"A good chilly morning to you from ACCIONA 100% EcoPowered!
"It has been another tricky night but a little less than yesterday. I have been bringing up sails up for the last few hours now but the problem is that the sea is quite choppy and the waves are coming from every angle. From time to time a wave comes over the bow and sends me flying, and the boat gives an enormous slam down which at times seems like it’s going to split it in two. So I really can’t go at top speeds until this choppy sea state disappears. I am trying to sail higher but then I come to a standstill, so it is a little bit frustrating. I have tried it a couple of times and there was one huge slam down in the boat at 18 knots that nearly knocked my teeth out…but well, it won’t be like this forever.
"It has started to get quite cold and I have put the shower curtain on the door….the whole team laughed at me when I asked for it because it doesn’t look very nice but I knew exactly where I was going to use it and it works!! The humidity level has dropped inside the boat. I admit that isn’t very stylish but it definitely does its job.
"I am still getting water coming into some places in the stern, between one and two buckets a day depending on the conditions. It isn’t serious but the water is so cold that I would definitely prefer not to be bailing it out.
"Inside there is a little bit of chaos where the clothes situation is concerned and I have put them into different categories:
1 Wet that can’t be used again… a small mountain has formed
2 Wet but maybe with some sunshine they can dry
3 Wet but can be dried over the coffee maker when I make coffee…particularly my socks
4 Wet but ‘usable’. When my clothes are just a little bit wet I can still put them on, and usually do so during the maneuvers because I sweat a lot and can then change into something that isn’t so wet, but just a bit damp. This is what I wear when I am inside.
5 Damp: “the Jewel of the Crown” I have a damp hat in my bunk bed that is inside the bag that is also inside my Gore-Tex sleeping bag. I usually sleep in the bunk only on the days that the boat is on a good heading and everything is going well. I actually get inside the sleeping bag without my foulies on. It is a really good feeling. I normally have the wet weather gear on day and night (I only put the ‘smock’ on inside the boat when there are over 30 knots).
6. The real ‘Dry Clothes’. These are vacuum packed inside the clothes bags.
"Yesterday I had an important setback – the radar. I found it hanging off the mast from the cable. It had come off of its fastening where it is fixed, and which allows it to move from side to side. I went up the mast to the height of the radar (no fun at all as it was pretty rough) and tried to put it back into place. I managed to fix it so it wouldn’t break again, and fixed it to the shrouds so that it can’t swing around anymore.
"At least it is now fixed in one place and won’t be crashing into the mast any more. It isn’t working right now, but hopefully I can go up calmly and have a look and see what is wrong with it. This has already happened a couple of times and when I opened the cover it was just a loose cable. So hopefully……
"As an emergency measure I also have an apparatus that detects the radar signals of other boats and increases my echo so that other boats see me better on their radar."
I have also had a little problem with the main sail track. The pins that fix the batten to the track had broken and since I was already dressed in my climbing gear, I opened it up to take out the track and put in a spare that I have. As I didn’t have any more pins for the tracks I have actually made some of my own, which I am thinking of patenting since I think they last much longer than the Karver ones – they don’t even last it through a battle.
