Blue Wonder - Wednesday 1st December

Rapier 550 on tour
Mark Jarvis
Wed 1 Dec 2021 13:40
Still generally making good progress despite the lack of a spinnaker. The wind strength remains stubbornly high and over night we had some quite bad squalls so lots of waves and wind to make sleeping a little more difficult. The inside helm position makes life really easy on Blue Wonder for watch changes and today when the wind rose above 40 knots for an hour it was very comforting to have everyone together, under cover, with a clear view of the sea and waves and alongside the sail controls.  As we surfed down the face of one wave we hot over 18 knots and so we simply too a another reef in the headsail. Dead easy, in dry and safety.
The forecast for the rest of the trip is for these 23-25 knot winds to persist and so it would have been ideal to have still had the option of our asymmetric spinnaker but the parasail is just too big to fly and set in these winds.
Otherwise, the crew are relaxed and when off watch the are watching DVDs, doing emails or writing this blog! The water-maker means that we can shower every day and Jim has become a dab-hand at bread making. We are going a bit too fast for fishing (that's my excuse) but we have now had 3 flying fish visit! 
 
More later in the week.
 
Mark