PPJ Day 7
08 April 2016 | The Pacific Ocean
Vandy
Another day, another sail repair. This time we ministered to our jib, as its foot was beginning to fray and separate. Using the procedure that we worked out for fixing the Code 0 yesterday, we pulled the jib down and stuffed the affected part down the hatch, where the sewing machine was waiting. Fortunately, on closer inspection, we discovered that the fraying bit was only a UV-protective fabric skirt that had been sewn onto the foot of the sail; the actual sailcloth was fine. The sewing machine had a hard time punching through the fabric and thick sailcloth, and so after a few feet of repairs, I took over and hand-stitched a bunch more. The last little bit we stuck on with seam tape. We broke one sewing machine needle, and I broke two needles and bent the point of one, hand sewing, but we eventually got it done. We pulled the jib back on deck and slid it up onto the forestay, where it's again ready for action.
We changed our clocks today. SCOOTS Adjusted Time is now one hour earlier. We were noticing that it was still quite light outside, when my 7 pm bedtime came around, and the sun wasn't rising until after my 4-7 am shift. It's about the longitude where you'd expect to make an hour time change anyway. I'm looking forward to seeing the sunrise in the morning. I did, however, forget to move the start time of downloading weather faxes from 6 am to 5 am, so I missed that batch this morning.
Eric answered the age-old question: can boobies snatch flying fish out of the air? The answer: yes. Apparently, it was a pretty cool thing to watch.
Here's a sneak peek for one of the things we'll be doing tomorrow: we discovered a small rip in our spinnaker today. sigh
Deck Check: no fish, no squid Miles traveled in last 24 hours: 155 for an average speed of 6.45 knots Total miles traveled: 1085 Miles left to go: about 1795
Sorry for the late posting today. We've been pretty busy and I hadn't had time to send this.