Thursday 6 December 2018
Kelpie
Sarah and David Holtby
Thu 6 Dec 2018 18:11
Well that was interesting. Overnight we got hit by 2 violent squalls in the space of three hours. These are "black" squalls that strike with very little warning and the wind on the leading edge is 35 to 40 knots (Gale Force 8 to Severe Gale Force 9) with a 30 degree wind shift. The wind subsides after about 25 minutes and slowly returns to the trade wind after about 40 minutes. At the moment there is no moon so you can only see them coming by the stars going dark as it clouds over; this means we get about 5 minutes warning only. In both cases we were able to get the genoa furled in time and handle Kelpie under her already reefed main. Kelpie, of course, handed it beautifully and remained easy to steer throughout - she really is a lovely design for this sort of sailing.
Our watches are now 3 hours behind the UK which is why this blog is published later in the day - we have our little routine aboard Kelpie where we do the emails after our lunch including getting weather forecast - We then have a big debate about what sail plan we need for the night ahead - Andrew has built some brilliant tools on his iPad to tell us what our VMG (velocity made good) would be in various scenarios . Thus far this process has served us well and we clung onto our second place and even clawed back some miles from the leader in the past 24 hours. Our noon to noon run (local time) was 146 miles.
Then we write the blog which will arrive on the website in the early evening in the UK
Gina has been forwarding some of the comments on the WhatsApp - thank you everybody for your brilliant support. We have a tentative ETA for sometime during daylight on Sunday (local time which in St Vincent is 5 hours behind the UK). Once we get organised with local WiFi etc, we should be able catch up with all of you then.
D