Although the full moon lit our way so gently last night was quite unsmooth due to wind changes all the time. We suspected several squalls so the spinnaker went up and down all night in prevention. However we seemed everytime to “miss” them. This morning was a grey morning, no sunrise from the sea and heavy clouds ahead of us. However the heavy clouds were all along the horizon so we thought it was just normal rain. We sailed through it, got a bit wet, the wind was steady and we thought this was smooth. The wind started to blow stronger and was up to 30 knots when it then dropped gently down to 17 knots. And from nowhere a strong wind hit the boat, Jörgen stearing had difficulties in answering the wind and the broach was inevitable. And then came the real rain – just like pouring hundreds of buckets of water in the boat. Yes now we know what a squall is = local mini tropical storm that last for only 10-15 min. The spinnaker blew off and all  4 guys  did a tremendous job in managing to take it in. The spinnaker is quite damaged being ripped off (reparable? we’ll see), the ropes (sorry don’t know  the marine word in English) that is “fall och gajorna” loosened themselves from the spinnaker left to the ocean and our wind instrument on top of the mast fell off also left to drown in the Atlantic... It took us 5 hours (still sailing forward) to sort everything out and our Mr McGiver Nils took the honorable duty to be lifted up to the top of the mast (with a cykling helmet, it is pretty shaky up there!) to check that nothing more was damaged. He gave us thumbs up from the top. After recovering and talking things through we decided to put up our second spinnaker (the Runner). And so we sailed on.

 

The kids comment from down the boat playing on the iPads (today was their iPad day): “Mum that was a really fun carousel, can we do that again?” 

 

Now only few more days to go and we are in St Lucia!  

 

Take Off and Louise