Belting along the trade wind route, Well that's what Christopher
Columbus did about 500 years ago. It was about then that he passed
this track in search of the "new world".
Well we are in search of a flat anchorage, cold beer and a burger at
the Soggy dollar bar in Sint Maarten.
The wind has been up (through the day mid 20's) and at night it
climbs up into the 30-35 range. Great sailing conditions but when
you are short handed as we are it gets tiring. Making the land fall
cocktails even better.
Night watch up to about midnight is wonderful, clear skies, lots of
stars and a warm breeze blowing, giving us great boat speed. It's
great sitting out side in the breeze hearing the boat working though
the sea as we eat up the miles. at around midnight it all goes away.
Sea conditions are nothing like the Pacific, there is no regular
swell, it actually is like the Med, sloppy, we counted three
different directions of swell running!. There are two large storms
up
north in the Atlantic causing this.
Day 11 24hr run was 174nm, Day 12 = 172nm, Day 13= 174nm, so we are
chugging through the miles and now down to 651nm to go. At our
current run rate we should be in Sint Maarten around midday Tuesday
18th December
local time. - If we keep the current run rate.
Found that another boat was abandoned yesterday!, like a bloody
obstacle course out here! - you would think the prudent thing to
do if you were to abandon a boat would be to sink it, get it out of
the way. All these boats will probably end up on some beach
somewhere
in the Caribbean.
It seems to be getting into a squally pattern at night, they all
seem to come up after midnight and run until the sun is up and the
volume of them seems to be growing.
There are a few Australian boats out here as well as us. Honeymoon,
from Noosa heads, they are about 400nm behind us bound for Barbados.
Penyllyan from Melbourne - Sandrigham Yacht Club, they left Las
Palmas a
few days ago. They got about 250nm out and found that one of their
rigging wires had failed!! They quickly turned around and headed
back to Las Palmas to get it replaced - lucky they weren't further
out!, There is another from Hobart - can't remember the boat name
and a Catamaran from Sydney Sedina. Then there is also about 6 more
in the ARC (Atlantic rally for Cruisers) - but the ARC boats don't
seem to like talking to the non ARC boats like us!
It seems that we are the only ones headed to the northern end of the
Caribbean chain, everyone else is off to Barbados or St Lucia.
Day 13 we were given a visit of a whale!!! yep a whale!, he/she
followed us for 30-45 mins coming right up along side the boat!
about 6 feet from the side, then it would go up front, down the
other side then do it all again. Seemed to be taking a real good
look. Made us a little nervous with all sorts of Moby Dick thoughts
and maybe whales are thinking of taking revenge for the Japanese
whale hunting! So we were glad it came but were also glad that it
left as we really didn't want to hit it. Made us think that perhaps
the BANG
we had the other day could have been a whale.
But with this visit we can at least blame our bad run on fishing
onto something other than us, it's the Whale!
Day 13 night was a killer!- started off perfect up until about 1am
then, it all fell
apart. We were side swiped by a large wave, rolled us quite a bit,
Big wave jumped up and landed in the cockpit - bugger!, as we rolled
one of the kitchen cupboards opened up and spilled the plates, cups
and sauces out on the floor, breaking them all in the process! So we
had the roll, the salt water and then the 100's of shattered pieces
of ceramic to deal with.
At 1am really unpleasant.
From then on the squalls came in thick and fast one after the other,
they didn't let up until about 11am the next morning, then the sky
cleared up and
it was a beautiful day!! Hopefully the intense patch of squally
conditions was a
front passing and it has now passed and we can have some clear
nights. But who know's I guess we will find out tonight!
Cheers
J&J
No comments:
Post a Comment