Satori - Day 4 - the fight back begins!
Hampered by no spinnaker halyard, Satori has been suffering when the winds drop below 20 knots. However the spares department, aka Alan, has been working wonders with needle, twine and splicing skills and gave us the opportunity to hoist a spinnaker. The only next question was who was going to re feed it at the top of the 25 metre mast. Ok all you worried wives and girlfriends, we needed a volunteer and there was only one man up to the job in the rush of applicants and, guess what, it was Alan. Ground up by hand by Narni, safety line pinning him to the mast controlled by me, Matthew ready to catch him (!), Nick and Patrick holding her on as steady and gentle a beam reach as possible, Alan made his way to the top, refeed the halyard and returned deckwards. I am pleased to say the manouvre was performed just as Commodore Peter Turner OBE (Asolare) would have ordered although we did forget to send Alan up the mast with a VHF - sorry Peter!. Another lesson for us to learn, I guess. The lack of chute has probably cost us a bit but there are many days still to go so who knows we might just beat Gwylan there. To make up for the gentle pace, the evening sail produced a dolphin escort for the early part of the evening and a whale sighting 200 yds away this morning. We had a close encounter with Nauta B for whom we ducked behind, notwithstanding rights, in similar way as we had done for Asolare but the effusive thanks from the crew (over the radio) was in stark contrast to Peter's in his blog to our same manoeuvre. Good luck to you Hr Pfister for showing the good spirit of ARC competitors - in the main! To beat Manby (and of course this is not a race...) we need to do something different and take a navigational risk or two. Watch out for Mike Broughton's next wizardry to get us back on track! In the meantime I hope I successfully download Alan's photograph from the top of the mast - it just makes me ill just looking at it!! And by the way - did Chelsea beat Porto last night? - couldn't seem to get it on any the channels out here.
Andrew Haining
Previous
|
Next