Onboard we also took on additional roles according to our experience.
Not surprisingly I was assigned to sail repair....
Clipper did offer a morning of training but that was before we arrived in England.
We were provided with a sailrite sewing machine for repairs on the spinnakers (the material of the main sails are too thick for this machine). Unfortunately we couldn't get the sewing machine to work. A member of our crew was appalled at how rusty it was and pulled it apart to clean it properly in Portsmouth before we left. I'm not sure if he didn't get the timing quite right when he reassembled it or the rough conditions onboard affected things but the bottom line was we couldn't get it to work. It struggled to pick up the bottom thread and at most you would get 2 stitches before it ground to a stop with a horrible grinding noise.
This meant we had to do all our repairs by hand.
We were lucky that we only had minor damage on any of our sales so hand sewing was perfectly acceptable.
When we got to Uruguay we realised how lucky we had been...
Two boats lost a spinnaker overboard which they were unable to retrieve. Other boats had completely ripped spinnakers in two and they spent days trying to repair them while we went sightseeing.
Our worst was about 6 inches of a seam coming undone!!
