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July 18, 2005
Solent -> Santander
As I write this I am sitting aboard NINJOD on a mooring outside of our host yacht club at Santander. Yes, phew what a relief… We have finally finished one although it was not without incident.
At our 10 minute warning the spinlock tiller arm extension broke off at its rubber flexible hinge thingy. Now in fairness to my wife, who confesses not to know that much about boats (or so I thought) , she saw its condition before our departure and was sure it was going to break, she politely suggested that we replace it. We ( my father and I) assured her that it would not and that if it did it would be engineered with a wire through the flexible hinge thingy thus ensuring functional use without flexible hinge thingy. Needless to say that there was no wire and arms like Popeye were required to manoeuvre NINJOD in the fresh winds.
With one issue on the issues list before the start and no more required NINJOD’s entire electronic instrument system crashed. The NKE topline bus just would not work. We had no depth, wind, log or anything useful information. The night before during the pre-race briefing we had been warned of the navigation perils of the Solent, the thought of tacking out of the Needles without depth information was thoroughly depressing.
We popped a reef in the main and headed off out of the Solent very slowly Fortunately for us we discovered Sleuth Hound and followed them through the final tricky exit into deeper waters.
Our strategy in the English channel was to beat down our rhumbline. It was a painful process but we were pleased to catch some boats up. On the 4th of July we saw Ushant.
The seas around Ushant were large. It was like someone had used a JCB to dig huge holes in the sea, many of which we fell into. At one point while on the helm I found myself an inch or 2 in the air as we fell off of the top of one wave into a hole. We called in at 11.15 on the 4th of July are reported that we were round Ushant.
While our 1st night in Biscay went well our 2nd night gave us a pretty fresh squall came through that left a long split in out mainsail. We reefed to reduce the likelihood of the problem getting worse and carried on, albeit slower.
We arrived in Santander on the 6th of July at 09.52. I was pretty pleased with our elapsed time of 94 hours 32 minutes and 48 seconds given all the issues we experienced and the awful beat out of the English Channel.
I am no longer a Biscay Virgin.. Hoorah.. and as was the case with the 1st shorthanded race I did ( The Triangle ) this event proved to be huge fun socially. I made some new sailing chums, met up with some old ones and, perhaps most important, I learnt a lot about me and NINJOD.
Posted by ninjod at July 18, 2005 01:57 PM