It’s
Tully’s 6th birthday on the Indian Ocean! We’ve got bigg-ish seas (9-12 feet)
and winds in the 25 to 30 knot range. This means it’s bumpy and damp (waves
crashing into the cockpit occasionally) and all the hatches and ports are
closed inside so it’s a bit on the steamy side but it’s breezy and cool enough
that some of that air manages to trickle down to most cabins.
Still, of our 8 crew (5 normal
plus Carl, Josh, and Talia), only Josh is mildly nauseous. The rest of us are
baking cakes, reading, playing video games, and doing all the normal things we
do on a passage.
We are enjoying decent speeds
through these lumpy seas. We’ve got three reefs (the maximum) in our mainsail
and our jib out. We took the spinnaker down a couple of nights ago when Joe
anticipated that the winds would build. I was on watch and Josh was coming on
watch when Joe decided to do the sail change.
Josh and I headed to the
foredeck to snuff the spinnaker. Our new sock is a challenge. I’m fairly
confident it’s on inside out, despite the stitching indicating otherwise. The
sock is a long tube that you can pull down over the spinnaker. Without a sock,
if you drop the spinnaker, you have to dive on top of it to keep it from
flapping all over the place. But ours gets stuck and this time was no
exception. Josh and I tugged on the slender, slippery rope with no results. The
sock didn’t budge. Joe maneuvered the boat to collapse the spinnaker. The sock
came down briefly, then yanked both Josh and me into the air. We yelped as the
line burned our hands and we let go. Thankfully, I had successfully resisted
the urge to wrap the rope around my hand to get better traction. Chasing the
flailing rope around the trampoline, I finally grabbed it as the spinnaker
collapsed around me. Josh came out and we fumbled around, trying to figure out
which end to pull (one end pulls it up and the other pulls it down). Finally,
we got it snuffed and put it away. Then we had to raise the main.
It went up more or less OK but
Josh was having trouble finishing up the grinding. He is relatively new to
sailing so when he said he was afraid he would break something if he kept going
on the winch, I confess I scoffed inside. In the past, I thought the same but
have since learned that the sails are much tougher than I am. I encouraged Josh
to keep going and then took his place, realizing that he was correct. It wasn’t
working as it should. The sail was up 97% of the way but wouldn’t tighten any
more. Joe came out to the mast and we opened the stopper for the halyard which
normally would drop the sail but the sail didn’t drop. Not good.
If we were heading into higher
winds, we would need the ability to decrease the sail area by reefing. If we
had a full main up in the wrong conditions, we could have serious issues. Joe
jiggled and banged and we released the topping lift, but nothing worked. He
tried shifting the wind angle to pop out whatever was binding the sail. Still
nothing. Rather than stand there and watch Joe think as I normally do, I
decided to think alongside him. I always try to ask myself, “If Joe weren’t
here, how would I solve this?” For once, I came up with something that actually
worked. We passed a line through the first loop where we reef the sail. This
gave us a point on the sail that we could use to pull straight down. We cleated
it on one side and put it on the winch on the other. After about three turns,
the entire sail dropped in a heap. Not exactly the best way to treat the sail,
but at least it was down. We raised it again and still couldn’t tension it the
way it normally does but now we knew we could get it down if needed. Within 12
hours, we did have a need and have been able to reef with no issues.
We celebrated Tully’s birthday
with a cake that my family often makes for birthdays. It is quite complicated
and I wasn’t going to list it as an option for her but it is also delicious. I
asked Tully if she wanted a cheesecake (her favourite dessert) but she said she
wanted Cobin to be able to have cakesdds and he doesn’t like cheesecake. So, I
made a Bavarian torte. A critical component of the frosting is cream cheese. I
bought some, thinking it could be useful for frosting but knew it would be a
while before I used it so I put it in the freezer. I took it out to thaw and
noticed that when I put it in the bowl to mix it, the cream cheese had the
consistency of cottage cheese. This texture went away with lots of mixing but
the frosting was still runnier than normal. I put it in the fridge to firm it
up. When I assembled the cake (4 layers), the frosting started to deteriorate
rapidly. I think freezing the cream cheese had destroyed some critical part of
its structure. The flavor was good but its other properties had changed. Each
layer of the cake was sliding around. This activity was compounded by the
vigorous wave action we were experiencing. I literally held the cake together
with my hands while Joe lit the candles in the fastest birthday cake experience
ever conducted on the Indian Ocean. Tully declared it the “best cake she had
ever eaten” so I guess it was a success!
image1 image2