Second Night & the Moon is Bright
Rich's 2025 World ARC PatBon Blog
Richard Hurd
Mon 13 Jan 2025 12:05
At least the sea wolves don’t howl and keep us awake! It’s a bright full moon tonight and with a fairly clear sky, visibility at 0200 is excellent. I’ve just come on watch, taking over from Val and I think we’ve just got 2 yachts in sight - Musketeer of Cowes about a mile to port and our good friends aboard One Distraction about 5 miles to starboard.
The forecast indicated that the wind would increase and turn to the north a little, so we decided to take down our large gennaker for the night and pole out the genoa and staysail and run directly downwind. Sadly the additional wind hasn’t materialised (yet), so it’s a bit rolly at the moment; not easy for the off watch crew to sleep! We’ve got 12 to 15kts of wind and with these sails up, we’re struggling to keep over 7kts of boat speed, which is frustrating, especially as Musketeer is going a good half knot faster! I’ve taken over from George (our autohelm) for 30 mins to see if I can steady the rolling and increase speed, but sadly not! George is clearly the professional in this department.
The food we’ve had so far has been amazing- Peter’s lasagne last night and salmon the night before. Sadly this salmon was fished from our freezer rather than the sea! We have been fishing during the day, but nothing caught yet apart from Sargasso seaweed! Nathan and I have even tried our Billy Bates Turbo Whistler lure, but no fish was interested. Just as we were rigging the twin poles on the foredeck, a pod of dolphins came over. There were two teeny weeny babies swimming with their mums which was so lovely to see. They stayed, frolicking on our bow for a good 10 mins and as always just brought a big smile to our faces.
So my 2 hour watch in the middle of the night is over and Nathan has just taken over. The ships log has been written up and we’ve got about 560nm still to do out of the total 815nm from St Lucia to Santa Marta, Columbia. Not bad progress, but not sure we’ll make it by Wednesday before sunset, unless the wind picks up a bit. So much for our predictions!
So it’s now time to try and get some kip in a rolly and noisy boat - wish me luck.
Thanks to Patricia, Nathan’s girlfriend for the crew photos below, taken just before we set off from Rodney Bay.
