Well, December certainly started with a bang for me. I come back on watch at 0600 each day and, just as the skies begin to lighten, I settle in the corner of the cockpit where I can both see and reach the instruments, and clearly watch behind us. I snuggle in and watch the dawn break, and then the sun rise. The uninterrupted view is one of the joys of being at sea.
Today, as the skies began to get lighter, it became clearer that there was an enormous black squall cloud, with rain underneath it, coming towards us. It was very broad and we were right in the middle. I put some reefs in the sail and closed the hatches. Then I put the autopilot on wind steering. Then the rain began to start and the wind to increase. More reefs and I shut the companionway top hatch and fixed the spray hood over the cockpit. Then - wam - absolutely torrential rain, wind up to 36 knots, and it went dark. More reefs virtually removed the sails but she still screamed along across the ocean peaking at 12.6 knots. I hid just inside the companionway. The boat changed course by forty degrees due to wind shifts. Ten minutes later the worst was over. The wind disappeared, the rain stopped, the sun shone and there was a great rainbow. I went to change into dry clothes. My first Tropical Squall. David slept through the lot later announcing that, as off watch crew, it was his duty to sleep!
After that the trade winds blew strongly all day, up and down they were, between 20 and 26 knots, but from a consistently easterly direction. The sea was rough. Big swell of up to 3m at times, and also a confused sea state. We kept the sail plan conservative and so the speed was down. We are a long way away from anywhere and don’t want to break the boat. Rather comfortingly we ended up in a 20 mile AIS bubble with three other ARC yachts.
The boat motion is quite extreme making it difficult to move around or do much. That said I still achieved the days washing up and David managed to prepare a good, beautifully presented, lunch, and a proper nutritious meal for supper. We have enjoyed freshly prepared meals, twice a day, for the whole passage. But otherwise resting or reading was the order of the day. We did also put the clocks back another hour, as we passed our scheduled point, and are now running on GMT-3. David checked the bilges and found that the t piece for the anchor wash, off the sea water heads inlet, was disintegrating and leaking. He did a quick fix to by pass the anchor wash - don’t think we will need it out here! - and remove the leak.
We heavily reefed before nightfall, to stay safe. Ended up with a ridiculously small sail plan. But then we did get a solid 25-30 knots over night. The wind is now roaring. No more squalls though. Actual sleep is not easy, and that’s down to the noise as much as the movement. But we both feel safe, we are sailing conservatively, and the boat is handling the conditions well. All remains well.