Across the Pond - Day 19

Jackamy
Paul & Derry Harper
Sun 6 Dec 2009 09:00
17:02.040N 061:30.629W


Saturday 5th December


Land ahoy! We spotted Antigua about an hour ago at 9.00am. Everyone was very excited as you can imagine. We've seen nothing but a handful of boats on the horizon for 19 days!

What a last night we had!

We had squall after squall after squall! No sleep was had as the boat was rocking and dancing all over the place. Not very pleasant and quite scary! Paul B and myself went through a squall that had 40 knots of wind. We think we had too much sail out as the boat just had no control whatsoever but once you're in a squall you can't mess with the sails as you'll end up tearing them. We ended our first watch and left Paul and Amy surrounded by 9 separate squalls....good luck! They experienced winds as high as 36 knots and monsoon style rains. Surprisingly when we weren't going through a squall and the winds were relatively normal, the foresail that was torn slightly the other day ripped completely. As you can imagine Paul wasn't too pleased but at least it happened on our last night as we wouldn't have made as much progress as we have had we not got two headsails. We were all exhausted this morning and really welcomed the site of land.

We're expecting to get into Jolly Harbour later on this afternoon and we should fingers crossed make it before customs closes.

We'll update again once we're in and get uploading all the photos we've taken!