Well, our stress free idyll has come to an end. Starting at 23:30 p.m. we hit the first really nasty squall. The wind went from 10 knots at 90 degrees to 28 knots at 50 degrees. I had to turn the boat 40 degrees towards land to keep the wind on the correct side of the nose. After a few minutes of hand steering through that mess and a deluge of hot tropical giant raindrops, it passed over us, the wind dropped to 4 knots and flipped back to due east. Zoom went the throttle, making up for lack of wind, up went a breath of thanks that we had prudently tucked a reef in each sail at dusk after catching the wahoo. No sooner were we straightened out when wham! Another squall hit, more rain, and this time the wind clocked over to the south thirty degrees. Only 26 knots this time...and so the rest of my watch went; squall after squall rolling over us. After the first weird wind backing , the rest of them caused the wind to clock to the south fiercely, then taper off and trickle back to east. Captain came up to relieve me at 01:00. I was very happy to give him the helm and the annoying squalls. I didn’t sleep much on my off watch because of all the squall noise and sail adjusting going on. For some reason when I finally did drift off Bang! Flappity flappity flap! Went the Genoa. Terrible way to wake up, compounded by the realisation it was almost 04:15. Normally who ever is ON watch, wakes the off watch at fifteen minutes until their shift to give time for waking up, fixing a snack, etc. But here I was fifteen minutes late!I flew out of the Lee berth, jumped into my life jacket, yanked on my glasses and ran up the ladder to the cock pit with no snack and no time to make coffee. “What’s happening?” I asked? “The Genoa furling line broke.” Captain replied. Oh (unprintable explicative)! We tightened up the now full-out genny and decided to make do with too much sail out until daylight. It was a long two hours with a lot more heeling than I was usually comfortable with, a rumbling hungry tummy from no food, and a distinct lack of neuron firing due to no coffee, but finally at daylight, Lars got up. We turned downwind to blanket the genny with the main, and Captain was able to manually wrestle that big sail into submission on the furling foil, then reattach the furling line. The morning continued in the squally vein. More excitement ensued when we spied two small fish boat 20 miles offshore. Then black flags! Ugh! Black flags on the ocean spell trouble! “We can’t go between them!”I yelled! And was ignored, and we ended up going between them right over a net! One of the fishboats began to approach us, but it was too late..we went over the net with its top surface held at the waterline by a series of small white floats not visible in the waves until you are directly over them. We cut the engine and drifted clear...whew. how we love the sweet full keel with the prop and rudder all smoothly out of the way in a clean unbroken line! A fin keel would have been caught. We sustained no damage, and the net appeared unharmed, so we waved and continued on our way. Finally, by mid afternoon there began to be a light at the end of the tunnel. I finished the excellent story, ‘Barbarian Days A surfing life’ by William Finnegan , we ate a nice pasta dinner and began our night watches.
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