Be The Jam

Position: Indian Ocean

S 08°09.21'

E 063°13.24'

Heading on bearing 280 degrees. Wind South easterly Moderate to strong.

Loads more problems. Problems by the bucket load. Getting very serious now. The Jib (Small Genoa) is so damaged now that we risk trashing it completely if we use it again. So that means we have no Jib to use before reaching the Seychelles . Another problem the pole for the Spinnaker snapped in half last night! That leaves us Spinnaker less as well. And finally Rupert spent most of the morning attending to the Genoa, the repairs we did earlier are holding, but more holes are appearing up and down the Mylar, Panels (Type of material), so much so that the sail has gone to the top of 'The high risk of tearing'

Category, (because we have one of those lists on board); so that has to come down in any strong wind! The only thing that seems to be holding together is the Main sail.

You might ask why is this happening? Well the sails were put away 2 years ago, not used since; and only now it has become apparent that they were not rinsed in fresh water. The salt water has attacked the sails in a variety of forms, like the eyes, the materials, even the stitching. The problem is they are the only sails we've got. The storms we're encountering aren't helping either. Last night was bad again. We have decided there is a storm highway or motorway between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres;

Think of a large motorway, like the M25, then there are these HGV's driving along it, except these HGV's are the size off 747's! There are a lot of them and they are all travelling in the same direction across the eight lanes! Some of them pass others, some of them crash into each other, but instead of stopping they carry on in a miss mash of wreckage, reeking havoc as they go. Now we are a tortoise, going very slowly across this 8 lane motorway of HGV747's! This tortoise is late for a date and has to cross the motorway as soon as possible. All the tortoise can do is start crossing the road. Well inevitably the tortoise gets clipped once in a while. His toe gets run over (The eyes in the sails go), his foot gets it (The Genoa gets holes in it). For those animal lovers out there I won't tell you what happens to the tortoise when the Spinnaker boom got broken!! Fortunately the Tortoise (i.e. Can Can - our boat) hasn't been run over completely!

Well enough of all that, it only makes me feel tired when I think about it (we are approaching another squall as I write). The one good thing to come out of the storms yesterday is a very, very big fish!! We think it is a Wahoo! It was about 4ft long and weighed about 20-30Kgs, it was very hard to judge, and all hell was breaking loose round us at the time. We chopped it up and into the frying pan it went. We managed to take a picture to prove it, so there will be many fish tale stories to be told! The problem is it is so big it is nearly too big to eat. I have been cooking the bloody thing since we caught it, what with no fridge or freezer, the only way to preserve it for a day or two is to cook it. So we had two huge steaks each last night, fish soap for breakfast, fish and chips for lunch (That's all I could think of doing with it so I passed the rest onto Rupert to finish cooking), and finally for Supper tonight and for lunch tomorrow we will be having fish curry courtesy of the Rupert! Fish, fish and more fish. Our guts are on over time at the moment with all this protein, in the middle of the storms when all the hatches are battened down, sometimes it’s a fight as to who gets to be outside on the helm, the smell is out of this world. I'm sure if Philip wanted to he could hum a tune or two, all he has to eat is some porridge and he's off!

So making good progress at the moment, just hope we don't get hit by any of those HGV747 types or we're doomed!