Lanzarote
Saturday 31 October
After yesterday’s failure to re-furl Lily onto her new tension cable because of too much wind, when I awoke to zero wind at 6.20 I gave David a little nudge.
David had made sure she was ready to go last night and it was a completely smooth operation, so we went back to bed!
Yesterday we realised one of our primary winches was a bit stiff and as we are due to service them we got on with this interesting job.
I hadn’t realised that stripping down winches was part of my skill set.
Getting the thing apart was very straightforward… all the plastic bits need washing; the metal bits need de-greasing and then re-greasing and then all you have to do is put it all back together again in the right order.
We were very glad we had taken a photo of the gears so we could put them back! Especially as David was looking at a photo of the wrong sized winch. I think it took us about 3 hours! Anyway we are still married.
After a swim in the pool we tackled the other one the same size – and it was much quicker – under an hour! I now have my Winch badge! Only 4 more (smaller) ones to go – you’re supposed to service them every year but we hadn’t done them last year and so this job was already high up on David’s list for ARC preparation.
As we were half way through our second winch, veteran crew Kevin turned up – the last time he sailed with La Bamba was our overnight leg from Cuxhaven to Terschelling (see past blogs). Kevin was obviously very impressed with all the winch innards strewn everywhere (so that it was almost impossible for him to get his bag on board).
We enjoyed an Italian meal nearby and realised it was Halloween – so happy Halloween everyone!