We set off from ACI Slaton heading for Sipanska Luka. Everything was beautiful. Three of us started the day with a swim in the sea and then we headed for the pool in the marina which had a pool bar.
Unfortunately the weather wasn’t hot enough for us to sit at the pool bar and have a beer…but we still had a morning beer.
We set sail for Sipanska and I took the boat off the mooring with some great coaching from Michal. I took us out into the main body of water heading for Sipanska and we decided to raise the genoa. We sailed along like this for a while and turned off the engines. We were making about 5kts and the winds were good so we decided to raise the main sail. We didn’t want the Genoa bumping about as we put the main sail up so we furled it away…a bit. In hindsight we should have furled it away entirely but hindsight is a bugger. It took us a while to get the mainsail up due to various problems and all this time the Genoa was flapping about. This flapping managed to loosen the shackle that attached the Genoa to the sheet until the shackle undid completely and shot the length of the boat like a bullet narrowly missing taking out Goochy. So now we had a mainsail half up and a severely flapping Genoa that we now had no control over. We managed to furl the Genoa some more to get rid of that problem for now, and then we carried on with the mainsail. It was at this point we put the first reef sheet into the electric winch to put some tension in it. Sadly we came straight out of the jammer and onto the electric winch at a bad angle. So when we started the electric winch it ripped the sheet out of the jammer and we broke it. So now we had a broken Genoa and a broken jammer, but we had a mainsail up.
Unfortunately on a Catamaran you can’t really sail on just a main as the boat becomes unbalanced and keeps heading into wind. So we dropped the mainsail again and started heading to a protected bay to make repairs.
We found a decent enough spot to park and anchored. We found a spare shackle and put the sheet back onto the Genoa and then tried to furl it away completely only to discover we’d over rotated the self furling jib mechanism thing and couldn’t put it away. So we made some more repairs, fixed that problem and then had a beer and did a little swimming.
Finally the time came to head to Sipanska so we decided to weigh anchor and get ready to go. We had some issues with the anchor earlier on the trip where the anchor chain would sometimes bundle up near the winch instead of dropping neatly into the anchor chain locker. This time it bundled up before we could stop it and knocked the anchor chain off the winch. This meant the anchor chain was attached to nothing and instead of raising the anchor chain we deposited 100m of chain onto the seabed. Fortunately the end of the chain is attached to the boat by a line so we were able to drag a few metres of chain back into the boat by hand, attach it the winch and started lifting the anchor again. This time I occupied the locker next to the anchor chain and kept jamming to end of the boat hook into the pile of chain to make sure there was room for the anchor chain to drop neatly.
We eventually made it to Sipanska for some much needed food and wine.
End result – we snapped some plastic off the jammer.
