RIP

Shit happens on my way to St Maarten.

The good news is I get a new main sail. The bad news is that at 1400, just under Monserat (the island with the active vulcano, altho no smoke shows as did last year) my main sail riped when I tacked for the last strech of 80 miles to SXM. Rest In Peace for the remains...

It was a long riiiiiiiiiip, perfect conditions, 27C blue fully clear skies and 25 knots of wind. It was a good sail, did its best although the 'curve' in the sail had since long ago moved backwards in the sail, but still did its job from 0-40 knots. Since april 2004 it has always been on the boom except for the winters of 04/05/06/07, after those winters we moved to better 'winters' so the sail stayed on 365 days.

It is beyond repair.

So, what to do? Still 12 hrs upwind sailing to do at 20+ knots.

I put on the orange try sail, small and ment for survival and brand new, never used. It works great at this much wind,

I'll get to St Maarten with this somewhere tomorrow by daylight I suppose..

An other RIP-eye Angus steak from the vrieser for dinner I think, had to do some work today, got very wet, only in my undies btw, no problems there.
It is now 17.44, sun will be down in an hour, pitch black for the next 2 hours and then the partly full moon will suddenly be there again and it will be very light again for the rest of the night.