Walkabout - Rocking and a Rolling Through the Night - Day 8 Mindelo to Grenada
Walkabout has gone Sailing
Andrew and Traci Roantree
Sun 28 Nov 2021 10:17
We are through half way! The miles to go figure will be less than 1000 shortly. And we seem to be into the sort of weather we would have expected from the trade wind route. The wind was fairly quiet during yesterday (10-12knots), but picked up over night. Traci saw 23 knots of wind on her watch in the middle of the night, and we hit 10knots boat speed. With the wind comes waves and swell. We are heading downwind, and the swell chases us along. These big 2-3m waves catch us up, start to tower over the back of the boat, and then the stern is just lifted up by the wave as it rolls on underneath us. This does lead to a lot of rock and roll boat motion.
The Handicraft club was in action yesterday - making some extra dyneema spliced loops and soft shackles - there are endless uses for them around the boat.
The Fishing club had a brief moment of excitement yesterday. There was a fish on, the reel whizzed out, I saw it jump out of the water, and then it all went quiet. I wound in the line to find that our best lure (the one from Zelda) had gone. The wire leader completely snapped. Must have been a big fish, I say…. After that, normal service was resumed, and all we caught was weed.
We swapped to BWR, poled out on the starboard side yesterday, and it looks like this could be our set up for a few days. The Hydrovane has continued to suffer from weed, making it difficult to use. So we spent a lot of time on auto helm yesterday. But the power consumption is huge in these big seas, and the boat corkscrews along over the waves. At times the helm would go from one full lock to the other full lock and back again several times. It was obvious that our batteries weren’t going to make it through the night. So at about 2200 I decided to steer myself - and it was surprisingly easy - not sure what the auto helm was playing at (may need to look at the settings again). Then I thought I would give the Hydrovane a go, despite weed wrapped at the bottom of it. And it has done OK since then. Sometimes it is happy for an hour, then you can spend an hour constantly adjusting it to get it to hang on to the heading. So it has been a long night for both of us - no opportunity to read or relax, and we need to be very vigilant .
Last night’s dinner was (altogether now…) Steak!! We had 2 really big and fat fillet steaks from Las Palmas, with some mashed potatoes and onions. It was fantastic. 2 other notable things about last night’s dinner… We ate with knives and forks (a first on this trip - usually a fork or spoon will do). And we drank the last bottle of homemade elderflower ‘champagne’ that we had brought from Tipton. We are a ’dry’ boat at sea. I don’t think this ‘Champagne’ has much alcohol in it, but it was light, sparking and very tasty. Just the thing to mark the start of the second half of this adventure.
Today I think there is a meeting of the Cookery club, where bread and cake is on the agenda.
The sun is up, and the fishing line is out… Fingers crossed.
That’s all from Walkabout for today - currently bowling along at 9knots towards Grenada!! YEEEEHAAAAAAAAA
A&Tx