The second event that happened during our passage from Grenada to Bonaire is that Kim had to go up the mast on our second day, at 7 PM at night! At around 5:00 PM, as Kim has made it customary when sailing more than 1 day, he did a "deck inspection" by walking around the deck, checking joints, bolts, fittings, the mast, boom, the sails and the rigging. Kim noticed that our radar dome was moving sideways especially as Kikuyu was hit by the periodic 10-second large wave that pushed against its transom. The radar dome is above the first set of shrouds on Kikuyu's mast. We all got on deck and for the next 2 hours checked the situation and pondered our options. We expected the waves to get larger on the following day and given that we could lose this important piece of equipment which could also damage Kikuyu as it came down, we made the difficult decision of pulling Kim up the mast. We say difficult because of many reasons.

1. We would do this under sail as the wind was from behind and, at that time, the waves and the winds had calm down. We had been sailing wing-on-wing with the Main sail on one side of Kikuyu and the Jib on the other. Prior to hoisting Kim up, we pulled in the Jib, including putting in the whisker pole back into its cradle, and continued sailing with our Main sail which provided more stability than if we had motored.
2. Daniel and Maria would have to hoist Kim up the mast using a manual and non self-tailing winch. This meant that we had to excerpt a lot of force winding the winch as we pulled Kim up. Daniel and Maria each used one hand to turn the winch as we steadied and held ourselves with the other hand and used all our strength together. In the past we had used the windlass, which is sort of an electronic winch used to deploy and retrieve our anchor chain, but this was difficult to rig under sail.
3. It was night time by the time we made the decision and got all the tools needed for the fix. This could potentially make the job difficult.

Fortunately everything went as planned and even better as the wind and the waves seem to get smoother while Kim was 40-feet up the mast trying to fix the dome. The night was also very clear and we could see very well. In addition, we turned all of Kikiyu's lights on including the steaming light which provided a good bright light. Kim was successful in rigging a line through the radar dome to support it, though he was unable to get the screws back into the rack where they are lose. We would be hoisting Kim up the mast again when we are in port next!