Day 11 / 12
Position 8 January 2006 2000 GMT 18 degrees 37 mins North 38 degrees 55 mins West. Only 1301.3 nautical miles to go. That's over halfway now so we are really counting down the miles. After the last update we had a bit of a change in weather. It is not uncommon to experience squalls on this route although we have had a pretty intense period of squalls over the last 36 hours. A squall is basically a localised storm that lasts from a few mins to an hour, we get gale force winds and torrential rain. The squalls are pretty hard work and mean that we are constantly tending to the sails and steering of the boat. When the weather is good we keep a relaxed watch during the day and at night we keep a watch but usually from the inside checking all is okay every 10 mins or so. With the squalls one of us have to be on deck at all time monitoring the wind and trying to spot anything sinister heading our way. The seas are also very confused which makes sleeping difficult when off watch. We got so fed up with soaking our wet weather gear today we put on our swimming cosies during the squalls (bikini and safety harness - hmm a good look I think). Anyway about 5 pm tonight we had a huge squall and when the sky cleared behind was our old favourite trade wind sky. Winds are still pretty strong but we hope to put the intense squalls behind us for a while. We used it as an excuse to celebrate with a beer. Despite the more difficult sailing conditions we are still doing really well and enjoying ourselves.
Squall passing by / view of squalls on radar
posted by revision2 @ 8:49 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home