19:27.1N 23:05.9W

Tuesday 14^th & Wednesday 15^th Dec

We had good sailing conditions through the night and by morning we were racing along at 7 knots but through the day this died away yet again and we ended the afternoon motor sailing gently to try to keep up the mileage.

At 6.30pm we were visited by several quite rare Rough Toothed Dolphins who have a rather more prehistoric appearance and unusually are quite audible with their chatter. Joyce chatted and squeaked back as she believes this can bring them to the surface but eventually they dived straight down instead of peeling off through the waves – another idiosyncratic movement particular to these dolphins. We motor sailed on through the night and R & J were woken around 2.30 am by the sound of the dolphins chattering outside the hull! There was a concern during the night watches when we were approached and shadowed for a while by an unlit vessel which we hoped was just a fishing boat and certainly later in the early hours of Wednesday we were tracking three fishing boats on the radar and sometimes visually. As a precaution R & J darkened the yacht for an hour and eventually it disappeared off our radar.

The wind began to rise around 5.30am and by 6.00am we were back sailing again. Gradually during the morning the wind continued to rise, but very unhelpfully it was coming from completely the wrong direction (again) and we were forced to sail close hauled and could not get within 50 degrees of our chosen course. The forecast had the wind veering all morning and so we stayed on a starboard tack until it had come round sufficiently for us to tack onto a new course which was at least due south. The sea was very unpleasant by now with a short chop running against the long Atlantic swell which resulted in waves that stopped us stone dead as Serafina buried her bows into them sending a wall of water rushing over the decks.

The sky then darkened and fearing a line squall Sarah insisted we reefed the main. This we completed just as the wind hit us and we then had an hour or two of 30 plus knots which had us flying along still at 6 to 7 knots when we were not semi-submerged in the next set of waves. The strong wind and cloud passed over and we were left with a good sail but the confused heavy sea remained and so progress was fairly slow as we still kept coming to an almost dead stop every so often as we were still sticking our bows into the waves.

By late afternoon the wind had dropped right away to barely 5 knots leaving us wallowing now in the seas which were at least a lot flatter. We once again resorted to the engine so we could at least ease the ride. We had a quiet night gently motor sailing through to 5.00am when the wind had risen again to allow us to resume sailing. In no time we briskly cutting through the flat seas at speeds up to 8.5 knots and to our relief, this was to continue into Thursday.

We have chatted each day with Scott-Free on the SSB radio and the main topic of conversation has been the unseasonal and unpredictable winds and wind direction. It is supposed to be blowing a steady force 5 or 6 from the NE but we have had absolutely everything except that! Equally there is supposed to be a current running south parallel to the African coast, but that has been running east, west and north, but rarely south. Finally the rolling Atlantic waves are meant to be marching relentlessly from the north west but again we have almost everything else but what we wanted. The weather forecasts change every day and so planning ahead of 24 hours has proved to be a mistake as we have several times made decisions that we have regretted later.

This is beginning to present a problem for R & J as we were  prevented from leaving Tenerife for three days because of the weather and we are now behind our planned schedule and they are fast running out of time for their proposed return to the UK from Barbados. As things stand they may now have to fly home from the Cape Verde Islands which will be a huge disappointment for them, but they realise that it would be unfair of them to put pressure on us to complete the Atlantic crossing by a very fixed date in January.