Race 6 - Day 19
Crew Diary - Day of fun
10 February

On mid-day watch today, we were joined by ‘Walther’, a very friendly little pigeon. He started by landing on the helm cage, just behind Jorge. Not realising he was there, Jorge almost jumped out of his skin when he turned and came nose-to-beak with Walther a few mins. later.

Walther then jumped onto the top of the companionway and just watched us for a while. Seumus popped up the steps a little while later and had almost the same reaction as Jorge. He then suggested renaming Walther, ‘Pate’ which we felt was a little cruel.

‘Walther’ had half a cup of water but declined a nibble of oat cookie then sat and sunbathed for a long time watching us. Such was the intrigue with watching Walther, that various events combined and resulted in us broaching, followed very swiftly by the support crew coming up on deck to assist in the Code 1 (biggest) Spinnaker retrieval from the depths of the sea!

All hands remained on and below deck to re-pack and make minor repairs to our code 1 spinnaker whilst Yankee 1 was hoisted and a reef taken up in the main, in order to resume racing. We were now in sight of Punta del Este gaining on us from behind.

Code 1 finally packed in the sweat box (sail locker with hatch closed) and re-hoisted. Unfortunately various events then combined again resulting in us blowing the tack and lazy sheet and having to bundle the code downstairs again and re-pack to try for a third time! What fun we had?!

Having successfully launched Code 1, lowered the Yankee and shaken out the reef, Seumus, predictably, decided he now wanted to change it to the Code 2 (medium sized Spinnaker), so down Code 1 came and up went Code 2, much to the entertainment of Punta del Este now only half a mile behind us.

I have now finished helping to pack my third spinnaker in one shift. Never done that before, neither have I fed a pigeon a bowl of water!

Tammy Hirst CV29. 11.02.2020.