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Mojomo (and the rest of the ARC) left Las Palmas yesterday. Mojomo's mailasail blog HERE.
Day 1 quote of the day:
The rules ask that we sail for the first half hour, so after 31minutes we snuffed it and motored fast down the coast
Day 2:
26:24N 17:21W at 0835 UTC 8+ knots SOG, sailing, total engine hrs 1.55 since start. I bet they say this was a "busy night" with things like one boat losing its rudder. Quite big seas but we kept sailing at over 8knots, wind down at dawn but back up now.
Interesting that parasail.
I see the manufacturer has manage to pre-blow it out to save the owner the trouble.
Are the slots adjustable, like the vent on a hot air balloon?
or is that me...
http://trooncruisingclub.org/ 20' - 30' Berths available, Clyde.
Cruising, racing, maintenance facilities. Go take a look, you know you want to.
(to save you the effort of clicking through to Mojomo's Mailasail blog)
23:35N 23:10W at 0830 utc 25th Nov
7-9 knots SOG now and overnight after slower day on Tuesday down to 6 knots, but we've still only motored under two hours since the start, an incredible achievement for me to actually somewhere distantish without slinging on the engines.
We're still heading mostly downwind with the same parasail up. We try adjust and pin the sail during the day for course corrections, and then at night we just have it on (safer at high wind speeds) dead ahead position. We had to have a discussion about which ropes are sheets and which are guys. I think we've agreed that the main heavy duty ones through the rollers are guys, and the pinning/position ones are sheets. Tho Rob says surely the ones that come back to the winch are sheets, on the sheet winch? Whatever, we don't care what they are as long as we all call them the same thing.
We'd like to be able to release/adjust the sheets from the cockpit, but that means we need more heavy duty blocks to route the sheets (or guys) down to the cleats near the anchor and back to the cockpit. My best daft idea is to partially dismantle the boom traveller and use those. We'll see.
Had go at fishing yesterday, hooked two, landed one and threw it back cos it wasn't big enough. That's enough fish mulilation for one day. Peter was Mum and ready to switch to fish dinner at a moment's notice, but we had pork chops, which of course was fab. Later in the evening, after he'd washed up and gone for a sleep, I noticed that instead of cleaning the hob, he seems to have fitted a brand new one. I'll have to have a word with him about that.
Bryan used his sextant yesterday, and all went perfectly. In fact, he made a historic cosmological discovery which might easily win him a Nobel prize - the sun is almost twenty miles away from its normal position, and actually jigs about a bit sometime around noon. Has anyone else noticed this?
The ARC race is in full swing, and thank gawd BxWx is getting the position data and not me, jeez, reams of positions for oodles of boats. They've mixed the email addresses and sent me the yards of positions as though I'm gonna plot them out or summink.
However, ahem, although we're not racing, my early position reporting worked fabulously and moved us into 6th position all yesterday morning, until about midday when it seems we're blimmin 19th. Apparently the leading multihull is "Mediocre"(?) the very same guy/sheet who protested us for being 24800kilos but in fact we were perfectly ok at 24800lbs. The direct sistership (ie same brand and make) of Mojomo is 45 miles behind. Or it was yesterday. So we're doing fine. We may have overtaken the nudist Finn boat (148?) last night, not sure. It's also looking good for next week - BxWx is suggesting light winds. I might be so-so at sailing but I am world class at giving it some stick with the loud pedal...
Textwise it's been quiet. Rob sister saz that says that Jordan has dumped her boyfreind in the jungle. Bryan's house still hasn't burned down. Hot news: - Bryan says he's FOUND his wife's glasses she left on the boat, okay?
Technical point:
The shot with the spinnaker has the boat sailing from left to right. Standing on the shore looking out to sea, you are looking west are you not. So - this means that Matt and the rest of the fleet are obviously sailing north.
Whilst I realise that it won't be as much fun as the spinnaker probably wont fly, I think they all need to turn left and start heading over to America - otherwise the chents cruise is going to be massively over-subscribed.
