Friday 11 October 2013

End of sailing for 2013

We have now laid up Mango until next year.

We had a somewhat eventful final sail as we had not spotted that the lashing for the throat halyard block was worn and it gave up as we were beating towards Barcelona and in F4/5, so the main came down.  However, we realised that this was the perfect opportunity to try out the trysail and it worked brilliantly: we were doing around 5 knots to windward (after letting out all the jib) and it works well with the our normal mainsheet set up.  It was good to have the trysail up as we spotted a couple of improvements to how we attach it to the mast which will improve it.

Prior to laying up we had a day trip by train to Barcelona to get a taste of what it offers and visit Parc Guell.  We saw the outside of a lot of the Gaudi buildinds and it was a great day out, we will be going back.  Unfortunately the camera battery died in Parc Guell.