Nice night. Finally. Well, almost.

Tuesday, June 21. 1130.

Overall, a happier circumstance than yesterday.
Yesterday evening, we had enough breeze that flying the spinnaker was attractive. After rigging the repaired spinnaker we unfurled it expecting the wind to do its usual work and flinging the spinnaker off the roller furling
in a couple seconds. Not to be. The drum locked. This happened once before and when I disassembled it, I found that the locking pin designed to prevent unwanted unfurling but allow it when desired had bent, thus
locking the drum from moving in either direction. This piece is supposed to have a weak spot in it so that it will break under excessive load rather than something else. But it had not broken, and the bent pin stopped
up the system. With the bent part broken off by me, all worked well except there was no longer a locking mechanism. However, I left the spring loaded broken stub of the pin in place, I think in order to show me how
it is placed should I wish to put a new one in. And thereafter, everything was fine.

Until this evening when the drum locked again. So, down with the spinnaker cable stacked with my invention of pool lane marker balls whose purpose is to prevent reverse wrapping of the spinnaker on the underlying
cable, another malady that then renders the spinnaker inoperative because when it is unfurled in one direction, the reverse wrapped segment just gets tighter. The float balls seem to have solved this problem.

When dismantled last night, the residual pin had relocked the drum and foiled our plans. It was easy to remove the pin altogether- as I should have done the first time it jimmied up the works.

By the time I finished the repair, the wind had come up to around 15-20 knots- too much to carry the spinnaker without blowing it out.

So, during the night, the wind slightly backed into the west-southwest with glorious sailing conditions under a full moon and scattered brightly backlit cumulous clouds.

This morning at the completion of John's 0300 to 0600 watch, the splendid conditions continued with winds in the low 20s and we were headed straight to Bermuda albeit with an adverse current of 1 knot still stalking
us from the malificient cold eddy of last night.

But there was a hitch. At daylight, John noticed that one of the sail stiffening battens had come out of the pocket going forward of the mast! That, I have never heard of.
The cause was three of four missing bolts holding the batt slide in place and capturing the forward end of the batten. This had also never happened before.
The fix required dropping the main, furling most of the jib and using the mizzen sail to keep us weather vaned into the wind, and then trying to find replacement bolts and nuts. The replacement bolts that I bought
a couple years ago from the batt slide supplier were too short. All this was hazardous given the now significant seas of about 6-8 feet and howling winds of well over twenty. Maintaining one hand for the boat (sailor's
rule for not falling overboard or coming to an abrupt end to a fall at the end of the safety tether) is difficult when two hands are needed for the repair.

So with greater deliberate care, we finally got the job done. During it, I saw broken ice on the deck but of course it was not; it was broken spreader light glass.
The job took three hours with essentially no forward progress To Bermuda. But now, back to glorious conditions, sailing at 7 to 8 knots as opposed to an average of about 2-3 knots for the previous day.
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