Guest blog entry
20 May 2012 | Pacific Gyre
Ron
Ha ha! Sean is letting me (Ron) tell the TRUE story by being the guest blogger today! First, everything Sean has told you already is a lie! No seriously, he is doing really well today. We officially declared today to be Sean's spa day. That means he's not allowed to fix anything. We couldn't stop him from fixing a block on the whisker pole, but otherwise he didn't do much, which is GREAT for us :-).
So today is shower day. We get a nice hot shower every other day. Everyone gets their own gallon of water and just enough privacy to get all squeaky clean. Scott commented that we really should be showering every third day because we really don't have that much water. But it's been hot, so Sean convinced Scott that we should be doing this every other day. Scott conceded with the comment "Okay, fine Sean, I'll shower with everyone". Of course, I came back with "uhh, that didn't sound right" and we chuckled for a bit.
So about the block repair job Sean directed us to do. A few hours later AFTER we finished creating an innovative solution with the duct tape and spare block, Sean calls us "hey guys, come check this out". And, there is another traveler just to the side of the broken block with the EXACT SAME BLOCK on it. All we had to do was slide that one off and replace it on the long traveler, and we would have been done. Instead, we rigged this elaborate block. It's working great, though, so we're unlikely to do the easy repair.
We cut the motor sometime around noon and have been sailing between 3-5 knots all afternoon. We actually are on our originally planned course sailing with just the genoa. We were able to furl and unfurl it without trouble.