The last two days have held their share of drama. After a very peaceful two weeks on sea I guess we had it coming. Yesterday started as most mornings, nice and quiet. The winds and the weather were favorable for some spinnaker sailing so we got everything ready to pull the sail up.

The kids were inside eating breakfast and Sarah was still fast asleep. Niklas started the engine and according to plans we started pulling the sail up. All of a sudden The skipper shouted, get the sail down now, the engine is burning. We could smell the smoke and see it rising in black puffs, my mind was instantly filled with all sorts of horror scenarios. Sarah was woken up and the fire extinguishers were gathered.

Niklas got ready to use his fire fighting skills assisted by Marcus and Sarah, I got the kids in their life jackets and ready if we would have to abandon ship. A fire on board 1000Nm from land is one of the worst case scenarios that you can imagine. When the engine hatch was opened, we noticed to our extreme relief that it was not in flames, it was the exhaust pipe that had exploded, we were out of danger. After the shocking start to the day everything else went smoothly, we were happy to be safe and sound.

This morning the winds were very light and we were mainly bobbing around in the water barely moving at all, the skipper decided it was time to pull up the big white spinnaker. We all should have known what to do but everything went completely wrong. I could not get the boat to turn to the correct wind angle fast enough, Sarah and Marcus let go of the sail too early, instead of pulling it back down it was pulled higher up, it spinned around the genoa and we had disaster on our hands.
After a lot of manoeuvring and hard work we finally got the sail down, not without extensive damage to it though. The skipper was very displeased with us all. These things happen once in a while, sometimes routine procedures go wrong.
What can we say we are only human and make mistakes, hopefully we learn from them and act differently in similar situations in the future. The rest of the day has been very variable, many squalls with rain, no wind and miserable progress, the autopilot has been jumping off as the boat has been turned from one direction to the other with the waves. Now towards the night the wind has picked up again we are doing 6 to 7kts and the mileage is decreasing. Hopefully in about five to six days we should be approaching land, the plan is to visit Fatu Hiva, the Southernmost island of the Marquesas, rest there for some days and then continue to the Tuamotu atoll of Rangiroa. We are all looking forward to a good nights sleep and stretching our legs on firm land.

MF