Whitsundays to the Philippines update.....
- Catherine.
- Feb 22, 2020
- 2 min read
The race out of Airlie Beach started with a 2 day motoring experience waiting for the wind to build. The idea was to line the boats up and set sail all at the same time for a Le Mans
To give you and idea of what we looked like with wind assistance see below,
The wind holes were the most frustrating things ever.
Sea, like glass and no forward motion. At one point we had 14 hours of not moving anywhere. Another time we were going backwards loosing 5 hours of sail time.
During these periods we tried to amuse ourselves, catch up on washing and practicing knots or other sailing activities.
Some of the sailing has been very hard. Being keeled over is no fun
Mostly we are sailing hard without too much difficulty however within space of 10 minutes that all changed.
The spinnaker sail which is light weight instead of being a sail full of wind, folded into itself creating an hour glass shape. This was a disaster but as were we using the grinders to pull the sail back into shape Ryan saw that the tack line which attached the spinnaker sail to the boat had chaffed through to the core. He straight away attached another line in case the tack line snapped through. At the same time we had an override, an overlap of rope which tempo prevented efforts to readjust the spinnaker.
All these issues were resolved but a stiff reminder that anything that could go wrong will go wrong.
We are looking forward the next race which starts Sunday 23 February with a return date of between 2-4 March
We do not know which is our next port because the virus has spread to Korea and Japan which were potential arrival ports before Seattle.
Before setting off we have had a little party to celebrate our arrival and prize giving
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