NEW COURAGE

After sleeping a night on my decision to end my voyage here I realesed that I would miss the sea to much. Therefore the new plan is to sail to Martinique instead to Florida.

I will probably start early in october.

There are two major problems with the boat. The first is that I got the mast to far forward. That means leehelm. That means that the chinerunners and the rudder are fighting each other. Instead of adding their forces they are cancelling them giving the boat very little lateral resistance.

I still think chinerunners are excellent but they have to be done correctly  like Matt does it.

The secound problem is that the boat got far to heavy. Thats because I have a tendency to overdo things, to make everything far to strong.

Vector a freindly German Yacht gave me a tow out of Kinsale. the weather was not good but it was getting late in the season so worse was to be excepted later.

The course was to windvard. When the other boats put up their sails they went much closer to the wind and of course also much faster.

Being heavy my boat took  much water over her but I had to keep fighting becouse I wanted to get outside the contenental shelf as fast as possible.

One night I was woken by heavy winds and rain. When I opened the hatch I was blinded by the rain on my glasses. At the same time a wave broke over her. I got a lot of water in the cabin.

To save windresistance I have no halyards. To get the sails up I use a stick. Unfortunatly now somehow the sails had got stuck. There was no other way to get them down than to climb the mast. It is not to difficult to do on land. In water, in calm water in a harbour it is also possible but more difficult. Now wind the wind blowing on a dark night half blinded I did not know what to do.

Unfortunatly there was nu volenters. I therefore took a deep breath and maneged to climb to the top of the mast and get the sails down.

Everything went well but later I was much more careful not to carry to much sail. Progress was therefore much slower.