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The Horn

Yesterday was a fantastic day, a stark contrast to the first three quarters of the trip. The wind wasn't quite as strong as I would have liked during the night, but the sea was flat, the sky was completely clear, and Venus was shining brightly during the sunset. As the sunset progressed and evening set in, all the other stars appeared, with Orion behind us and the Milky Way, the galaxy we are in, sparkling across the sky.
Late yesterday morning, we decided to pull up the gennaker, even though it seemed like we were tempting fate after such a successful day. The sock isn't long enough to contain the gennaker, which was already trying to escape. With everything set up and ready to go, Adam stood by on the sheet while I started to pull up the sock. (I am not sure what you call the fiberglass 'funnel' on the base of the sock but it has already been a problem and fell off a few times. I thought it had been fixed with several cable ties. It looks like a shoe horn so we will call it the gennaker horn). The bottom of the sail started to fill and i was pulling up the sock with the gennaker horn also going up and bottom of the sail was already filling with wind and starting to billow out - and then the gennaker horn fell off! This isnt a problem for hoisting the sock except the gennaker horn will be stuck in the middle of the sail and means we are going to have a terrible job trying to get the gennaker down. My vertical leap saved the day again and i managed to snag the gennaker horn which somewhat contained the billiowing sail even though it was flapping around and trying to go in the sea and Adam was able to read my lips saying "quickdropthegennakerasfastasyoucan" and we got everything back on deck with the only issue being covered in salt water. Despite this hiccup we still manged to do 166nm over 24hrs. And with 1350nm to go its looking as though the end is in site. All we have left is the 'final boss' which is a predicted 35 -40 knts over the weekend to Tuesday.

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