, get shaken all about, before hopefully retreating back to the safety of the cockpit with perhaps 90% of one’s body left intact. In short, we sailors try to minimise the number of times we perform this operation!

As I write this report, the gybe manoeuvre was conducted some 60 minutes ago, and my PTSD therapy session is complete! Time now for Bev and myself to sit back and relax before the skipper has another ‘how about this for an idea’ moment…

Log in tomorrow for details on our mid-crossing celebrations (or mutiny re-enactment and impromptu burial at sea if Ade decides he wants to gybe us back onto our original course!).

Falcon once again ‘out’.