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Defyr - Day 6 - Mastwalk at Night



We were sitting in the night watch with Rimpiläinen. It started to get dark as the moon was hiding behind the clouds. We had only 5-6 m/s wind and it was coming almost directly behind us. Even so it rather looked like we were heading to New York instead of St Lucia. We had hoped to get more wind and from better angle, but this is what we had. With this 5 knots speed our estimated arrival to New York would be in three weeks. So we more or less let the autopilot do the work and chatted this and that.

Wind lowered even more and turned behind us. "What an earth is happening with our genoa." First it hovered towards deck and then slipped into the sea. Rimpiläinen run off to collect the sail and I run inside to put on decklight and wake up others.

The shackle of the genoas halyard had broken. Now we had a bit of a problem. The halyard was in the mast top and the sail was on the deck. So it was time to decide who's going to make the walk to the mast top in the dark night. Okay, now someone might think why we didn't just put the new code zero up. Well, eight hours earlier we found the code zero in sea, after a "thingie" in the halyard broke down. So we had to fix genua if we didn't want to sail the night with a mainsail only.

Rimpiläinen was ready to climb to the mast top. We attached two halyards on him to get him up. Also we had one rope, that pulled him downwards to prevent spinning endlessly around the forestay. And yet one rope that kept him attached to forestay. Of course the wind went up to six m/s and the waves made it a bit of a challenge for Ville. All of our crew was pulling some rope, and we were glad to be seven. Everything was set and Then it was bloody winching that was done by Tiksi and Alex. Up he went! Afterwards he said that it was almost ok in the top, but between first and second spreader it was "rather" shaky. We got the broken halyard down (and also Ville). Have to say some hoorays were shouted!

We replaced the shackle with a new one and made our genoa fly again! It took 1 hour and 15 minutes to get the genoa from sea to the mast again! After the hazzle we sat in the cockpit and our chef managed to make us sandwiches and cold beer for everyone. I'd say that was well deserved!

Annika & crew from Defyr

Ps. More in finnish www.saaressa.com

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