Day 17:Things that go bump in the night
Purple Mist
Skipper: Kate Cope
Tue 24 Jan 2023 15:35
15:23.684N 51:32.075W
Day 17: Things that go bump in the night
There is definitely a pattern to the Purple Mist challenge of the day…and that’s they are now happening at night.
Last night started in a regular fashion with a few 25kt squalls. No real dramas, the boat was a bit over- powered and rounded up to wind but soon recovered. The other night we had the mother of all squalls well we’ve now met “Big Daddy” …First part of it was a sustained 25kts which rattled the boat like crazy then came the lashing rain , then the 38kts!! (This is Gale force 8). Releasing the kicker made little difference so I dived for the Jib halyard and dumped it. At times like this I’m so glad the jib is hanked on as whilst it was over the side of the boat trailing in the sea it was still all attached to the forestay and safe.
15minutes later the whole storm had passed so after Claire wrestled the jib back aboard the boat we hoisted the whole lot back up again. These are the sort of manoeuvres where we lack experience as we have never have to do this in the UK. We both agreed if/when we do another Transat we would now both have a lot more knowledge of the different sail set ups and emergency procedures that are quite specific to the Atlantic. We are getting better as with this incident - no sails or people were harmed.
Here for you weather buffs are snapshots of the wind direction shifts and speed of the 2 sides of Big Daddy squall.
Wildlife of today was two white birds with long tails. Someone I’m sure will know what they are …answers on a postcard to ‘Purple Mist, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean’ . There is some formula to know your distance from land by counting the number of birds per hour you see. Anyway as I can’t recall the formula it’s lucky we know exactly that we are 512NM from Barbados or two “Myth of Malham” races.
We also had 1 very tiny flying fish - definitely not enough for Sushi.
