The days seem to blend into each other just a little more. This morning I was going to pull some ground beef out of the freezer for dinner tomorrow, the entire top of that one freezer with all the beef and pork in it was defrosted. Must have been at least two or more days worth of defrosting because it was all soft and everything in there was solid as a rock. I had Don take a look at it but couldn’t determine more than I had, that it just wasn’t freezing, it still had power to it because the light was on. I spent the afternoon rearranging refrigerators and freezers, I got about half the stuff out, I’m not too worried about it over night because it’s all rock hard, just have to find more room. It’s a shame too because I was just getting more room in the refrigerators and could put things in the freezers, like the giant stack of tortillas.
Another day off underway and it was a beautiful one. I was going to give a bread lesson in the afternoon, but everyone was asleep.
I like to cook holiday appropriate food, so this morning we had hot cross buns and hard-boiled eggs. At capstan Dough passed out some chocolate and I made carrot cake after dinner. Both halves of the topgallant came down and more saw dust was made in the name of the main coarse. While Matt was on watch I asked him to make a little stopper so that my starboard side fridge door doesn’t swing open all the way, it was really hard to put anything in there while holding the door.
When I got up in the morning I was amazed at how it looked, kind of like a close pin, with the topgallant broken we can’t set the royal.
At capstan Robin was explaining how the British Navy use to tack back and forth to find their man overboard. So we were going to give it a try, hands sprung to braces and Tino was on the wheel going hard to port, he called for help and no one jumped up and I happened to be near by and gave a hand. I had planed on going through freezers and organizing some stuff because we weren’t rolling too badly, but I stayed on the helm with Tino for the next two hours.
What happened next was kind of unclear, Drew, Don and Mitch were hauling on the main coarse starboard brace, they were taking up slack and then hauling a little and it didn’t seem like all their effort was in it and then were was the blood curdling sound of wood splintering.
The main coarse yard broke.
About half way out on the starboard side it snapped in half, right where it hits the shrouds when it’s hard over. The theories as to why it happened, there was a weak spot around there where epoxy had previously been pored because it was un laminating itself, maybe the wind picked up right at the wrong time to something was fetched up some where. Before the thought of the huge beefy coarse yard being broken could fully sink in to anyone’s head Dan immediately called out for the topsail to be taken in and shortly after people were scurrying up to furl and take care of the coarse.
Tino and I had a great view of what was going on the whole time and I was plenty happy to be stuck there and not having to go aloft. The topgallant and the coarse had their sails taken off to take some of the weight off of them, they left the topgallant lashed to the shrouds because she is fairly small. A lot of the gear for the coarse came down quickly, yard arm tackles, mast takes and then the gear for the sail. I had to go make dinner but they did bring down the smaller part of the hard that had broken off.
At the end of the day looking back things could have been messy, but it went smoothly; the mates all jumped in the rig and gave a hand as well.
We caught a tuna in the morning that John filleted for me so we had that for dinner with teriyaki chicken. Brooke also spent a good amount of time making pretzels for the night watches.
Yesterday at capstan Robin explained to us how we were going to dog watches today, the 4 to 8 only stand 4 to 6 and then the old 8 to 12 stand 6 to 8. Then later that night the 12 to 4 would move the clock ahead an hour and they’d only have to stand three hours of watch. For whatever reason C watch thought he Robin meant last night and not tonight, so they moved the clocks, and I wasn’t aware and got up late for breakfast. I still had enough time, just things were rushed.
It was a really nice day off, the whole atmosphere of the boat was more relaxed.
Another beautiful day sailing across the ocean. For the past few days we’ve been rolling around a lot more, but it’s in a rhythm that everyone is getting use to, just hard to sleep at nights sometimes. Lots of the bright work is getting more coast of oil and everything is starting to shine up nicely. I’m also finally getting shelves installed above the freezers and John said that I could possibly get a small sink installed in one of my back counters.
