Friday 17th August

At sea

20 44.970 S
159 16.836 W (at Midnight)

It was now over 24hrs since we had begun this horrendous nightmare of a ride, the seas and wind were slowly calming down; we began to think that 22knots and 12 ft seas were good! Finally as I took the watch at 05.00hrs the winds dropped to 20 knots and by 08.00hrs were down to 17knots – it felt like we were hardly moving at all. As the sun (!) rose we spied a few patches of blue sky, admittedly they were very small but at least they were there. Our speed had dropped away to 4 knots – now we weren’t going fast enough – there’s just no pleasing some people! Gerry went out on deck and removed the pole from the jib (we had furled the jib away with the pole still in place) and we very tentatively unfurled the jib, it picked our speed back up to a respectable 5.5 knots which we were happy with as it would ensure our arrival at Rarotonga in daylight hours. We threw the fishing line on the water to see if we could tempt anything (no it didn’t work). For the rest of the day we took turns to catch some sleep and keep watch. We continued to try and dry out the inside of the salon and the clothes and towels that were soaked from the previous couple of days. The wind speed settled at around 17 knots and stayed there with occasional gusts of up to 23 knots for the rest of the day and into the night. We managed to have a decent evening meal at last and some normality returned to our schedule.