Ah, our trusty skipper George ... he's awesome!
After about two days of uninterrupted sailing/motoring, we arrived at our next port of call, Baiona, Spain. However, let me back up to a specific episode.
D'uh ... what's a cruising sail? 😮
So we had the wind at our backs and George decided it was a perfect time to put up the cruising sail. This sail is similar to a spinnaker but rigged a little differently. Anyway, Jon had never seen this sail in action, or a spinnaker for that matter. So he was pretty excited about it. I had never seen a cruising sail in action but have dealt with spinnakers a lot in racing – and they are pretty awe inspiring but in a race situation can be incredible stressful. Anyway, George, Jon and Danny went up to the front to prepare the cruising sail. It was housed in a material chute with an unfurling (if I can call it that) mechanism. With a little struggle, it was released, and it was pretty amazing and looked awesome (just like the skipper !!! – inside joke).
Struggling to release the sail out of the chute mechanism
The speed you can get with a cruising sail if the wind is right is pretty significant and it is so quiet. I think we got up to 11 knots at one point – if I am remembering the right situation – actually, maybe that was another situation – don’t remember – but we did get some great speed compared to the other boats. And it looked great. We were joking that the sail design looked like it was saying “eat this” to the other boats.
The battle continues
Anyway, the wind changed and Jon asked George if the sail could be moved to the other side to take advantage of the changed direction. George said yes and we discussed how this manoeuvre would unfold. So everyone prepared themselves – I didn’t really have much to do, being the least experienced and just watched.
Finally in its full glory
Well in the process of trying to move the sail, the chute mechanism got tangled and wasn’t functioning right and the sail, moved over to the other side, but with the wind not cooperating was being blown against the spreaders. Unfortunately combining all this with the fact that one of the spreaders at the top had a sharp cotter pin sticking out, the sail was catching on this and David and I watched in a bit of a panic and horror as the sail was getting ripped multiple times. We told them to release it and bring it down. Nothing like a huge sail flapping in high winds. Pretty intense.
... eat this ...
Anyway, we got it down but still had a problem with the chute bag being stuck on the rigging. To make a long story short, at one point we had Jon in a harness being pulled up the mast to try and deal with it. All this in high winds with the mast rocking easily 7 feet in either direction. I was holding Jon’s life line and it was pretty stressful to watch. He couldn’t make it up though because the harness was not a good design, was not on him correctly and he was falling out. So we lowered him down (and I could breath again) and pinned the ropes and chute down to wait until we arrived at our next port of call, Baiona, to fix the mess.
A proud skipper and sail, before the ,,, um ,,, we'll call it an oops
So given that I did not expect that story to be so long, I will post about Baiona tomorrow. But that was the cruising sail story. A bit of an adventure to say the least. But no sailing trip like this would be worth its salt without an adventure!
Jon thrilled at experiencing something new in sailing ... which he said for once didn't hurt ... oops ... spoke too soon ... this was before the attempt to put the sail on the other side.
Sounds exciting – too bad the sail got ripped.