Walkabout - Day 7 - Fishing ban

S7:22 W103:34

It was a sad day due to my fishing license having been revoked by Head chef.

We have now made it out of the doldrums so are well in towards the trade winds now. The weather isn’t very settled and is still very squally and wet at times. We are hoping that this will come to an end soon and be more settled in a few days. Although the boats ahead have reported no improvement. But here's to hoping.

Monday started off well with the sun finally coming out. We hadn’t seen the sun much in the last few days due to still being caught up in the cloud from the squalls. The wind was steady and we spent most of the day on the Hydrovane. There were a couple of sail changes to break the day up, we hoisted the blue water runner and flew that until the wind picked up and was overpowered. So that came down. We soon reverted back to main and genoa as before.

There was no fishing to be had today because Traci said I had filled the fridge and freezer with more fish than we could eat. So we ate Tuna and Mahi goujons for lunch to eat the left over up and then the rest of the Mahi then baked a few more fillets to be made into Kedgeree for dinner. Fishing will be back on tomorrow to hopefully cause more issue for the Chef!!

The night started off well and nice and calm but it didn’t last for long. During Andrew's shift we started having 40 degree wind shifts and that only built to when we were all up and having wind shifts of 50 degrees. This wasn’t a issues for the sails as we were on the hydrovane which means we just follow the wind angle. This is a problem for the direction we are heading though. We had already put 3 reefs in the main and furled the Genoa as necessary through the night. So the sails were well reefed for any squall action that might hit us.

This morning the seas state is confused and messy. We are now trying to head dead down wind but due to wind shifts again this doesn’t help our direction at times. We have had a drive by with another arc boat called Into the Mystic. They came within 400 metres of us and we managed to wave to each other. Feels a bit odd to be that close to another boat when they are is much ocean to sail in!

We forgot to mention that a couple of days ago Walkabout clocked up 10000 nautical miles since we left Plymouth on 15 August 2021. Quite a milestone. And today we will log 1000NM into this passage, about one third of the distance will be done.