Passage to Marquesas day 22
Nickanddenisesailing
Sat 20 May 2017 03:07
Biggy squalls.
We are so close now we can nearly smell it - the beer, the pizza, the anchorage........ Buuut we had a bit of a delay after a bit of a rubbish 24hrs so looks like we wont get in till the wee hours of Saturday (tomorrow morning).
What started as a relatively clear night turned into a night full of massive rain squalls, thunder and lightning, wind gusts of 35+ dropping to 10knts within a few min and pretty much no sleep for both of us. This followed through into this morning and only now 5pmish has it started to settle - although we are still surrounded by dark clouds. Frustrating to deal with as it involved lots of sail changes, reefs in and out all night and very little progress as the wind behind the squall front was light - although we got quite a few surprise blasts. We tried sailing with the squalls but quickly found that the fastest way out of the lightning zone was to take sail in and let the squall pass over us. Just difficult as it was one after another. So we spent the night and most of today soaked through in our wet weathers, jandals on (lighting strike protection..?), grab bags ready and all electronics in the oven. We watched a few forks hit very close to the boat and we have been counti
ng our
lucky stars that they haven't hit us yet..... fingers crossed for the next 10 hours.....
Part of our bimini also decided to try and make a bit of a break for it today during a large gust in one of the big rain downpours. Luckily NIck caught it before it tried to stab a hole in the hatch and re secure it.
Other than that we are trucking on and have spent most of the day talking about kiwi pies and how much we love them.
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