Я незнаю извени My email was just hacked and is all screwed up, this is the only way I can warn anyone. Don’t open anything from me that doesn’t look personal.
Can’t we just kill these virus assholes?
A gratuitous picture of Desesperado. How I miss him!
Maui to Canada aboard Samphire took 20 days and was more than a little tedious at times though not without incident. This section of the voyage had a different feeling to the first. During the 43 days from Panama to Maui I don’t think we took a single drop of seawater on deck but almost as soon as we upped anchor at Maui we were beating into choppy seas and strong winds and there was plenty of spray. This calmed down somewhat once Samphire cleared the Paiolo Strait between Maui and Molokai but for a week we pitched into a goodly wind on our starboard bow and you had to look lively on the foredeck if you wanted to avoid a soaking.
I am reminded – in my previous post I rashly declared that I thought Hawaiian sailing canoes are undercanvassed but now I see that they are rigged for the fierce blasts that whip along the channels between islands, so Hawaiians you win. I still think you paddle too much and probably can’t go to windward very effectively, but hell, you look the coolest.
Also in my last post I said something like a proper Pacific crossing involved arriving mad with thirst, having eaten the smaller members of the crew and been dismasted by a hurricane. Well, I should be careful what I wish for: on the fourth night we were dismasted.
At two in the morning a critical bolt worked its way out of the forward rig and the entire thing collapsed to leeward. Samphire has, or had, a unique rig consisting of two identical A-frames rising about 42 feet above deck, which are normally very strong ( I had no hesitation scaling them in order to sit on the horizontal plate at the peak to watch for whales whilst underway, as long as the motion of the boat was mild: up there I can get pretty sick), but, well, we should have kept a better eye on the bolts. We’d been flying a very small “fisherman” sail upside-down between the two mast tops and rather incredibly this sail, sheeted to the top of the aft rig and halyarded to the top of the fore, did not tear and was preventing all 400lbs of the forward rig from falling into the sea; the whole thing was hanging in the air at an angle to leeward and swinging about. The ocean was fairly bouncy, not to mention dark, but we were not in a position where the rig was banging against the hull and threatening to sink us (it probably couldn’t sink us,Samphire is tough), so we had time to plan and move carefully. Paul dismounted what was left of the Furuno radar whilst I went gingerly forward and rolled in the forward furling staysail which was fortunately still taut on its stay. Then came the process of cutting the forward rig free of its remaining good leg and cables, and in a couple of hours we had the whole mess lowered and secured diagonally across the deck.