Trucial Coast, Day 19 - becoming irrational…
Andrew Hunt December 13th, 2007
It’s amazing how the ocean can make the most rational of people superstitious! Within an hour of our arrival in St Lucia, we have to hand a completed rally declaration to the event organisers. Part of this declaration is a gear test, where you rate the performance of various bits of kit on the boat, and give details of the manufacturer and model: a potentially powerful piece of customer feedback as 2,800 miles of ocean is as good a road test as any! Because you only have an hour after arriving to submit this, it follows that much of it will have to be completed at sea. Yet Rob, engineer by trade and definite man of science and reason, is loath to do this in case it jinxes a piece of kit that hitherto has performed admirably! And there’s me with my list of things I want to do once ashore. Whilst perhaps a little less of a logical person (I did a humanities degree after all!), I still don’t normally give much truck to superstition and when a black cat crosses my path I don’t torture myself trying to remember if this is good or bad luck. But I’m reluctant to commit my “landing list” to permanent format for fear of prejudicing our arrival!
So, once we arrive in St Lucia, whenever that may be and in no way presuming it will be in the next 24 hours….here are some of the things I’m really looking forward to
- The rum punch they dish out on arrival. Still only had one beer and one elderberry and port liqueur the whole crossing!
- A few beers. See above.
- A shower. I have been showering on board, but to be able to stand under a stream of water and not worry about conserving it, or having to pump out the shower every 20 seconds or so, will be blissful.
- Going to the laundrette! Some of my clothes for the crossing have definitely reached their limit…..
- Some chocolate. Those who know me, know I have a massive weakness for chocolate (I blame Dad). But since arriving in Las Palmas on 23rd November I have not had one single bit of chocolate! So I’m really looking forward to that.
- Some fiery food. I don’t know why but I’ve got a craving for a curry or something really spicy.
So there you have it, my simple wish list. Not too much to ask!
We have continued our incredibly bumpy progress towards the finish line without major hiccough so far. I don’t think the swells are any bigger than those we’ve had previously, but our angle to them is meaning we’re really being tossed around. However our DTF is 105 miles and we’re still anticipating a (very) early morning arrival into Rodney Bay, all being well. We’ve had a bit of company for much of the last 24 hours: in the afternoon yesterday as we were running along under reefed genoa and staysail, a Moody 54, Myrach of Ibiza dropped in on us, and we’ve been within a couple of miles of her ever since, although I think she has disappeared over the horizon in the last hour or so. She did prompt us into a sail change and course change, aiming directly for the north of the island and broad reaching under genoa alone. During this sail change, we discovered a distressing fact: our staysail, the workhorse of the entire sail collection, which has done an amazing amount of work (I make it roughly 220 hours out of 432 sailed so far, probably our most used sail!), has been damaged and won’t be used again this trip. Several of the metal hanks that attach the sail to the inner forestay had unclipped and two of them had chafed right through the sailcloth on the luff and were now chafing directly onto the cord that runs up the inside of the luff. She has been (temporarily) retired with full honours. By which I mean she’s in a bit of a heap on the foredeck scrunched with a couple of sail ties and attached to the deck with shockcord!
So our final day (fingers crossed…) is on us - we’ll be continuing much as we are throughout the day and then in the early hours of the morning we’ll complete some yachty manouvres around the top of St Lucia, pass Pigeon Island and sail across the finish line into Rodney Bay. I’ll post one last log to let you know how it all went!
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