day 9

"The Minnow" ARC 2005 Atlantic Crossing

Mike's Exciting Day 9 Update!

Our bucketing line, among other things, tuckered me out last night. So I
went to bed early and slept very well. I awoke this morning before sunup
feeling pretty good. Ready to take up where we left off the night before.
David and Jim were already up and at 'em.

A hose was pumping some of the remaining water from the front right locker.
We proceeded to hang up and lay out stuff to dry, empty the remaining items
from the hold, and finally bucket out the remaining water in the hold. Pumps
are really slow on hundreds of gallons.

The wind was medium and the seas fairly calm. We were moving along fairly
nicely with the gennaker and mainsail. So we also attacked the main halyard
problem. We further assessed the rope chafing and made some "bandaid" type
repairs to it. We are fairly certain it will not chafe unless we need to
move it, like for reefing. In the next couple of days, when we hit calm
seas, we plan to put a new halyard up.

We put our pumps back together in their original configuration and fixed a
lot of minor things on the boat. It was a productive morning and continued
into early afternoon. Then we heard this loud "rrrrrip." The gennaker had
torn from the bottom to the top. It's finished for this trip. And it was a
really good sail. Now we go slower. Blah.

That is until we get spinnakerable winds. If we get spinnakerable winds.

We proceeded into the night with a full main and solent.

Fishing report:

We caught a nice dolphin. Even at 7-8 knots it skidded it's way toward the
boat. It's in the fridge now. Our other pole caught our prop (we think that
might have happened during our gennaker salvage maneuvers). We just left it.

Arts and Entertainment:

There were lots of moans and groans and gripes. Old men doing manual work
that they are not used to (1) get a lot of funny marks on their bodies (2)
walk around a lot more gingerly than normal (3) moan and groan and gripe
when they get up from a sitting position.

We ended the evening with a nice music-filled movie featuring George Clooney
singing called "Oh Brother Where Art There." "You are My Sunshine" was the
boat favorite. (we enjoyed a baritone version of it around 3:00am, but
that's officially day 10 info)