After passing Grenada last night on approach to Trinidad and Tobago, we got out of the Caribbean trades and into a whole different kind of wind and sea. Its actually been very pleasant, with easy breezes and relatively calm seas, making for very nice sailing, although not as fast.
This morning we made the call to sail along the top of Trinidad, instead of going into the serpent’s mouth and between Trinidad and Venezuela. It’s shorter this way, and we didn’t feel like we needed relief from the ocean, that the other route would have provided. Plus the seprent’s mouth is famous for strong, adverse currents.
With the wind gone light at 10am, we decided it was time to charge the batteries, so we started the engine for the first time, and have been running refrigeration and the freezer as well, while we motor along the north coast of Trinidad, a very green and jungley place.
During all this calm, of course something happened. And for once it wasn’t in the middle of the night! With the mainsail down, the main halyard shackle pin wiggled loose, allowing the main halyard to disengage from the sail and swing about all over the boat, dangling from the masthead. We tried catching it with a boathook, but it was always just out of reach, then would wrap itself around the backstay for a while. I was decided to pull into some local cove to get the boat calm so I could go back up the mast, when clever Steve thought of snaring the halyard like a rabbit.
He made a nice little snare trap out of small line, like a noose, and hoisted that up the backstay with the spinnaker halyard. When the main halyard drifted into the loop, he yanked the string and grabbed it! We then pulled the whole mess of snare and line and halyards back down to the deck where we sorted it all out and put everything back in order.
Steve gets the merit badge for today!
We ended up motoring a bit more than we had planned, but after a series of squalls passed through the wind is coming back, and we are just sailing again off the NE tip of Trinidad.
10.51N 61.04W 543nm gone, 4207nm to go. 3pm 6/30