Sailing around the World ( Presently at Sea )
A Lady
Stephen Hyde
Thu 30 Sep 2010 02:24
|
WEDNESDAY 29th
SEPTEMBER 2010
We had a terrible night,
It was very windy and wet, with winds gusting up to
46 knots,
The sea's were huge, with occasional waves crashing
over the boat and soaking everyone and everything,
On top of all this, the skipper is still coughing
and spluttering badly.
07.00hrs, Skipper and Terry set up the boat to
Goosewing , ( Headsail out to port with the spinniker pole and the mainsail out
to starboard )
This always works well when there is too much wind
for the spinniker. but the boat rolls much more than with a
spinniker.
We had a collection of 52 small flying fish on the
deck this morning, On one previous occasion, we had 49 and we thought we could
open a fish factory
Ohhhhhh, all the rolling makes the typing of the
blog very difficult, not to mention the need for anti sea sick
tablets.
We could hear a lot of other boats talking to one
another on the radio, and they are all experiencing the same weather, even those
300 miles ahead.
That does nothing for us, but it is comforting that
others are in the same boat ( so to speak )
09.00hrs Radio net,,, " Brown eyed girl" is
the radio net controller today, and we cannot hear him, so we really dont know
where we are in relation to the rest of the fleet,, but we do know , we
are at the back somewhere.
Shortly after the radio programme, it stopped
raining, T G
We recieved a grib file fron "Weather at Mailasail
" and it does not make good reading, or should I say viewing.( grib file shows
the weather pattern for the next 72 hours )
The low that Bruce refers to in his weather reports
to the fleet, is much closer to us than we expected, so we will
have
much more of this crap.over the next 3 days,
Midday , It started to flog rain again, much
heavier this time and it went on all day and all night,
Monsoon type rain ......................
Ohhhhhh got drenched, and so did everything else onthe boat.
Dinner,, Yeah, we have to eat , even in
this,
So skipper made a Mince beef dish with rice, (
Which we are getting much better at cooking now ) and a host of veg mixed into
it all,
and then server in soup bowles, thats a good
way of stopping the food from sliding off the plate every time we are hit by a
wave,
We hear one boat uses " Dog dishes " and think
right now that it is a good idea.
the trouble with soup bowl's is they can turn
over,
Later we got advice from Bruce to go further
south to 17 S in an effort to get out of the Thunderstorms and the
low.
We have already seen this on our grib file and were
making tracks that way in any event.
As the day progressed, the wind just grew and grew.
As night fell, we had very rough conditions, so we reefed the boat
down
till there was hardly and sail showing, and we were
still touching 11 knots at times.
21.00hrs We We spoke to a few of the boats
around us and all are ok, Lady Eve did have some fresh water in her bilge, but
this must be an internal leak,
Distance travelled
.........................................417 miles.
Stephen Hyde
|