Day 18 Canaries-Martinique

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Wednesday 26th Nov '25

Obviously by the day numbering system you will notice I have skipped a day.  Well there's only so much you can talk about when every day seems to be the same, that is until it isn't!

You may have already noticed the photo - so we had some guesty winds this morning on Kel's watch which got up to the upper limit of "big red" so he called Richard (the next on watch) to help him take it down.  Which they did successfully.  Wind dropped back to normal 15-18kts range so after 20mins or so "big red" came back out to play.  That was about 06:00 and everything got back to normal. 

I came up for my 10:00-14:00 watch and sat in the seat at the downstairs nav station playing games on my phone and we were sailing along nicely.  Kel went out into the forward cockpit to sun himself while he read a book.  After 10mins he called me and pointed up, I went out looked up and saw this - 



NOT GOOD!


 

We had no gusts, no rolling, nothing unusual and in fact it had been quite pleasant sailing with the wind at around 140 degrees on starboard tack, perfect angle.

It looks like it might have touched the spreader but it's not supposed to get that far so we are not sure what or how it happened but the end result will be very expensive!

This is why I hate spinnakers and light downwind sails, great while they work but flimsy and expensive.

The silver lining, if there is one, is that it happened now when we are only 240nm away from being in port and not at the start of the crossing as that would have made it a lot slower.

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