BVIs to the Azores - Day Six 25 48.680N 058 14.616W

Aurora_b
Mike and Liz Downing
Mon 2 Jun 2014 21:59
What did we say yesterday - we definitely don't want to go south of east. And where did we go - south of east! We also said we had lovely weather, and that changed very dramatically yesterday evening. A front came through from the west full of rain, squalls and thunder and lightning. An electrical storm was raging all night with vivid lightning to the north and west of us. Most of the lightning was from cloud to cloud, but every now and then a streak of fork lightning would shoot down to the sea. We seemed to be on the southern edge so to try and keep out of it's way we headed south of east most of the night making around 5kts with wind from the south. The ploy seemed to have worked until 13.00 today when it caught up with us - torrential rain (couldn't see more than a few yards), thunder and lightning and wind all over the place. By 15.00 it had settled down and we had, and still have, wind from the north! That doesn't figure on any weather forecast that we've seen. So we're still heading east and going to stay low to try and keep below the bad weather until we reach the wind circulating around the Azores high, and then start to head north east. Not sure exactly of our noon-to-noon run as we switched everything off when the lightning got closer overnight, but working it back, it's around 114 miles. It's still overcast with low cloud, intermittent rain and squalls - hope that clears soon! Having a few problems with the sat phone and the aerial, which we couldn't take down, may have been affected by the lightning, so don't worry if blog updates are a little erratic. We can try and send them via the SSB, but with the current atmospheric conditions, I would be surprised if that worked well.

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