ARC day 9. A bit of a hiccup....

We had a bit of and adventure over the last couple of days. After the parachute sail worked we left it flying overnight but higher wind speeds had it over powering our little boat. We brought it down at about 3am and motored the rest of the night.

By morning we had winds up to 30 knots which isn't terrible of itself but they were coupled with waves of 4m +. Pretty scary. Then we discovered one of our water tanks was empty because the boat movements had thrown a bottle onto our sink tap and it had run the entire 100L down the drain. The water pump had then overheated and shut down. This wasn't going to be easy to fix at sea.

We have lots of spare capacity for water but the pump is pretty essential to flushing the watermaker as well as making the taps work.
Kerrie and I independently came to the same conclusion that the sea state was too severe and the water situation too uncertain so we banged up our mainsail on third reef and turned left to head for Cape Verde. 36 hours of beam reaching through awful seas and we got to there this afternoon. We got the ARC rally control to book us a berth here by email.

Very glad to be here and have already magiced the water pump back into life so going to chill out for a few days and get some sleep before deciding to either continue to St Lucia or stay amd explore the archipelago here.

We are all fine apart from being a bit sleep deprived and are hoping for a semi restful night here in the marina. Semi, because the marina has chained pontoons which move about... This means the boat is shifting a lot in the force 7 that is still blowing. To be honest we are all so tired that we wouldmprpbably sleep through and earthquake anyway.

 



Sent from Iridium Mail & Web.

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