A delayed blog today as weather conditions and sea conditions were most definitely against typing on the laptop!

 

Our position is from 14:00 today local time which gave us a logged distance of 206NM but a more accurate 180NM COG.

 

Since commencing the 400NM sea crossing to Malta yesterday, the wind picked up to a F6 S’ly wind.

 

While initially this gave us good boatspeed of 9-10knots on a beam reach, the building swell made it difficult to steer Ceilidh accurately although the autohelm did a very good job.

 

Before midnight we had 3 reefs in the main and some rolls in the genoa and were able to remain in control while maintaining 7.5knots.

 

The beam swell was very uncomfortable and we took a good few solid green one’s over Ceilidh, some of which found there way below soaking some of the bedding.

 

So all in all a very taxing night for the crew and I put in a double watch of 6 hours overnight to help keep Ceilidh on  track. It turned out to be a very dark night with lots of cloud cover so not easy to see where the next wave was coming from. All in  all a very tired Ceilidh crew in the morning.

 

Some funny stuff now:

 

Our splendid B&G instrument panel is now known as “ Burble & Garble” as Dave & Neil argue about the planned eta at Malta as given by this piece of kit.

 

We have tested the sea shampoos provided by Janet, all working satisfactorily.

 

We had a round of crew plank exercises, plenty of scope for the log writer to improve.

 

Brighter and very warm weather has returned this afternoon  with the breeze now at F4, eta for Malta is now Monday evening.

 

DS