Been a big 24hrs here on Rush with one thing and another.
After an epic day yesterday surfing with 3 reefs and code 5 the breeze and sea built quite considerably and so at Midnight we switched to a slow but safe mode with 3 reefs and the Solent which we’ve had most of the day. Have just swapped back to the code 5 with a general trend down in breeze with an average 17-22kn. Sea is annoyingly still quite big with the odd wave set that can be quite awkward in throwing our big wide transom around. We’ve had some big ones land on deck from all angles including straight through the transom. We are looking forward to the seas trending down a bit through tomorrow, makes a big difference for our particular hull shape at this wind and wave angle. For now we are short shifting on the hand steering as the pilot gets caught out by the odd wave (so do we from time to time). All good fun and getting well into the swing of things. It’s satisfying when you get a wave right and off she surfs, max speed so far was yesterday at 18.7kn!
We caught our first fish. Well, if you can call it a fish, we didn’t know that Mahi Mahi came in snack size but turns out they do! Nevertheless, made some cheeky little pre-dinner goujons to share and we didn’t have to worry about stopping, it was out and onboard before it realised it had a made an unwise decision!
Chafe has been a thing again today. We’ve had to do some rope work on the tack strop on the bowsprit which wore through it’s cover and we also had the spinnaker sheet rub through it’s cover on the guard wires. As we are using a reaching spinnaker dead down wind we hadn’t fully appreciated the acute sheeting and the sheet had been gently rubbing. We’ve end to ended the sheet and made some little guard wire covers with toilet pipe covered in a slippery tape, hopefully that does the trick. You might be able to see in the picture, the Iridium makes it pretty low resolution so maybe not. The fish will be hard to spot ;-)
No sign of sailor Ted today, think he’s looking forward to more settled weather, he didn’t sign up to this....
We are pleased with our progress, we had to make our first time change today as we head West which is a sign we are heading in the right direction. Before we get there we have 4 hrs in total to change so our new ships time for watches, cooking and logbooks is now UTC -1.
Sitting on the cockpit floor under the spray hood as I write this on my iPad, the on watch are smashing out some post-dinner Guns n’ Roses and all is well.
Good night from us all here on the good ship. :-)
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