brest stopover

after the arrival night out, I went running the next morning. could only manage 4km but it was lovely running around the town and the castle, down to the naval base and back to the boat. 

the castle

view from the castle to the marina

panorama

we'd agreed to be ready to work by 0900, and we got loads done. matt showed me how to strip down and service the mainsheet winch, which is a 3-speed primary. I also got the rig check done, even in the rain!

we also got our new, taller stanchions here. we had been the only boat to leave london with the short ones, which made the crossing fairly interesting... unfortunately for us, we were one short. so one of the aft stanchions is still a short one. oh well!

we didn't get lifted in brest, which we were supposed to. we discovered in gosport we had no antifoul on the hull, so this had been the plan. it looks now like we won't be antifouled until sydney, which is almost halfway. 

kate, the winch wench :)

one of the primary winches. in bits.

we serviced the rest of the smaller winches on board, and the other two primaries as it's important to keep these running well. the intention is to do them in every port but we'll see :)

old pulteney had a corporate event on one of the days in brest, and everyone had to suffer pipe music blasting out of their on deck speakers. gah! to top it off, patrick (their dutch skipper) was wearing a kilt but it was too low and I felt compelled to go and show him how it should be worn. ten minutes of instruction later, he looked quite presentable and I went back to my boat. not sure he appreciated it, but I can't look at a badly worn kilt!

jay's sense of humour :)

we are getting used to dealing with the maintenance and engineering guys as well. these are the guys who fix the stuff we can't manage and give us advice so we can do more ourselves. we'd put a post-it on one of our trip boards laughing at the fact we had a water heater on board (which we're not allowed to use) and jay saw it, and left his own response... 

on our third day in brest, it was crew brief time. the race starts tomorrow again! it has flown by trying to get everything done and see a bit of the town. the brief was at a place called oceanopolis and we were on the first bus so got a bit of time to look around and get some food beforehand. after the briefing, we went back to the boat, then went out for our team meal to a tex mex place in the marina. at first it didn't look like they had anything suitable for me, but after speaking to the really helpful waiter, I got special vegan enchiladas. kate looked pretty jealous :D

we decided to be sensible and had a (reasonably) early night as the race start is 1330 tomorrow