Day 5 - Pacific Crossing -27th March

Tonight I ache all over. It's been parasail day.

But first, last night. Amazingly, for the first time there is very little to report. Everything went to plan. We chugged along at four and a half knots with a prevented full main on a broad port reach. Only two things to report. Firstly Gill caught me asleep on watch. It was only 10 minutes. I know because I listened back to my Audible book and that's all it was. But she's still not convinced. The second event was much more interesting. We got a message from Mariel one of Atlantic crew saying to watch out for a bright asteroid crossing the moon. Guess what? We saw it! Incredibly bright like a multicoloured pin prick it passed for us just below the moon which is now getting bigger and then moved eastwards back towards Galapagos. Very cool. Thanks Mariel, it was beautiful.

So at our morning meeting when we decide what we will do for the day I had one priority. "Look Gill, if we don't try to fly our parasailor over the next few days we might as well sell it because we won't get a better opportunity". So that's what we did and it took nearly all day one way or another. And that's the reason I'm knackered tonight.

The parasailor is a beautiful giant three cornered sail. It is attached to a rope at the top of the mast and there are two ropes in each of the bottom two corners. It flies out the front of the boat and pulls the boat along downwind with the wind coming from behind. To make it easier to fly it has a horizontal slit two thirds of the way up. And to tame it it has a big sausage of sail material that is open at the bottom end. The steps are. Run the ropes. Attach the top rope. Attach the bottom ropes. Hoist it up. Let it fly. Tighten the ropes appropriate for the wind. Sounds easy? Oh, I forgot to say it is 169 square metres. That is one big sail and a lot can go wrong. Especially when it's the first time we've done it on our own.

Three times before we've flown it with other people. In Portugal with Andy after the regatta there, in Grenada with Tony and Rosemary of Celtic Rose. And finally more recently with Peter and Sally of Milly. Peter gave us excellent tuition (we hope). We started to launch it at 9.30am. After four attempts to get all the ropes correct (the little bits of string trick didn't work Peter because that pesky continuous blue rope kept playing up). But finally Gill hauled it up inside its sausage, I let go, I pulled the sausage up and there it was. 7 5 knots, quiet and no rolling. It was then 12.30. We returned to the cockpit, tweaked it a bit and had lunch. We flew it until 4.30 when we thought we had better take it down for the night. Basically reverse the process. It took an hour. And now we have our night time rig of prevented out mainsail again. Phew.

Tomorrow it should be a lot easier as it is stored on the side deck, ropes attached and ready to go A good day.


Please do keep your messages coming. It's great to hear from old and new friends. The last thing we do before settling down for the night watches is to download them and read them out.


We are now over a third of the way from Panama to French Polynesia and over 500 miles from Galapagos. FP is 3.5 hours behind Panama so we will have to lose that time before we arrive. It is also around 3,000 miles to FP so every thousand miles west we go we need to lose about an hour by putting our clocks back. Already dawn is coming later and sunset is around 7.00 instead of 6.30. We are getting west now at 97°W. Working out what time it is back in the UK is getting tricky especially as they just put their clocks forward but an hour!


email (text only, no pictures) to mvgc3@sailmail.com

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