St Helena

Arrived here in St Helena yesterday lunchtime after a stressful passage with a number of repairs required. The only good thing was the weather was relatively benign and the seas were calm so it was a good sailing trip. Winds were generally good with only a few periods of very light breeze near the end of the passage. The passage was not a good one for Peter as he was constantly mending and repairing things. The first day out the Generator stopped working and Peter traced the fault back to the fuel lift pump so he jury rigged a replacement using the dinghy outboard fuel pump. The winds were light so we did have several sail changes to maximise the wind available which is tiring work for both of us. During the latter part of the trip we blew out our spinnaker in a squall which happened overnight bringing 27 knots of wind. The sail is not strong enough to withstand that force so it ripped half of the sail away. It was then all hands on deck at 1am to drop the sail and go back to white sails for the rest of the night. Since the wind was behind us we flew our main on one side and the genoa on the opposite side to 'wing on wing'. The arrangement took it's toll on the main and a broken carr now needs replacing. Now we are e mailing Selden in Sweden to see if spare parts can be shipped out to us in Brazil. The next leg is some 1900 miles to Brazil so we do need to be careful with the sails we have left. Unfortuately our other downwind sail the new Parasailor has a tear at the bottome now as it got caught on the bowsprit whilst we were trying to hoist it in light winds. Luckily there is a sail maker here and Peter has taken it to be stitched. Our arrival in St Helena has been a good experience so far. The island is serviced by a supply ship RMS St Helena that calls once every two weeks from Cape Town. When we arrived the ship had recently been but already the shops have sold out of lettuce and other fresh goods! However a trip to two stores has proved that vegetables can be found if we are not too choosy about what we eat. So instead of brocolli I have squash and turnips to cook! The World ARC function was at St Helena YC last night and as no one from Rally Control is here I made a presentation on behalf of the fleet of a signed framed poster to the Commodore Julie George. It was a bring and Braai so we took steaks for the BBQ and some rice and pasta was available to go with these. Today we are getting provisioned and sorted out for the departure on Sunday. We would like to do a tour of the island and had originally booked this for this morning but with all the urgent things to do we decided to delay doing this until tomorrow. St Helena is like being back in time and they use pounds sterling here but also there is the Bank of St Helena which issues it's own notes so we need to use these here as they cannot be changed in England.