14:06.809N 59:57.366W
Knotoncall
Sun 10 Dec 2017 00:13
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14:06.809N 59:57.366W Knot on Call Blog 8/9th December -
Day 20/21
Our penultimate and our last nights at sea!
Yes please we all shout in Unison! Well what have we
learnt so far - not to start a sentence with the word So, never ever temp fate
by mentioning how nice the weather is, that for once there is no wind at dinner
time, say the winds eased lets take the reef out, tell your Grandson that the
storm on the East Coast near Whitby couldn't possibly effect the weather here.
Just all too risky by far, tempting fate like that.
So we charge on into the night following another day of
down wind sailing, Fridays' in 20-25 knot winds gusting 30 knots, lots of
squalls drenching the crew who come off watch looking like rats that have been
hosed down by a water canon. Still on the same gybe we are aiming for the
gap between Martinique and St Lucia where we would hope to gybe to reach our
destination. Of course getting that just right is a tall order with such varying
wind direction so we may well have to do it in more than one gybe. The wind
angles have really not been kind for the whole of the crossing either on the
nose or dead astern, just what you don't want. Looks like we may arrive around
first light Sunday, we'll see.
Saturday is a much better day and although squalls are forecast between
Barbados and Martinique and we will be at the northern end of that zone, there
are none on the horizon yet. At last its happened we gybe onto port tack after
94 hours and 680 miles on starboard. We are in a group of around 10 - 12 boats
all who have taken very different routes across, some going north, others due
west and others like ourselves taking the southern route. The northern route is
shorter but with more difficult upwind sailing, certainly this year there seem
to be very few of those boats ahead of us. As we all funnel into the same
destination boats are merging again into small groups from all those different
passages. Gybing back onto starboard we are gratified to see our track should
take us exactly where we want to be. Sail around Pigeon Island avoiding the wind
shadow and straight across the finish line in Rodney Bay - yippee!!
Feeling that we are almost done cooking on a roller coaster we jettison
some of the "past there use by date" vegetables over the stern, The children,
Phil and John, have the rotten cabbage and squash shot putt contest over the
stern and two soggy cucumbers as make shift javelins. The deciding contest of
these two mighty Olympiads taking the form of a sliced potato skimmer contest
over the back of the boat. John claimed victory with 3 skims and a bounce off a
wave top. Actually the veg lasted well and very little of the 10kg each of
potatoes and carrots and other veg were wasted. We still have apples and oranges
but tomorrow we will be dining out!
We have 2 bottles of Cava in the fridge and the organisers promise rum
punch to all new arrivals at whatever time of day it is by way of celebration.
We have sailed a total of 3300 miles in a little under 3 weeks and its almost
time to stop the boat.
Bye for now John
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