Current position "19:49.4N 29:15.3W”. Too much to talk about yesterday. The day started with various spinnaker challenges – resulting in it needing to be repacked down below deck as you can see in the attached. The wind and weather steadily improved, as did Graham’s sextant work, with a fix only 1.8 nm from where our friends the satellites position us. You can see the daily shower routine – starts with sea water, buckets thereof, and then a sparing amount of fresh water, just enough to make the soap work and be able to rinse off – but otherwise all must be preserved!

 

 

All this great weather ended up with us raising the bimini to give us more shade – the sun is becoming remorseless when it’s out from the clouds (we’re level with south of the Sahara here) [I’m sure you can all relate to this in London]. So we approached dinner very happy with ourselves. We looked to the north and saw a stream of squalls and smugly welcomed the fact that we were further south. At this time we took pictures of the fantastic sky, not realising [derrr] that there was a reason for it looking so dramatic. As we looked astern we saw a big blackness. Graham asked for opinions how long it would take to hit us – votes were between 1 and 2 hours. But we concluded we could be wrong and would do well to get the spinnaker down which took us the next 5-10 minutes. Some 10 seconds (no kidding) from when we’d done that we were hit – the wind went from 10 to 25-30 knots in about 3 seconds, with rain consistent with standing under a full powered shower. The attached pic shows us about 5 mins into this, all smiles [you can’t see the rain as it’s protected by the bimini]. James and Byron then retired to be rested for their 10 pm watch. Graham and Chris were struggling to control the boat which had two reefs in a poled-out genoa, but still a full mainsail – but were happy in the fact that this couldn’t last long. The mainsail, with wind and waves was causing the boat to lurch from gybing the main to backing the poled-out genoa – opening up the chance of breaking either the pole or boom – so Graham was full on trying to keep control, while Chris then tried to work out how to reduce sail (and get rid of the bimini which was blocking all vision of what was going on). One and a half hours later the squall finally dissipated – Graham described this as like riding a bucking bronco for one and a half hours and practically had to be scraped off the deck from exhaustion.

 

All told we had broken a block (pulley) on the mainsail, which was fixed later on in the night, but nothing else. So exhaustion aside, it was a good learning for us. Next time it’s spinnaker down, pole down and two reefs in both sails at the first sign of trouble.

 

Otherwise we had a rather windless night (a pity one couldn’t have had the mean speed between the two episodes but no such luck) and so today we’re off to normal again. Progress wise, we’re now well west of the Cape Verdes – and it’s pretty much west all the way now, about 1850 nm to go, having just covered 1000 nm since Las Palmas – so 35% of the way! When we look at the position reports from this morning it’s tempting to be initially disappointed – our identical boat is neck and neck with us, and the race version of our boat is 60 nm ahead. But as at 4 am we had 1898 nm to go, and much of the fleet is between 1900 and 2100 nm to go; only the faster boats are in the 1800s and the very largest race boats below that – an no-one knows at this stage who has used any engine (the cruising boats are allowed to; they get penalised at the end); we haven’t used ours at all. So all in all I think we’re doing great.

 

Thanks for reading!