[from Nathan]
"You already saw Jens' note about all of the fun we've been having at night when everything is going smoothly.
*
The part he left out was our little firedrill last night. Fortunately, it happened right at watch change (so, with me having just come up and Bob+Tim already used to the conditions, we had three people on deck). We were zooming along nicely under spinnaker in the dark (just after 10 PM PST) when the guy suddenly parted right at the tip of the spinnaker pole. It was probably a material fatigue issue because the line gets pulled against the metal and around a corner there. We didn't do anything to trigger it: smooth sailing and then "pop".
We lost the associated sheet (the shackle probably popped open while the kite was flogging away to leeward). The crew immediately popped up from their bunks and was ready to repack the undamaged kite after we recovered it.
We needed to rerun some lines because we're now down a guy (no other lines with a "donut" on the end to sit nicely against the spinnaker pole). The boat is now set up with a single line on each side instead of doubles, but it was the best we could do quickly to get the kite back up quickly.
Putting the spinnaker up again resulted in yet another problem: the shackle for the sheet immediately popped loose and we had to do another takedown, complicated by the lack of a second line to the other clew.
Everyone worked quickly and the kite was down, repacked, and reset within minutes. Practice makes perfect, I guess.
The Pacific Cup is a real proving ground for equipment: 2000 miles of hard racing puts more wear on things than a good season or more of regular racing.
Anyway, once things were cleaned up we had a great and mostly uneventful downwind (one wrap in the light stuff which we undid by a quick gybe and tug on the leech)."
-Nathan
A chronicle of Spellbound's epic voyage: San Francisco to Kaneohe. Including updates and running commentary from shore side during the 2010 Pacific Cup.
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