MacIntosh Newport Bermuda Sunday (Day 3)

At the 6:00 shift change, winds were diminishing down to about 10 knots and it was hard to get the boat moving more than 6 knots of boat speed.

We decided to hoist the 1.5oz spin and get the boat moving.

Dove into bed, and missing the other crew sailing along in 14 knots of breeze get whacked a gust front with 30+ knots.  Durk did his best to drive the boat down, depowering the chute, but the boat rounded up and stopped.  They went back to the #3 while the winds were howling.  I didn't even stir in my bunk.  Apparently they also got dumped on with heavy rain.

In the mayhem, we lost the port spinnaker sheet/guy overboard (shackle let loose when dousing).

We then went back to the to the jib top reacher:

Another video:

By 6pm shift change, winds were under 12 knots, it was time to go back to the 1.5oz chute.

Hosting a spinnaker on Mac is tough.
The spin halyard has a jam cleat high, so you jump the halyard hoisting the sail with someone else with one wrap on the winch below taking up the slack in the jump.

On this hoist, we got a puff during the hoist, and we got an override on the winch with the sail only about 3/4 of the way up.  Clearing the override, the halyard ran though our hands before we could get the jam cleat set.  The spin shrimped under the boat.

It took us over half an hour to recover the shredded chute:

We were now down two spinnakers!

We hoisted the #3 to get the boat moving again.

Durk: "Now that we are moving, let's have a drink of rum and some potato chips"

LOL carry on

By 19:45, the winds had dropped to 12-14 knots, so up went our LAST symmetric chute:  the brand new red/white Canada chute:

We stayed with this chute for the rest of the night with winds 12-14 knots with the occasional gust to 18 knots true.  When the gusts came, we would drive the boat downwind

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