Day 10: Swimming!

posted in: Atlantic Crossing II 0

The wind has died and the Burnetts are scooting along on their starboard engine at 2600 rpm due to the demands of keeping the load at 60% during the break-in period. Motoring isn’t ideal, but everyone is appreciating the hot water. And hot water means laundry day! One of the nice things about being isolated from other humans is that you can relax the rules a little. We haven’t generated much laundry because we basically all wear the same clothes for a few days in a row. Except for Allie, that is. She has been in the same pajamas for about a week, Mel is observing. Probably should do something about that…

Allie’s hair turned out fantastic! Put a shell necklace on her and she resembles a funky mermaid.

After we took the spinnaker down, we hove to and Greg executed Operation “Sh*#er’s Full.” This required donning the scuba hookah and swimming under the boat with a long fiberglass rod, which he stuck in the discharge port for the kids’ holding tank. Unfortunately, no blockages were detected and Marvin did not get any relief from this, and now Greg thinks the problem lies with the valve in the seacock for the tank.

At this point the mermaid’s call to the sea overwhelmed Allie, and she went for a swim with Greg in the middle of the Atlantic. Mel and Tommy, the more anxious, er, smart, of the four, stayed aboard and worried, despite the safety precautions in place. Allie’s summary: “Fun!”

Boat stuff: 152 nm in 24 hours. We are motoring. The wind petered out yesterday, and the spinnaker really doesn’t like apparent wind of 6 kts or less. When we turned more upwind to increase that speed, it thrashed around anyway in the beam seas. When we took it down, we found some significant chafe in the halyard and realized we probably had the halyard extended a little too far the first day, allowing the spinnaker too much room to flop around. We’ve lost about 4 feet of spinnaker halyard and are going to have to be clever about it for the next time we hoist, which hopefully will be tomorrow when the wind picks up again. A spare spinnaker halyard is the one spare halyard we don’t have. Ooops.

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