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A wrapped kite and a repair - all in a night's work
Thursday, 24 September 2009
Tom Gruitt and the crew on Cape Breton Island have been busy with the sewing machine... fortunately all the crews received special training from Hyde Sails before they set off so they were fully prepared to complete the task...
"Well, last night was all going very well, boat speed was great and we were doing great on the leading boats until we tore our lightweight kite. We were running doing about eight knots when after chafing on the forestay the sail gave way with an almighty rip. With a slick bit of crew work in the dark, the sail was dropped and a new one hoisted within 10 minutes. Unfortunately due to the fairly light winds and a bit of swell we managed to get our medium weight kite wrapped three times around the forestay, and in doing this put a few holes and in that kite too! Overall a pretty bad night, even one of the toilet seats has broken!
"The medium kite has been repaired and as I speak the lightweight is having the foot sewn back on (see portrait pic). A great effort has been made by all with most having little sleep and some of us feeling a bit a bit ill bobbing around on the foredeck retrieving pieces of spinnaker or being down below sewing the thing back together again. We now need to get back on the ball and start chasing down people ahead as we round Finistere and head further south towards Rio.
"Due to a few people being ill today I have been doing a bit of freelance motherwatching, I cleaned the heads and changed all the bins, it's always good to keep everyone happy as they'll be the ones cooking your food next!
"I think everyone is settling in to their watch systems well, I have a different watch system to Watch A and Watch B, my watch (which only contains me) overlaps the last two hours of one watch and the first two hours of the next, this brings great continuity between the two watches and means I can pass on all the info from one watch to the next. Another added bonus is that I get plenty of time to do my media bit as I'm not needed all the time so can pop off for a few minutes to write this or take more photos of things happening on deck. Sleep is short, only 4 hours before you have to get up again and if like me your bunk is right next to the generator it's a pretty poor 4 hours sleep. Sleep is getting more and more important as more mistakes will be made when the crew are tired, anyway all this talk of sleep is making me yawn! Goodnight, or should that be good morning?"
posted by Hyde Sails at
22:30
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