Day 8 - Passage to St Helena
Misterx
Thu 13 Mar 2025 23:37
13/03/25
8:30 pm
Day 8
Atlantic Ocean
DTD : 693 NM
The wind has steadily gone down for the last 24h, and shows no sign of improvement for the next day or so. We have seen very little sunshine today, the clouds have been bloated and 50 shades of grey, moving very slowly from our back, settling over us and then pushing past us at a glacial pace... even the darkest of them didn't manage to produce much more of a baby's breath upon our fully deployed sail. We are not moving much in this wall to wall greyness, the grey skies imposing their various tones on the sea, without the white lace at the edge of the waves. But I still like watching the clouds in all their subtle monochrome ponderosity.
No more jolting and lurching, the crinkles of the sea have been ironed out, we kind of glide now on its watery surface. And the sounds are very much muffled, no rushing water, no slapping on the hull, no wind howling in the rigging, no whizzing of the whizz, no creaking, and crashing, just a gentle whisper barely pushing us forward between sky and ocean. I use to love sleeping in the front in these kind of conditions, in the V of Mr X, enveloped by that gentle swishing, lulled into sleep, a sleep that was taking me back to the serenity of being in the womb, warm and secure. I've not slept in the front yet this passage, still too cold, the water temperature has not come up to the required degree to sustain the illusion. But it will come and i am looking forward to that very special sleep that will take me back to before any consciousness, the most refreshing of sleep.
So nothing much happened today and that is ok, it is also part of the journey, those lull days when we just take a breath, not being industrious and busy with doing things and just existing. Breathe in, breathe out... even the ships traffic around us has disappeared, the excitement of it, the need to be watchful and alert disappeared too.
Of course this won't last long, tomorrow will surely bring its fair share of frustration at not moving fast enough and the scheming will occupy our empty hours, shall we put up the asymmetric, would that make us go faster? no, not enough wind, it would collapse, the wings maybe? that won't do either, if only we had a few more knots of wind, we can make it go faster with only a couple more knots of wind... we will go through all the possibilities, weight them all and in the end dismiss them all as futile... we would just not go any faster... not until we got this couple more knots of wind. And we will settle back into the lull, until the wind turns up... hopefully not too much of it...
M