Position @ 1200 UTC
35⁰ 05.42 N 45⁰ 25.86 W
Nautical Miles traveled in last 24 hrs:- 152
A bit of a hectic night, the pin at the end of the pole keeping the jib sheet came detached/broke so the sheet jumped out so had to haul the jib in and put out the staysail. The main was also pulled out but with the equivelent of 3 reefs in. Naturally our speed fel from 6 ish to 4 nish knots but at that time noon new what to expect weather wise.
I came up at 0600 hrs as usual and left the rig as it was even though the speed was well down. A good decision as with the passing of the day the seas became more confused and the wind grew stronger so our rig was exactly what was called for; in fact we didn’t change it once during the day and went into night with it.
The issue is simple. We have a stationary very high pressure to East of us, which is South West of the Azores and we have a number of low pressure fronts from the North West of us and coming our way. We are trying to navigate ourselves in the middle but erring on the High Pressure front side. The “Gun Ho” boats are keeping nearer to the low pressure, goodluck to them. The highest wind speed we recorded during the day wa 38 knots, Anam Cara didn’t “bat an eye lid” just took it in her stride. As I have said before Anam Cara can take much more than we mere mortals can take!For exapmle, today we were hit side on by a rouge wave, several tons of water smack into her mid drif with the brunt of it being taken by the small window above the fridge: How the window glass didn’t break I don’t know but all 4 of us were in the saloon at the time and we all ducked expecting water to flow in, but it didn’t, good old girl.
Early afternoon we watched “Mutuny on the Bounty” and I made two loaves of bread, not the most sensible thing to do in this sort of weather but we are out of bread now!
Apart from the high seas and the wind we are now having specially when the rouge wave comes in and slams water right over the boat! Visibility is also poor so we have beenrunning our radarall day and no doubt will dosomright through the night.. Wonderfull thing radar but the down side is the amount of power it consumes. We ran the generator untill the batteries were fully charged and no doubt we will have to do a boost during the night as well.
Paddy cooked a superb fish soup/stew and to follow we were going to have the rest of the Lasagne.The bread came out of the oven at the same time and I have to say both loaves were a succss; in fact we only had the fish soup and bread, the lasagne didn’t get eaten.
Battening down everything followed dinner, ready for a night to remember or will it????