Rush - Day 17- Seaweed is evil....

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggghhhhhhhh!!!

A new battle has commenced, seaweed! As we get closer the seaweed is getting thicker and there is loads of it, impossible to drive round it because there is so much. As Rush has a flat bottom and it floats on the surface we have been getting it caught around the keel, the engine leg and rudders. It’s also no longer possible to use the hydrogenerator as it gets seaweed around it’s propellor. We’ve done a number of ‘back downs’. This involves dropping the spinnaker, rounding up head to wind and drifting backwards until it comes off. They work well but take time and we’ve done loads, 10 minutes later you need to do another one. What a pain, you can feel Rush being dragged back, we are loosing 1-2kn of boat speed because of it!

On the positive side we have just cracked 300 miles to go. It was looking likely for Thursday morning but the seaweed situation and not as much breeze as forecast means we won’t hold out too much hope on that front. We should be in 15kn of breeze, right now instruments are showing 7-8kn.

Today has been quiz day for the nippers with sweets to win, they got every question right and all the sweets (of course). There’s also been some home schooling with some maths tests and lots of drawing (mess!).

With around 48hrs to go we had to send our St Lucia health declaration today. Glad to report all healthy and well onboard the goods ship. Once we arrive we have to have PCR tests and wait up to 48hrs for the results before we can clear into St Lucia. We’re pretty tight on cooking gas and into the tinned food now so hopefully that will happen quickly so we can get stocked up. Think we will take the quarantine anchorage option whilst we wait rather than sit in the marina, then we can swim.

Other than the seaweed all is well with Rush, she’s been doing an amazing job for us. It’ll be nice to get her to the other side and replace some of the ropes that have worked hard, fix the toilet that broke a few days ago and give her a good wash down. It’s getting pretty hot during the day down below now, very glad of the fans we fitted, they are really good.

Until tomorrow, Rush out :-)