3am tap on the cabin door. It’s Stu waking me up for my watch. He fills me in on the previous hours, it was brief. We seem to be stuck in a schizophrenic cluster of wind. As soon as we get our hopes up and slow our speed on the engine, it drops to 3-5 knots wind speed. Like a carrot dangling and then it’s gone when we get so close. Continuing on the engine is not ideal but we’ve been advised to keep going west. And quite frankly bobbing around with no wind and a decent swell gets tedious.
Eventually we think it’s time to get the sails up, all the signs are there. We see some cloud and wind appears to be funnelling through. Slowing the engine down, the wind seems to be consistent, out with the Genoa. Engine is off but we can still hear some roaring. I panic and realise that I’ve totally forgotten to turn the generator off after dinner last night : / not great considering it consumes our fuel which we are trying to preserve and use only when we absolutely need to motor away from the wind holes. Also taking into account we’re only 430 nautical miles into a 2600 nm voyage. We still have a looonnnnning way to go.
It’s now 6am, we’ve woken up Jason accidentally with all the commotion of hoisting sails and leaving the generator on. It worked out perfectly as it’s time for his watch anyway! Guess what, the bloody wind has frozen again. Back in with the Genoa. Engine back on. By this point, I’m not tired or perhaps I’m over tired so decide to stay up for sunrise with Jason and Ted. On night watches, Ted either decides to chill out in the cockpit with whoever is on watch. He properly snuggles in and helps to keep you warm. Or he’s in our cabin snoring away. As we’re both out in the cockpit, of course Ted is out with us. He barely stays inside if we are outside and vice versa. It works perfectly as he is always with you, which relieves any stress of him exploring the deck on his own. It’s almost as if he knows we are on a long voyage and completely chills out and actually enjoys working his way around each crew member for a bit of attention and play time.
Anyway back into the cockpit and just as we are enjoying the sunrise we notice we are suddenly surrounded by squalls. My first ever sight of one and I’ve been dreading this moment since the first time I learnt the definition of the word. If you looked straight up it was pure bliss, blue skies and then scanning down towards the horizon there was a noticeable gradient, starting with a light dreaming grey and becoming a scary, dark mass of cloud. There’s no way out and we’re heading straight into a squall. It’s times like these I really appreciate sailing with such an experienced skipper, Jason doesn’t seem phased by our direction into a squalls, in fact he appears to be quite excited. The wind starts picking up and then the rain, poor Ted doesn’t know what has hit him. Don’t think he has seen rain since we left England! This particular squall we have entered isn’t too hard on us and we make it through the other side :) but appear to have more squalls ahead. We glide through several squalls, all quite light weight and manageable. A good introduction to them and now I fear them slightly less than I did about 2 hours ago.
Stu is now up on deck with us, the sun has risen, providing some welcome light across the horizon. Looking over to our starboard side, there is the most perfect rainbow. It’s as if someone had Photoshop’ed it into the sky for us. The colours were magical against a horizon that doesn’t change that much day to day at sea and particularly in contrast to the thick, dark clouds from the squalls. The full rainbow, looking so proud with both sides shooting straight into the sea like laser beams and then reflecting onto the water. It was definitely worth going through a few squalls to see such an incredible sight.
Dipping in and out of squalls, we start to experience issues with our wind instruments again. Similar to our first few hours of this voyage. We wait until the sea state is calmer, dig out the manual and begin to calibrate our wind instruments. Our instructions are to go round in a circle, slowly, under 2 knots boat speed while one of the display screens shows you the calibration progress. About 6 minutes in and having done 3 circles, I look behind and realise, shit! the fishing line was out. School boy error #2, all three of us are kicking ourselves. Being positive and hoping that our circle circumference was too wide for the line to be caught up in the prop or rudder, Stu starts to reel it in. It’s coming in easily enough, there’s hope until it stops and we can see it coming from straight underneath. It’s stuck on something under our boat. We cut the line and as and Stu holds it as we motor forward, he can feel the tension of the lure still in the water and it appears to be slipping from his hand, which is a good sign. Hopefully it’s only caught round once and the weight of the lure will pull it away. This didn’t happen, we can still see a few meters of line trailing from under our boat. Plan B, Jason volunteered to dive in and cut it from the prop or rudder but the sea state is too erratic and it would just be unsafe until we reach calm water. At this point I’m thinking it’s sods law that the 1st fish we catch will be trailing behind the boat and we won’t even be able to reel it in! Stu comes up with a brilliant idea, Jason ties a line around the gaff, we pop a cork around the spike and Stu drops it in. Like one of those games at a fair when you plop the magnet in to catch a fish or duck. The idea being that he drops it deep enough and as he pulls it up the line rests into the U shape of the gaff and we can pull it up and at least bring in the lure. It takes Stu 4 attempts and we see the line has been caught! We get the lure and cut the line as short as we can. Phew!
Karla appears after about 30 minutes, she managed to get back to sleep after our night watch at 6am and slept through the squalls, calibration and fishing line game.
After the morning activities we all turned into sloth mode, I needed to sleep after being awake since 3am. I opened the hatch slightly in the cabin to let some air in as it turns into a hot box during the day. There’s a cool light breeze coming through, Ted is snuggled next to me and just as we are about drop off a freak wave comes waterfalling into the cabin. It literally scared the life out of us. The guys on board realised the hatch was open and Jason comes running down. Recovering from the total shock of what had just happened, and again another school boy error I moped up the wave and finally got some rest!
I woke up still feeling groggy, hot and seasick from lying in a cabin that was slamming on the swell. After a shower and a seasick pill, I was ready to face the open world. Up on deck Stu, aka the ultimate sloth attempting to multitask. He was flying the Code Zero, eating pizza and drinking beer. An unusual sight to see the sloth multitasking ;)
The Code stays up for a couple of hours and the wind drops again. I would never in a million years think that there would be no wind in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As advised, we will continue to head West in search of wind :)