Thursday 30 May 2019

Thursday was quite an eventful day.  We woke to the peace and tranquillity that we hope for in an anchorage. This however, meant that all the boats were pointing in different directions and responding to individual local winds and eddys.  An old boat nearby gradually moved closer to us as we were swinging one way on our anchor and this boat was swinging the other.  The boat had been parallel next to us, but as we were finishing our breakfast, we had to leap up and fend it off.  There was no one on board, and we were glad that this had not happened in the middle of the night, when some damage would have resulted to one or other of us.

We raised the anchor and left the port, planning to move back to the north east to position ourselves for the step to Menorca. We managed to half raise the mainsail before there was a bang and the furling line parted. Equinox has a system where the mainsail is rolled around a roller within the boom.  Usually this is an excellent system and it has made it possible for the two of us to handle the large sails comfortably. Today this jammed so that we could not rotate the roller in either direction, and the sail was three quarters up.  We can’t go back into port like that. The benefit of the system is that you can always lower the sail, you just have to cope with the 77 sq metres of sail cloth. The usual method of doing this is to flake it over the boom, but with limited personnel and the weight of the sail, this was not easy.  Fortunately, there was little wind, and after and hour or so, we had managed to flake it over the boom, and lash it in place, so that it could not blow out, and either be damaged or endanger the boat.  We returned to Soller, to evaluate the situation, with the boat not moving about so much and re anchored in a slightly better spot than we had previously been in, further away from the boat that nearly drifted into us.

It became clear that the roller was stuck fast and we would need outside assistance to fix it.  I contacted the helpline for the boom manufacturer and we looked for rigging companies who could help.  The only ones that we could find were in Palma, and eventually we were recommended to one who could send people to help us on Saturday morning.  That was going to be the best we could do, so we spent the night worrying about what the cause of the problem might be and how easy / difficult / time consuming it would be to fix.

At least we were all safe in a very attractive place, the sun was shining and we could stay anchored there indefinitely if need be. It would require some modifications to the short-term plan, but we never try to plan too far in advance knowing that things like this or bad weather can happen.

Distance covered today	5	nautical miles
Trip distance covered	708	nautical miles
Distance covered 2019	708	nautical miles
Steve (and Tricia)