Trucial Coast, Day 15 - light at the end of the tunnel??
Andrew Hunt December 9th, 2007
Is there light at the end of the tunnel? I hope so…. I have a fairly long tether but the end was definitely in sight when I came off watch this morning, having spent 4 hours in the dark getting heavily rained on the whole time, under a sky completely covered in cloud.I’d seen the wind go from a becalming 10 knots, through to good sailing at 15-20 knots, up to a full flown Gale Force 8 by the time I came off watch. I was looking at the prospect of another day of cloud, rain and squalls with a bit of dread. So when I resurfaced and there were clear patches of blue sky and even some sun (for only the second time since the halfway point) it was a bit of a godsend. If I had reached the end of my tether I’m not sure what I’d have done - after all we’re still 750 nautical miles from St Lucia and the fastest way to get there is to sail! But we’re now reaching in some fairly large seas, but with a pleasant Force 5 at our backs and making good speed of around 7 knots. The area of nasty weather is supposed to be to our north now, and we’re heading south west so I really hope that’s the last we’ll see of it. But given our propensity thus far for finding all the bad weather, who knows! At least we’ll have had a bit of a respite if we do get back into it. We’re taking the opportunity to dry out our wet gear and just enjoy being on deck!
We do have a bit of a head problem: heads are our on board toilets. Our forward head is airlocked (does this make it head locked?) so we can’t pump it out and it’s inoperable. Our aft head has some sort of problem with the holding tank and outflow pipe, so seems to be backing up. So you could say we’re up a certain creek without a paddle! Rob has fixed the aft head before on this trip and now faces the prospect of doing it again. To be a bit delicate, it involves pumping all fluid out of the tank and then pumping air into it to “blow” the blockage. It’s deeply unpleasant and I don’t envy him at all…
We’ve also got a freezer issue, as it’s not freezing things as it should: most of the contents are pretty much defrosted. So we’re working out what to do with the food…. I’ll let you know what our plan is tomorrow!
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