16 June 2022 – Thursday – UH OH !!!

Yesterday before we left Stonington, Casey my mechanic, came on board to see if I had any questions about the new generator or anything else. I asked him about a problem when we were charging batteries with engine only. His investigation found that our big alternator which should charge the batteries has a short. No time to fix it …BUT … with a brand new generator, we should be fine. Since we will be sailing, the engine shouldn’t matter at all. Phew!

Then, we took off and began sailing in a nice breeze towards Newport. Unfortunately the breeze ended up being on our nose by early afternoon and we needed to be in Newport before 7 pm in time to do the final registration for the race. So we decided to motor and take down the sails. The mess you see pictured below is what happened as we dropped our main sail.
The mechanism for raising and lowering the sail depends on two lines. One line raises the sail and the other lowers it. The lowering line snapped as we were halfway done so we tied it together and kept going. It snapped again! We were able to get the sail lowered. It would have been a disaster on the race.

I made a quick call to Robert, the rigger at my yard. He will arrive this morning with a brand new line. My yard is amazing.

We made it through registration and Bermuda immigration by about 7:30. We returned to Etoile for dinner and a quiet night. Here’s hoping we are all good from now on. Everyone is COVID negative!!