Really Awkard Boxes

Great news! We didn’t break anything yesterday. It was still too rolly to send Jacob up the mast and so we had to stick to our poled out genoa and staysail combo. The wind angle had changed overnight, however, and so we did have to swap everything over to the other side. That involves rather a lot of knitting and making sure that the sheets and guys (fancy nautical name for ropes) run the correct side of the guardrails, and that the running backstays are in place and tensioned correctly. We are gradually getting better. At the start of the trip this exercise could easily take a couple of hours as we tried to find the best run for each of the ropes. Yesterday we managed it in just 30 minutes, and we actually only stopped sailing for a couple of minutes, albeit under staysail alone. The good news is that despite the general lack of wind and our very limited sail plan, we still managed to average over 5 knots.

The other major activity of the day involved the Blue Water Runner. To give a clear run for the various ropes, we needed to get the sail off the guardrails and down below. This is easy when its all furled up in a long sausage, but not so easy when its 150 square metres of loose sail. We got it down below OK but then we were faced with how to fold it. The sail itself is probably 18 metres long and perhaps 14 metres at its widest. The cabin we were trying to fold it in is considerably smaller. We tried rolling it, we tried flaking it; we even tried the ‘lets quickly stuff it all in its bag and do the zip up before it notices’ technique, except the zip on the bag is broken and the Blue Water Runner wasn’t in the mood to play ball, after all, we had dragged it away from its sea view. In the end we just stuffed it into the forecabin in a big white heap and quickly shut the door.

Even simple jobs can prove challenging at sea, which brings me to the changing the gas cylinder story. The other evening whilst Vanessa was preparing a gourmet feast in the galley, the gas ran out. Now normally this would just involve a quick nip to the gas locker to swap the regulator between cylinders and then Bob’s your uncle. Unfortunately it isn’t quite as simple as that on Shepherd Moon. As part of the refit last winter, we installed swanky, new, fibreglass gas cylinders. These have the advantage of being far lighter than metal cylinders, plus they don’t rust and you can see the level of the gas through the cylinder. The disadvantage is that you can only fit one in the gas locker. The two spares are in the aft locker, lashed down with rope and wedged between four Really Useful Boxes (or, as it turned out, really unhelpful boxes).

In a marina it would be fairly straightforward to empty everything out, but when the deck is behaving like a fairground ride, it becomes a little more challenging. Firstly we needed to get the old cylinder out of the gas locker along with the four petrol cans that help wedge it into place (our philosophy is to have all the potential bombs stored together; you might as well go out with a really big bang if it all goes pear shaped). Next we needed to take out the really awkward boxes and pray that they would not take their lead from the Blue Water Runner, and leap into the sea. The space made by removing the boxes gave the spare diesel and water cans an opportunity to ricochet wildly around the floor of the locker, an opportunity that they were only too happy to seize. Inserting my body into the void restricted their fun to an extent, but not enough to prevent the infliction of a number of bruises. All that remained was to unlash the new cylinder. If someone else had been responsible for the over-enthusiastic knot tying I would at least have had the mild satisfaction of being able to curse their OCD tendencies whist trying to untie them, in the dark, through a gap that wasn’t really wide enough to get my arm through, whilst being attacked bodily by assorted jerry cans. But, alas, that wasn’t the case. Anyway, the knots were eventually undone, the cylinders were swapped over, and the diesel and water cans had their brief period of freedom brought to an end. I think we ended up eating around 11pm that evening, but it was well worth the wait.