A few days after finishing the solar panel installation with ChinaMan, we left the marina and spent a few days at anchor to see how the panels performed and how much power we were generating with normal onboard operations. The results were excellent.
Besides having more than enough power thanks to the new solar panels, we also had a huge supply of bananas from our St. Lucia shopping spree. We hung the bananas outside on the boat to ripen. Many of the bananas that weren’t part of the main bunch ripened quickly. The problem with hanging the bananas outside was that birds were eating them. Around 5 a.m., as dawn broke, birds would quickly start landing and pecking at the bananas. We had to find a solution so we could at least sleep a little longer :).
Late one evening, we left St. Lucia and set course for St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a roughly 10-hour, 40-mile trip. This would get us there early in the morning, giving us the whole day to explore. During the Atlantic crossing, we had noticed that the upper main halyard shackle was taking a beating and that the rope running over the sheave was slowly wearing down from the constant movement of the sail, threatening to break. The rope was about 12mm thick, non-stretch, static rope.
We did an inspection in St. Lucia, and our suspicions were confirmed: the outer sheath was completely worn through, leaving only the bare fibers exposed. Technically, we should have shortened the rope or replaced it with a new one, but that wouldn’t have been a permanent solution; it would just happen again. We had covered about 4,000 nautical miles so far, and this kind of wear and tear was normal, even though the boat was only six months old. That’s sailing life.
Around 3 a.m., I went down to the cabin to make a sandwich when I heard a light thud on the roof. I went outside and noticed we were losing speed, even though we had a decent wind. I looked up at the mainsail… and it was gone :). The rope holding the mainsail had broken sooner than we expected. Since the sheath was gone, the fibers had quickly frayed on the sharp edge of the masthead. Because we use a lazy jack system, when the rope broke, the sail simply dropped back into its cradle. As we don’t have a backstay, sailing only with the headsail wasn’t recommended, so we furled it as well and continued on by motor. We knew we would have a very interesting day once we arrived in Blue Lagoon.
We arrived in Blue Lagoon around 11 a.m. The entrance to the marina was a special kind of hell: reefs everywhere, with a solid wind and waves crashing over coral heads less than 20cm below the surface. We received instructions via radio about the clear channel and how to enter the marina, and we finally reached the dock and tied up. The plan was to stay here for a few days, celebrate New Year’s Eve, see what happened, and then move on, but first, we absolutely had to fix the mainsail.