December 6, 2015 – We have entered the area of the Atlantic that is known for squalls: local wind and rain storms. You can recognize a squall by dark vertical clouds and you can actually see it moving. They grow and move quickly, so in case we come into a squall it’s only for about 15 minutes that we will be having strong wind and showers of rain. Yesterday night we have seen 2 squalls that just passed us. We’ve seen them on the radar but also by eye. It’s impressive to see how fast several clouds can compile into 1 dark rainy cloud. This time we were lucky, no need to put on our rain jackets.
We were less lucky when few hours later we wanted to reef the mainsail. We had issues with getting the sail straight due to the lock of the line that slips, which we only found out today. Additionally often the electrical winch (lier) stops functioning because the power switches are suddenly turned off (overheated perhaps). It happened again last night in the middle of the action. The man were on deck and the woman inside heard somebody cursing about the winch and all 3 ladies jumped immediately out of bed towards the power switches. Quick reactions! I woke up few seconds before by the bucket of sea water that was poured over my face while I was sleeping – never leave your window open when at sea! So all crew was up in the middle of the night to fix the rigging. Approximately 45 minutes later the mainsail was reefed and the jib was out again and 4 out of 6 could go back to sleep.
Today there are still quite some clouds in the sky. It can be that we are in the sun with a blue sky above us and we see in the front or in the back a dark sky with clouds and showers. It changes constantly. In the late afternoon the tip of a squall passed over and all except for Herman stayed inside until the showers were over. Everything under control and now we’ve experienced a squall!
Finally we’ve seen a boat on the horizon! We expect to see more boats soon because we are getting very close to Saint Lucia now. We are on the 11th place of our group (in total 22 boats) and we expect and hope to arrive as 10th.
Other than the squall and the boat not much happened today. All of us have been taking naps during the day, due to the lack of sleep last night. So it was a quiet day! Now everyone is again in bed, with Inge on deck as night watch and me finalizing the log. When the log is sent I’ll join Inge and in 1,5 hour Daan will take my turn and I continue, just like the others, with my beauty sleep. J