Friday 12th February : on passage
Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Fri 12 Feb 2016 16:10
We took a last trip ashore to wish farewell to the fishing dog that lives under the hard at the marina, and after a somewhat frustrating wait of an hour we managed to get to the fuel dock and spend our last 6,000 Escudos. It literally just filled the tank. The final strains of Carnaval escorted us out of the bay, the last thing heard was the drumming of the percussion band on the hard. Several other crews had already sailed out of the bay and all had been picked up moved along by the wind acceleration zone between Santo Antao and Sao Vicente.
We were no exception; a good force 7 to 8 grabbed us and spat us out well south of the Islands sometime after midnight. That was expected, but we were somewhat surprised that the higher than expected winds continued all night. We have been surfing along at speeds of up to 10 knots under two reefs and only half the yankee. Every so often the waves smacked Awelina hard enough to knock her off course or join us in the cockpit as the wind continued F7 gusting 8 overnight. Back down to force 6 now which feels quite gentle.
Other than that we had a relatively quiet night. The odd flying fish joined us at intervals as the cockpit got rather wet. The wet deck also showed unfortunately that our repairs to the leaking genoa car track in the deck were not 100% effective and we have currently stuffed the space around the leaking bolt fitting with kitchen roll and a pillow case to keep the water away from the instruments. So far so good but we do need to try to get a better seal once the decks are dry
It's back to taking an age to make coffee, cook lunch or generally move about. Every thing at sea seems to take twice as long to carry out or need an extra arm or two. We're sure after a couple of days we will not notice this but as usual even for those of us with no sickness issues, the motion does take 24 hours to get used to living with. Plus we've been molly-coddled living in port with flush toilets and showers to hand.