Friday 22nd June

At Sea

2 07.923 S
93 28.686 W (at Midnight)



My watch was uneventful apart from the wind vanishing completely, Gerry took over and I went to bed only to be woken up an hour later as he wanted to put the main sail away and we don’t go out on deck without the other person being in the cockpit – even if they are grumpy and bleary eyed. When I got up at the end of my “off watch” period Gerry had unfurled the jib, he went to bed and the jib did a reasonable job of moving us along for the next couple of hours. When Gerry got up from his sleep he decided that we would try the main again, we furled the jib away, hoisted the main and then unfurled the jib again. Just one small problem, as he went to hoist the main the halyard wrapped itself around the radar reflector and took a great deal o
f persuasion, swinging and jerking accompanied by a lot of foul language to free it. Having successfully freed the halyard Gerry thought he might as well do the topping lift whilst he was on a roll – more cursing, jerking and swinging but on a different bit of line with me hanging on to the back of his shorts to prevent him from falling overboard. The operation was a success, though it may be temporary as this has happened before. The apparent wind was 11 knots and we were flying along at up to 7 knots. At 07.00hrs Gerry kept the radio schedule, Y Not was 4 miles behind us and just within line of sight; Timela was off to their port side and some way behind Y Not. Cameron reported that they were doing 2 knots at the time – no wonder they expect to be at sea for 3 months, I couldn’t do it! JJ Moon joined in to tell us they would be setting sail in the morning. Gerry was happy, we were winning (yes Dale & Lorie it IS a race; any 2 boats, same direction and all that crap!) and at the time we were surfing down waves reaching speeds of up to 8.8 knots – woohoo! As the day wore on we hooked 2 very large fish and successfully lost 2 lures (and the fish that were attached) I was beside myself as we are now down to one lure, I’m guessing that we won’t be eating much fish at all this leg of the trip. We continued to do speeds in excess of 6 knots all day, it got a bit lumpy for a time as the swell kicked up a bit quicker but that eventually settled back down to mildly irritating especially when a toilet break was required. We took turns in napping during the afternoon to try and keep up our beauty sleep, heaven knows we need it! We pulled further away from the other boats, loosing sight of them and suddenly being the only boat out here, with nothing in any direction except sea and sky. Our one “spotting” incident happened mid morning, we saw a simply enormous pod of dolphins, there were hundreds of them, leaping and jumping so much that the water boiled around them, just as fast as they had appeared they took off underwater and vanished never to be seen again. The rest of the day was uneventful; we continued to sail at a blistering pace and wondered what was going on when our speed dropped below 6 knots. The evening meal was the most difficult part of the day as we managed to hit a patch of swell that came at us beam on and every few seconds we were bounced from one side to the other making cooking a real trial. It did calm down for most of the night and we managed to sleep for short periods when we weren’t on watch.