Thursday dawned overcast and grey with very little wind. Gradually the wind increased and backed. The rain started to bucket down and continued to do so for the rest of daylight hours with the odd flash of lightning to keep us alert.. The wind at one point was from the south west....this in the Trade winds which are supposed to be consistently from the north east.

We spoke to Herb during the evening, having been unable to for the last 2 days due to a minor aerial fault on the SSB radio. He said we were in the middle of a rather unusually big area of “convectional activity” - essentially a thunderstorm. He said that if we headed south we would soon be experiencing calmer conditions, a boat only 60 miles away had had winds of 5 knots most of the day.

This was the cue for the wind to increase further. The rain had now stopped but the wind was a steady 30 knots and was touching 40 knots at times, in other words gale force. We had earlier reefed our jib to its smallest size, so I rigged the inner forestay in case we needed to hoist our tiny storm jib. However, we ran before the wind and although a bit jerky, the inside of the boat was quite pleasant compared to the wind and increasingly large seas outside. The log entries for the afternoon and night read 15.45 pm ”continuous very heavy rain and winds gusting to 30 knots”, 19.30 pm “rough”, 01.00 am “rough”, 0200 am “sailing under fully reefed genny, inner forestay rigged” and at last 0600 am “wind falling light”.

Through all this our small white visitor stoically stood with his head under his wing in the cockpit. He was drenched and wind swept. We thought that he would be unable to last the night but on waking from my off watch I found nurse Lorraine feeding him noodles with a pair of tongs!