Position 16.01.266N 045.42.157W
We had an eventful night with squalls driving the wind up to 45kts, showers, heavy seas.
Donald & Audrey were on watch 10pm to 2am and had an interesting session with heavy rain and high winds causing them to reef the genoa and hunker down.
We came on at 2am and it all looked relatively calm. By 3.00am we had encountered some high winds but not sustained. Then at 3.30am large black clouds gathered behind, in front and to the port side of us. The clouds behind had a tornado cone shape to them. The wind angle also changed substantially meaning we were having to head way off our course to the north to keep the wind from folding our genoa back. We had taken the mainsail down during early evening.
We took the decision to take the genoa all the way in as we could see the wind building on our Garmin systems and by the time we were doing it and battling to get the last 6’ wrapped away the wind hit a howling 45kts accompanied by heavy rain.
At the same time the problem we have had with our heading hold autopilot system disengaging itself happened again and we swung rapidly round to port. The helm would not respond quickly as we were running our starboard engine only, and at low revs to help our stability in the large swell. With the combination of that coupled with the wind angle the boat would not turn easily. We started the other engine, regained our heading and re-engaged the heading hold.
The port engine then showed us our intermittent fault where it turns itself off for no reason had definitely not gone away and promptly shut itself down. By now it was also raining even harder and still blowing well with a big accompanying swell for good measure. By now we had stabilised the boat and were back on track so increased the revs on our starboard engine and carried on.
The boat is big, heavy and robust and saw us through. An interesting hour however and a good test of skills handling the boat through some unforeseen problems.
We were able to see the lights of one other boat in the fleet last night off to our starboard side periodically and they popped up on our AIS system some of the time burt other than that there was nothing else around. Glen and Caitlin had some heavy rain and changing wind through their watch too and we were all glad to see the sun come up.
We have seen no new wildlife today and there even seem to be less Cosmopolitan Flying Fish around.
Today saw us complete 1 month since we left Antibes and half the mileage to St Lucia from Cape Verde. We had a piece of Toblerone each to celebrate!
Delicious salmon and roast veg for dinner last night, vegetable soup for lunch today, tomato and basil soup tomorrow and then our soup supplies are finished no doubt to be followed by some other amazing dishes from the galley from Audrey & Caitlin.
It is a nice sunny day here, changeable wind both in force and direction and still large swells. Our weather forecast for the day tells us there is “slight potential for isolated showers and squalls over the next few days” - we hope they pass us by!
Everyone on board is good and enjoying the passage.