Evening all.

Oh what a day... A very long but good day. In the early hours of this morning the winds decided that they were going to go on a holiday. With 5 knots of wind the boat was creeping along. Every 20 minutes or so the Auto Pilot off course alarm would blast at me and I would need to get up out of bed and re-trim or hunt for some wind. So, from 4 am until now that has been the cycle. I finally gave up on getting any sleep at around 10am local time, when I went on deck. I could barely see 50 meters from the boat as a heavy fog had settled, one that remained with me for most of the day. Never to waste a good opportunity I thought that I would use this windless day to get a bunch of the jobs done on the boat.

And what a productive day I have had. I had the chance to take a look at my troublesome batten and found that my sewing skills were not to blame. It had just worked its way out the side of the batten pocket. After a good 15-minute game of tug-o-war I finally got the batten to re-seat in the batten car and closed the end of the batten pocket. For good measure, I sewed some tack stitches in to hopefully help prevent this from happening again. I then took the chance to inspect the main sail and check for chafe or tares.

I did find a very small hole in the foot of the Main sail (the bottom bit) and attempted a repair however due to the heavy fog and moisture in the air I couldn’t get the repair tape to stick so I will have to tackle that one again another day.

I also inspected all compartments and gears like the steering system and bailed out all the water in the boat. I also tried to find where the water was coming from and Sikaflex the spots to help reduce the water ingress. There wasn’t an alarming amount of water but still an annoying amount when I need to sleep listening to it slosh around.

So after the whole day of moving from one job to the next I feel in high spirits as I have accomplished many of the jobs on my short list.