Thursday 14 Nov, HHN day 34: The day starts badly but when the sails are back on and boat tidy again, we are reinvigorated.
IT disaster strikes. My laptop refuses to wake up this morning. After pressing the “on” button in all ways possible I give up with the notion that it’s simply faking illness and will reawaken any second. It really does seem to be unwell. Time for the untrained IT doctor before rushing to the A&E for computers, for an expert triage. Its back is swiftly unscrewed, battery out and all visible connections dis- and re-connected. But still it remains firmly “off”. All of a sudden this issue becomes the highest priority on CB to get fixed. We can set sail southbound without an engine, without a toilet or with a faulty generator, but NOT without my Laptop back in the land of the living! With advice from both Ray and Liz, we set off for the closest (trained!) computer doctor in Deale. With $50 down payment we leave the PC with promises it will be attended to in the next 24 hours.
To get distracted from the family illness, we head to the hardware store where we again load our credit card with yet another $80 of debt. We really should look into getting shares in this place! But that said, it really is the best little hardware store we have even been to. And we’ve done them all!
Today is calm and a little warmer than before. So it will be sails-up day. But first the halyard clutches both need attention. The one for cutter is jammed and genoa clutch refuses to allow the halyard through. Quickly taken apart and rebuilt, we are ready to go. The sprayhood and tent both have to be collapsed to get sails out of saloon with the halyard. No chance of manually lifting them out without risking a hernia. Once the 2 sails are on the deck we have a tea break and comment how lovely it is to see the saloon floor space back again after walking around the huge sails for the last 4 weeks.
With all the preparations already done, both sails go up and get furled pretty easily. Oana and I can almost do these things with our eyes shut nowadays. We then try to unfurl mainsail. As usual when it’s not used for a while, it does not come out of the mast easily. While I hard pull on the clew, Oana wiggles it in and out on the hydraulic buttons, as I call the shots. While doing this, hundreds of stink beetles, who were hiding in the rolled sail, all fall on deck. Little buggers, we hope they enjoy the fall!
But try as we might, we just cannot get the last few feet of the sail to unfurl out of the mast slot 🙁 Until that is, we finally realise there is still one bird avoidance device left up there, with a line around the mast right where the curling problem seems to be. So out comes the Bosons chair again and up I go to cut off the garden wire and string. Once removed, the mainsail comes out all the way and back again without any issue. We are again reminded of our love/hate relationship with the in-mast furling of our fully battened mainsail.
Ok, that’s sails up, whoopy! We feel like a sailing boat again. We just manage to tidy the deck of sheets, halyards and runners before it’s dark again. Dusk seems to come so quickly these days.
Inside, the evening job is to finalize the packing of the mid-cabin bilge and under-berth stowage. Oana has been in there all day cleaning and wiping all and any signs of mildew. A battle that seems to be continuous since we were in New England last year where Cloudy “contracted” the mildew virus! She has become a mildew-spotting expert, claiming to be able to see mildew spots from a 100meters distance!
Finally, at around bed time the cabin is tidy again with all carpets back down. How very civilized we are starting to look! It feels like we have our loved Cloudy Bay back again. We really don’t do messy, and we have been messy ever since we got back to the boat 5 weeks ago.