I finished my bread this morning having fried eggs on toast to make a change from Porridge. Very nice. I had another bit of toast with cheese and some plum Chutney (thanks Mandy, I think) because I forgot to bring any marmalade. That’s another thing along with the garlic and more music which I should have remembered to bring. The sea is up again and we’ve a bit of a blow forecast for this afternoon / evening it’s up at about 20 knots at the moment. I’m not going to try to make bread today, it’s too bouncy, it’s hard to even put the kettle on at the moment, I have a few packets of partially baked bread so will do one for lunch with my soup.
I’m just back in the cabin from having stowed the main and put up the jib, we’ve lost half a knot but I don’t want to stress the rig. The main puts quite a bit of torsion on the mast and the alloy gooseneck fitting which is now being used as a mast step I’m keen to preserve, it’s not designed to take much torsional stress.
I tried putting up the jib in addition to the main at dawn having altered course a couple of times in the night with the wind now in the south but it was backing and filling and not too happy so I doused it again.
Last night looking around the rig etc. I noticed that my repair to the jib is taking wear, I don’t understand why because it doesn’t appear to be rubbing on anything, I’ve been tying a sail tie to the tack to centralise it within the pulpit to keep it clear of rubbing. In any event I took the sail down below and cut out a much bigger patch of sail repair sticky cloth and put this on, the glue on this batch seems a lot better as does the weight of the material, it came as a freeby with my new North 3dl sail (now consigned to the deep, unfortunately, with the mast) so should be fairly high quality, fingers crossed it holds for a bit longer than the last repair.
We did a good turn yesterday of 98 miles run and 91 of distance made good. Hopefully today will be better as we were doing more than 4 knots and sometimes over 5 yesterday, we’re down to 3.5 now but there’s only a few hours of the run to noon left in any case and we’ve done 99 miles already. 490 miles to Campbeltown now, ticking along.
We’ve been visited by another bird, I think it was a Herald Petrel but the bird book thinks it’s only found here accidentally, it may have been a sooty shearwater but it looked smaller, darker and different to me.
Hoping for some dolphins when we get into home waters, I’m missing them having still not seen one this trip which is I think quite unusual.
Just lost my long post Jock as wasn’t signed in so suffice to say looks like you’re 4/5 gone and will be sad to see the end in some ways but hoping you continue to stay safe and cheerful as ever May your bow be filled with plentiful playing dolphins! 🤞👍😁