Theodora - 7/12 in the morning

Well the last 24 hours or so have probably been the most uncomfortable of the trip so far. We have had our first two squalls, which were easily managed and gave the boat a welcome fresh water wash. The sequence of events is clear, as a squall approaches the sea roughs up a bit followed by a wind increase which in both our instances was only about five to ten knots. As ŵe feel these two effects we reef the twizzle rig in to make the boat more comfortable and then the rain comes. This flattens the sea a bit and lasts no more than ten minutes or so and that’s it. After the squall has passed we noticed a marked reduction in the wind which is probably the most painful part of the whole squall.

The reason it’s been so uncomfortable is that we have waves coming from two different directions. We have the swell caused by the wind coming out of the NNE, this is fine. However we also have a swell caused by a storm of the Florida coast, which is over one thousand miles away, this is coming at us from the north west and when the two combine under the boat it is like sitting on a bucking bronco. The forecast was for the second swell to die away in the latter part of the day, I tiredly hope so.

We did have one alarming moment in the small hours of this morning when ŵe received an automated emergency message from the only yacht in our vicinity. In fact ŵe received the message six times we had seen no other signs of a vessel in distress such as flares. So we got on the VHF and called them up, after three calls there was no reply and ŵe started to think about what to do next. They were about twelve miles ahead of us so getting to them would take a while and the sea state was very tricky. Just as we were thinking through our next steps a warm Australian voice popped up on the VHF informing us that they had a faulty radio handset and that they were fine and then thanked us for paying attention. We wished them a good night and got on with the bucking bronco ride very relieved.

We are now 843 miles from St Lucia which means we have sailed 2,000 a big first for all of us on he boat.

The sun has risen and it looks like another warm day.