Only as strong as the weakest rope
21 August 2019
Paul Barker
Day six, no dolphins 🐬 for the first day this trip. We were sailing well in moderate to rough seas and a good strong wind pushing us along.
Before I joined the boat ⛵️the skipper had an almost new refit of the boat (always good to see before joining) with new steel rigging cables, ropes, sails and guard rails, from what I can see, all very good quality. Making good speed and time through the day, all was going well, until with a very loud bang something had broken. On inspection we found that the rope to pull the head sail in, had snapped about 3 metres from the drum at the front of the boat, it’s a very important part and turns out that it wasn’t replaced in the refit.
The problem now is replacing it with something else, unfortunately all we have is too big to pass through the hole or not with sufficient strength, the decision is made to use an old rope.
The skippers wife is the person who was chosen to crawl her way up to the front in heavy seas and a very bouncy boat ⛵️(I volunteered to do this task but they said no) she fought her way forward threading the secondhand rope through the pulleys along the side of the boat⛵️. With some confusion of what she was doing she got the job done in around 40 minutes, but not before her life jacket self inflated with a bang, thus making it very difficult to see exactly what she was doing. When she came back to the cockpit I commented that at least it happened in day light.
I went below to get my head down ready for my watch at 22:00 when I came up there was some good and bad news. Good.. the winds were due to get lighter 🙂. Bad.. the rope we replaced had also broken ☹️. I now have the next 6 hours to sail without full control of the sails. For me this time passed without further incident. The skipper has been suffering with quite severe and debilitating sea sickness from day one (that’s 6 full days