21st February

Very boring morning working on Nuts.  Sanding primer and giving it a second coat.  Not worthy of a photo.

Did zoom into Horta marina in the afternoon (waiting for primer to dry is my excuse) to check out the Ultime doing a pitstop.  These things are HUGE. Edmond de Rothschild is making its first stop and is looking a bit battle scarred.

Aft wing a bit damaged

A big piece of fairing missing from the stbd fwd wing.

Notice there is a person near the clew of the mainsail on top of the boom.  

The shore team were very busy doing repairs and service  on the port foil and stbd rudder.  Im sure there are plenty of things to service and I believe they will be here for 48 hours instead of the 24 hours minimum.  More favorable for the weather on the last stretch and safe in first position with the record long gone .

Spent this evening doing a major service on my Raymarine ST 1000+ autopilot for my little fishing boat.  It was making a strange noise last Sunday so took it to bits.

Discovered some bad problems on the drive shaft but fortunately had an old ST 2000 without any electronics and have converted my 1000 into a 2000.  Still got to test it at sea as swopped motors as well and the 2000 ram moves a lot faster than the 1000.  I think I will modify the insides to put cutoff switches to limit the ram from reaching the end as that is what caused the damage.  Found some solutions on Youtube.

Back to more sanding and painting tomorrow - boring!!