Ever since we hit the half-way mark at the weekend it feels like the sea has ramped up a notch. A confusion of waves, the swell at odds with the following winds, has us pitching all over the place. Meal-times are a surreal juggling act with a Pythonesque ballet of chairs sliding around, plates and cutlery shooting all over the place at random moments, juice going flying, but conversation flows on uninterrupted. Thank goodness we all have our sea legs now - the kids don't seem remotely phased!
I was unsettled last night on the midnight watch though, when the Skipper, startled awake by the crash of an especially choppy wave, leapt up from the Cockpit and asked what I thought of the clouds behind. Clouds behind? The moon was clear in the sky when I'd last looked... but in the space of time I'd taken to read an email, clouds fringed with shadows of nimbus had gathered (accumulied?!) and were racing across the sky. Could one of them be carrying a dreaded squall? For the first time in my life I felt intimidated by a cloud formation. After a period where time stopped as we held our breath, they carried on moving across behind us, and away. Still, I was monitoring for squalls on the radar every 15 minutes from then on, and in the process of conscientiously switching between wind and chart screens to keep track, must have inadvertently adjusted the windhold autopilot (keeping us at a steady angle to the wind) by ten degrees. It was only when I woke the Skipper to warn him
of the gennaker flapping that it became apparent why.This trip is a real learning curve!
Yesterday we started to notice an abundance of algae in the water, and I was just picking up a rather pretty clump, wondering what it was doing there on deck, when a rogue wave drenched me from behind in response, much to the amusement of all! The kids and I are having lots of talks about plant life at the moment, and finding fresh specimens to examine is not the easiest on a boat crossing nearly three weeks in, so guess I'm grateful on balance ;-) It wasn't until an observation in a message later that evening from Rich, about his experience of an Atlantic crossing, that I registered this particular sea weed is native to Wide Sargasso Sea. A novel place, the only sea without a coastline apparently, where eel larvae hatch and later return to lay eggs, and to where turtles travel, for their babies to take shelter from predators in the sargassum weeds.
The sea also brought us into the company this afternoon of an unknown sailing vessel, fellow Swiss according to the AIS, that had been zooming ahead a few days ago. Close up we able to see that it was a trimaran, rather than the cat we had assumed. It had one reef in its beautiful mainsail, and we wondered why it was holding back when it could be flying, until the Skipper contacted us over the radio and we had our answer: it was another ARC sailing vessel, Flying Merlin, who had slowed down deliberately for our benefit to say hello! Unlike us, they had hurtled south initially, fuelled up in Cape Verde, and are now being guided by the same weather plan as us, which is very reassuring to know.
In other news we are changing clocks to Rio time today. It means lighter evenings and darker mornings, which I'm not that keen on, but it's the right latitude, and brings us one step closer to adjusting to Caribbean time. The idea that we might actually get to St Lucia one day is steadily becoming more tangible...