Delivery Day 6

S 23°43.954’ W 007°35.187’

After a hot and peaceful day (due to lack of loud motor noise), we all – even Peter – had a really refreshing swim in the clear, still water – made even more so with the discovery of a pair of snorkel goggles! We all had great fun watching a tiny stripy fish swim in the shadow of the boat, and the chilled and tanned for the remainder of the day.

The crew’s spirits have been high, and many a prank and joke have been played or laughed at. At one point, Stanley was catching a quick nap up on the foredeck – until he was abruptly woken with the on-board air horn, that is. Another popular joke from when the engine was smoking is ‘GET ME THAT FIRE EXTINGUISHER… NOW!’, which the crew utter frequently and have a good laugh about it.

Like we did en route to the island, we decided to hoist the spinnaker on a jury-rigged bowsprit of our spinnaker pole, giving us the grand total of 4 hoisted sails (mains, genoa, storm gib and gennaker). We made excellent speed with this arrangement; we were going at half the wind speed (the whopping -8 knots).

During the night however, we found that our petulant spinnaker pole had decided to make our life interesting, and we found it was bent at over 90°!

This has provided ample jobs for the ‘ADHD’ crew members complaining that they have nothing to do.

We are all very hot but happy, and experimenting some more with complicated and interesting sale rigs.