AZAB Day 3 Tues 4th June - a tough 24hrs
Nutmeg of Shoreham
Ollie Holden
Tue 4 Jun 2019 16:59
Bad night last night - some nasty squalls came through and we had too much sail up. And then the wind totally died from 0100-0530, which was mega-frustrating as it poured with rain and we were rocking like mad so it was very hard to do anything. Very disorientating too. Eventually I just furled the jib, pinned the main and went to sleep. Woke up an hour later to find a breeze filling in. But it meant I didnt get any sleep until 0500. We were drifting round in circles and I could see Milou and Saffier doing similar about 5 miles away.
Then the NW'ly kicked in like it said it would. Its been blowing 22-28kts solid all day, with a rough sea with waves 2-3m, right on the beam. We've got 3 reefs in the main and a scrap of jib, and its an uncomfortable motion; we're still doing 6-7kts. Both E and I are in the saloon just dozing because theres nothing else you can really do. Water crashing over the top of the boat and now again managing to squirt in through the saloon hatch. Unfortunately Emilia's Kindle took a lump of seawater whilst she was sitting in the cockpit reading last night and it's erased all her books, which is a real pain.
At least we are not hard on the wind, but this isnt much fun as Nutmeg is still crashing off waves and rolling a lot. Looking at the forecast it looks like it will drop a bit tomorrow then pick back up again on Thursday, I need to look at the longer-range forecast tonight as I was really hoping for some more benign conditions at some point on this leg.
I guess I didnt think very hard about what conditions would actually be like on this trip. Perhaps I've been lucky in the past because we've chosen most of our departure dates and been very conservative. But this is very full on and I am feeling a large weight of responsibility; Emilia is 100% reliant on me to make safe sensible decisions. We are 250 miles from anywhere - about equidistant from Brest and La Coruna, and 280 miles from the Lizard, and just under a third of the way to Ponta Delgada.