Last news from Nomad IV
For those of you who closely follow our tracking, you were probably wondering why we suddenly stopped for a nap in the middle of the ocean. Well here’s the explanation:
After nearly 400nm in 24 hours, yesterday evening shit hit the fan!
The spinnaker head loop broke dropping the sail straight into the water.
Thanks to the very quick response of the crew we managed to get the sail onboard quite quickly.
The spinnaker sock however decided to play the dirty trick of getting it’s self wrapped in the rudders. After a few minutes, and being unable to steer the boat we decided to drop the main and drift whilst our diver, Jean Philippe slipped into the water to evaluate the damage.
In our misfortune we remained lucky, having a good vision on the rudders he was able to instruct the crew as to what ropes to cut and to pull and in less than 15 min the torn sock was freed and hoisted back on board followed
by our swimer.
As dark was due in less than an hour, I decided to not let our monkey go up the mast to retrieve the halyard despite the young members of crew being quite keen to go, it being much safer to do it in the morning. We therefore decided to sail through the night under full main and J1.
As we hoisted the sails again, part of the crew set to check and hoping it possible, repair the spinnaker and the sock.
On Saturday morning, as the first rays of light came from the east we were able to recover our halyard and by 9:30 UT we were flying the genaker.
A few hours work later, just before lunch, and having fully checked the sail and done quite a repair on the sock, we are happy to say we’re flying the spinnaker again at less than 1000nm from Grenada.
Look out for us soon and prepare the rum, the race is still on …
JeanPaul
