Stories from the Atlantic. Shenandoah Blog n. 4

Shenandoah Blog. n. 4 1900 UTC -2 hrs  28°N 30°W -  Good evening all from the Big Brother Shenandoah, where we have had an action packed and exciting day today, culminating in a gybe about an hour and a half ago. Brilliant news on the ‘ ça và Jacques’ front as I’m on the starboard side of the boat and we’re expected to be on a port tack for a good few days now, if not the whole of the rest of the race, so I’ll be getting rolled in to the hull and won’t need a leeboard.

On the sailing front , apart from changes from night to day and vice versa, little has changed since we cleared the Canaries and got some wind. The swell is ever present and the only thing making an otherwise very comfortable sail a tad less pleasant. It’s changed about as much the chord in a Status Quo song.  Sail repair as seen from deck and from the mizzen spreaders

That was, until we gybed of course and now it’s all change. We were getting pushed further north by a NE breeze which veered more E every ten minutes, but we’re now on a course of 225 or so.Sail repair news is all good as we now have a mizzen sail, with the mammoth hand sewing repair job all done and dusted. We have no way of reefing the mizzen however, so it’s all or nothing ! The clew got lashed back on this afternoon and AL and Andy finished the foot
rope finished so it’s all good to go. We currently still have the trisail up.A big afternoon in the harness for me as I spent an hour of the afternoon hanging over the sea at the aft end of the mizzen boom helping Bryan with the mizzen clew lashing, (don’t tell my Aunty Sarah; she worries), and then went up the rig too a bit later on to re-jig one of our racing pennants.

Hair loss update  Team Movember has hit the skids big time which is understandable considering Movember is over. After Tim’s early dismount, three more top lips got alopecia the following day and then it was all over, disbanded like The Grateful Dead when Jerry Garcia died. Chuck’s is a permanent fixture and I’ve been ordered to keep mine !

Apart from that life goes on. The tea is flowing, the yacht is carving her way inexorably towards the Caribbean, and it’s feeding time at the zoo, and my window is coming up, so I’m going to sign off.

Fairwinds, Will

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November, 29, 0628 hours. Shenandoah Blog n. 3

It’s all been happening on Planet Shenandoah in the last 24 hours and the last time I posted I was bemoaning the fact that we were still having no luck with the wind. That lasted until about fifteen seconds after I hit the enter key at which point the wind started to build, and before you knew it, we were barrelling along, touching 12 knots at times.
Down below, Chef had prepared us a sumptuous monkfish curry, which I over-stood on. It was so good I had seconds and was just feeling comfortably numb when disaster struck. A call to get on deck and not five minutes later I was out on the bowsprit with Bryan and Thanny getting ready for a jibtop drop. It all went well though and a night of great moonlit sailing in fair swell was to follow.

Man overboard

More drama simultaneously with the start of the wind building was the arrival of chief officer Tim to replace me as watch leader at 1800 last night. He didn’t MOB in the sense that he exited the vessel, but he did turn up for watch clean shaven. Team Shenandoah Movember has lost it’s most prolific caterpillar. It took poor blonde Ieva until almost the end of dinner to work out what was different with him.

Culture corner

Despite 99% of the culture Australia has to offer being in it’s fermented dairy products, one of our Aussies has been putting together a poem over the last few days which everyone has got wind of, and has been eagerly anticipating. He didn’t disappoint either. We have a new poet laureate in the offing, in the form of Mr Jesse Cook. Despite the unhappy marriage between Apple and Microsoft, we hope to be able to include it in this posting, but we’ll see what happens.

In other news, the sail repair program is going well and the mizzen should be ready to go again tomorrow thanks to some yeoman work and brave endurance stitching today from several members of the crew. We flew the reacher 3 for a while this morning with the trisail which gave the helmsman a hard time.
Changed time today and are now an hour behind GMT, a term which is no longer politically correct apparently.
A bit of up in the air action today too with myself, Alan and Bryan taking a mast each for a full rig check. Photos to follow hopefully.

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November, 27

Bobbing around on the graveyard shift

"Morning all. 0500 Tuesday, and a beautiful moon in the sky at the moment, which will be full tomorrow night, and it’s like having the lights on. Very bright moonlight.
That’s the exciting news out of the way as we’re going nowhere fast. There’s very little wind to speak of and we’re just bobbing around watching the other boats on the tracker carting along in double figures VMG ! We’re not jealous though, honest.

Our plans to lure the opposition in to a false sense of security are working perfectly. We’ve gone up against five modern boats in a big old schooner and headed south where the others went around the top of Tenerife. Furthermore, we also cracked the main boom two days before leaving and tore the leech of the mizzen lower yesterday during hoisting. The former is all bandaged up and good to go, and the mizzen sail is going to get some TLC in the morning.

There is some good news though. We have extra help, which for a yacht with more sail combinations than Rod Stewart has Lamborghinis, is very welcome. Which brings up three points.

1) Talking of Lamboes, our guests on the crossing are of the same geneology, as they’re all Italian. Andrea, the owner’s son, joined us on Sunday in time to get settled in before coming with the crew to the yacht club for dinner. With him are his partner Emmanuela, and friends Giovanni, Barbara and Andrea. They’ve been fully involved from first thing Monday morning and are a great help sailing the yacht. Unfortunately, they haven’t brought the wind gods with them though, and we continue to suffer at 1700 on Tuesday in light airs south of El Hierro. At one point last night we had an estimated arrival time of March 20th. Oh well, at least England won the second test in Mumbai.

2) Big Shen trivia; if you put ‘Rod Stewart -  What Am I Gonna Do’ in to YouTube’s search bar, you’ll get a music video from circa 1983/4 shot on Shenandoah in Cannes. Bizarrely, the video features several repeat shots of a man jumping rather un-bravely in to the sea wearing a pair of Y-fronts which, quite frankly, look like they could have done to go in the washing machine about a fortnight previous.

3) Barbara is the only Italian I’ve ever met who eats Marmite.

Standing by, this channel".

Will Jones, Shenandoah Bosun