Day 19 Duck Winging on the Atlantic

Day 19 – more wind, more lumpy sea. This is the real Atlantic. It’s good to have the wind but these seas are putting a lot of stress on all the yachts out here. One yacht has lost it’s mast. Picture taking your home and then putting it on the sea. Everything is shaken around rather violently. Things will unfortunately break.

Duck winging and heavily reefed

Skippy was on the daily radio check-in finding out if other skippers were goose-winging given the sea state. Two confirmed they were, that was enough for Skippy – we’d be doing the same! For our non-sailing friends, you put your main sail on one side of the boat, holding it out in place with a line called a preventer. Then you rig a spinnaker pole and take your genoa/jib to the opposite side. This allows you to sail with the wind right behind you. But it’s a fine balance, you need to get the sail sizes equal, get the sailing angle right etc. So off went the boys to the front of the boat, bouncing nicely, while the girls looked after the helm and all our lines at the back. It probably took us the best part of two hours getting it all right and using our manual furler but so far so good. We’re saying that, as every time we say something is going well in the blog next day it collapses. The curse of the blog! And Harold the much-loved mallard duck has insisted duck winging is a much better term so duck-winging we are.

Skippy then suggested the fishing line goes in but a crew of exhausted people surveying a sea of big lumpy waves politely declined Skip’s offer. As we write he’s snuck it in the water…shhhhh…don’t tell.

Feeling proud of our duck-winging Susie felt tortilla would be in order for lunch. The sea state was having none of it and the freezer ended up getting a good clean with lots of egg. No yolk! 🙂

On the fun side, a sing-a-along was initiated and Gareth revealed not only is he a strictly dancing fan but Abba is right up his street too. Out came the Christmas songs, the Pogues, and we felt a little bit of the Yuletide joy going on in London right now.

Alas, when our days are busy, they are really busy. As the sun went down, a couple of alarms and our autopilot was not working. Investigations showed the pin that connects our steering quadrant to the hyrdraulic ram of the autopilot had sheered clean off! And this is a top of the range B&G/Simrad autopilot. Deploy MacGyver Wear who was trying to make a substitute when we realised we could tie the remaining pin on with some good old bungy cord. Wear and Skippy set to the task. It’s crude but, subject to the curse of the blog, it’s working.

We realise we are confusing some people with sailing jargon. So today – sails. We have a big main sail that is used downwind for stability and power and is eased out as much as possible to optimise the area of sail offered to the wind. The front sail is called either a genoa or jib depending on it’s size. If it goes past the mast it’s called a genoa, if not it’s a jib. But the two are frequently used interchangebly – we actually have a genoa. Then we have a staysail which is a smaller sail between the genoa and the mainsail, used instead of the genoa for more stormy weather. Finally there is the beautiful parasailor for downwind sailing only that sadly is packed away due to too much wind.

Quiz for you – suggestions for our finish line song. As one blog comment said, it’s not really in our nature to arrive quietly, we do indeed have a finish line kit ready to wear! Our song on leaving was Seven Seas by OMD. Let us know an appropriate song and the Adina Crew and Harold will play it loud as we cross the line no matter the time of day or night!

This is Adina and Harold duck-winging across an ocean.