approaching land?
Alize
Mike Somerville
Thu 13 Dec 2012 23:13
|
14:20.8N 60:08.16W
speechless.....the last day...we can't beleive
it...What a beautiful trip this was. We're not there yet, but we realized this
was the last splendid day with light out on the Atlantic. It was a beautiful
day, which was quite a releif after our somewhat disturbing, squally and
rocky night. To give you a little insight in what sometimes happens on a
nightshift (like yesterday) let's try to set the scenery: Tim wakes Barbara up
"it's your time now", so Barbara gets up, does a little chitchat with Tim about
the conditions and all seems fine. Barbara nicely sits outside, playing with her
ipod as ALL OF A SUDDEN rain comes down with a force so heavy that all the black
water around you turns white from splatters. She throws away the ipod, closes
down the mainhatch and runs to the steering wheel, to back up George, might he
fail. Wind gains to almost 40 knots and while George is doing a great job, Alize
is flying with 12, 13, 14 knots in this squal!!!
5 minutes later? The sky clears up, the stars show,
the rain stops, the wind dies....nice hey? that's why we looooove sailing
:-)
It's also worth mentioning in terms of setting the
scenery that in the whole trip we (Mike L and Tim) only saw 2 cargo ships...nice
to notice that we called them up, requested them to alter course to avoid a
collision and....they did! Isn't it great that a 560ft Cargo ship alters course
for our beloved 42ft Alize? We think it is. Furthermore there is hardly anything
to see out there...now that we are approaching St. Lucia we incidentally see a
red, green or white light..it would be nice if we'd see some more this coming
night!
Today during the day, the sun was out there
and made it a lovely day. We changed our clocks 2 hours, so this beautiful day
even lasted 2 hours longer! Nice way to cheat :-). A nice breeze of around 22
knots kept Alize going with 6-8 knots so instead of swimming we sat at the back
of the boat, with our feet in the water, half waterskiing behind the boat.
Beautiful! And how nice is the water! Around 30C the meter says, lovely!
Later in the day, some dolphins showed up to greet
us and again, for the last time, Tim managed to create a great meal with still
some fresh veggies and fresh melon for desert! How could this be
better?
And here we are, all set for our approach to Saint
Lucia. The charts are out, the waypoints are set, some 50 miles to go with a
beautiful light wind night in front of us...speechless.
As we are sending this, yet another flying fish has
just landed aboard - on Mike S's lap! Mike has bravely grasped it and returned
it to is safe home - the wonderful Atlantic Ocean!
Regards to all at home,
Barbara, Mike, Tim &
Mike
|