Wet & Windy
MILANO BLANCO
James Blackburn
Mon 6 Jul 2009 00:12
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06 Jul 2009 38:56.9N 51:43.2W
Paul
A great days sailing all westerley, perfect for our
course due East for Horta.
After dinner we were clearing up and noticed a long
grey front moving towards us, quite fast, so we got into our wet weather gear
and reefed the main, shortly the front hit with a wall of water, which lasted
about 2-3 minutes, then a burst of wind which blew us across the flattened water
almost on the plane. Shortly after this storm had passed Jamie went to bed
leaving Carlos and I on watch.
The next couple of hours passed with us dodging a
couple of small weather systems and just getting a bit of rain from the edge of
them. At about 2 we hit another small system full on. Again it started with the
rain then a good amount of wind we were running all the time with a mizzen
(reefed), Main (first reef) and the genoa reduced but goose winged on the
spinnaker pole, the wind started fairly gently at about 20 knots and then grew
to 30-35 knots, the boat stayed very stable and just seemed to almost plane
through the water.
By the end it felt like I had been on a
rollercoaster ride.
After this excitement I went to go to bed, only to
be roused by Carlos 10 minutes later saying there was a big cloud coming with
lightning and we needed to reef the main. Once the main was reefed we sat in the
cockpit and the rain started fairly gently soon this very black cloud
slowly moved overhead, It was about the same size and shape as a large airship
and for what seemed forever just seemed to hover over the boat, with us
expecting a big bolt of lightening to drop out of it at any time, it didn't.
After this had passed we thought it was all over but were we wrong. What can
only be described as solid water fell from the sky, with this came a very strong
wind. The rain had completly flattened the water, so we were flying through the
rain, with a huge bow wave, and this strange glow surrounding us, afterwards we
decided the glow came from the mast head light, but it was very
surreal.
The morning ended up fairly uneventful, except to
say that we still had good wind from the west and had another great day
achieving 167.7 nm.
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