Roger going in to sort the prop wrap
Originally uploaded by Yacht Susannah
SUNDAY 5 AUGUST 2007
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| Roger going in to sort the prop wrap |
ROGER'S BLOG
Before breakfast, I donned my wetsuit and armed with a sharp bread knife snorkelled down to discover the mother of all prop wraps. A north westerly swell was making its way into the bay and Susannah was rolling and hitting me on the head – my second favourite bit of anatomy – as I dived and hacked at the wrap. Unfortunately, while the rope cutter had proved totally ineffective against the pot buoy line, it did a very good job of cutting my finger – an injury which bled badly and required steri-strips.
We experimented by lashing the bread knife to the boathook and attempted to saw through the wrap from the comfort of the dinghy but this did not seem to be having any affect. In the end, I reverted to diving, sawing, coming up for air, diving, sawing etc. Eventually I managed to hack all the line off, but was unable to save the pot buoy for the fisherman. We play on the sea – these guys try to make a living from it.
This was the fifth prop wrap that I have sorted out on various boats and easily the worst. Usually, it takes a few slashes with the knife and the rope drops of. This took about an hour, numerous dives and an injured finger.
It was good to get the wetsuit off, rebandage the finger, clean the blood out of the cockpit and sit in the morning sun eating two day old croissants and drinking filtered coffee. While relaxing in this way we idly watched a fisherman motoring around looking for his missing pot buoy. We confessed and apologised in broken French; he seemed very philosophical about it, possibly because there is no French word to express the same degree of urgency as the Spanish ‘manana’ or, more likely, because if you leave unlit pot buoys overnight in an approach to an anchorage you can expect to lose a few.
SHEILA'S BLOG
By the time we had reset the anchor, rigged the flopper stopper and launched the dinghy it was nearly lunch time. We had a look around St. Jean de Luz, which has lovely Basque buildings but was very busy as August is the main French holiday, and seemed very expensive for meals. We called in to the very small marina to find out how much a berth was, as we wanted to go to Baiona tomorrow. It was 58 euros! We decided to stay at anchor.
The wind was getting stronger, so we found a café hoping for it to ease, but instead it increased in strength. The forecast was only force 4 – 5, but we should have paid more attention to the Barometer dropping yesterday. We went to the dinghy, but the sea was quite choppy by now and Susannah was hobby horsing. We spoke to the local water sports company who said the wind probably was about a 5 but there was a 3 meter swell coming in and it wasn’t going to get any worse or better. He let us launch the dinghy from their pontoon, rather than battle through the waves on the beach, and set one of the young lads to follow us in his jet ski – which was just as well. I got the full force of the waves breaking into the dinghy and was cold and wet by the time we reached the boat. I tied a bowline (as I thought) jumped on board, and then turned around to see Roger floating off in the dinghy. Luckily, the boy on the jet ski towed him back to the boat.
Susannah rode to the waves head on but did not roll side to side with the ‘flopper stopper’ so we had a reasonably comfortable night.
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