21:30
Local Lea Time, Saturday
We
have now logged about 1700 nautical miles, and have about 500 left. So we’re all
expecting palm trees in the horizon any time soon now. It’s come to our
attention that the leading ARC+ boats have already reached Saint Lucia within
the last 24 hours. Considering we have about 4 days to go, I find that kind of
crazy but also kind of cool. Go them! In our defense though, they all have the
superpower of a spinnaker (in addition to being bad ass sailors) and we no
longer have a spinnaker pole (that we use for our sail that isn’t even a
spinnaker) because, well, it kind of broke.
The
nonstop fun these past few days started Friday afternoon, when Erin was cooking
dinner and had baked potatoes in the making. She was on a good roll with the
whole ‘spreading food all over the place’, and as she opened the oven to check
on the baking, the potatoes decided to do a little dance in the rhythm of a
wave. Potatoes everywhere. Everything we’ve eaten since we left Mindelo seems to
fit in the category ‘hey this tastes kind
of funky,’ so to nobody’s surprise, we ate them anyway. I strongly believe
the reason for the potatoes decision to jump around, is because they were just
very excited about us running into our Swedish friends on S/Y Corona Aq, the
second boat we’ve crossed paths with in these 10 days at sea. We were so happy
to suddenly see them out here in the middle of nowhere, and we even got to have
a little chat thanks to the brilliance of radio.
This
same night is when things went from fun to not too exciting. During the night
20-25 knots wind had us surfing the Atlantic like a speed boat. We may have
gotten a little too excited, because it didn’t take long before the spinnaker
pole decided it needed a break. Like physically, it broke. It’s now bendy like a
hot dog. So that really sucks, considering this downwind sailing doesn’t give us
much choice but to spread our sails for speed, whereas a spinnaker pole
supporting the foresail is essential. But with no ability to fix this problem
at sea, we decided that life must go on. At least until our skipper tripped on
the staircase and sprained her ankle in a “it hurts so bad I think I may have
broken it” kind of way. You could say the pole kind of took our skipper down
with it, she is now parked on the bench with a painful, compressed ankle held
high.
Luckily we’re at the point where we’re closing up on
land, and not moving further away from it. We’ve settled with the fact that
these last 500 miles will just take some more patience than we expected, but
eventually we’ll reach the land of the rum & coke. We feel like we’ve missed
out on a few of those really slow days where the calm wind provides the
possibility of fishing, taking a dip in the ocean and even having time to be
bored. But hey, it’s Saturday night, we’ve had the inevitable (Friday night)
pizza à la me, the Christmas calendar is keeping everyone happy, and even the
injured skippy has agreed to enjoy these last days of this adventure.
517 nm
to go
-Lene