Wednesday 15th August

At sea

18 26.950 S
155 06.235 W (at Midnight)

Happy birthday Sue, sorry we missed talking to you when we called, hope you had a good day.

Our second day of the passage began well, I cooked us breakfast and we all watched the sunrise, not that it was very spectacular. We again threw the line in the water hoping for a fish today. The wind began at about 15 knots with the swell still on the beam but within a short time the wind moved forward of the beam and began to drop in strength. The sails began to flap and it wasn’t too long until Gerry poled out the jib to stop it from collapsing and moving the preventer on the main sail to stop it from flopping across to the other side of the boat. For the rest of the day the sailing was pretty horrible, rough and rolly making it impossible to read or do anything whilst on deck and difficult / impossible to sleep if you went below. Abigail began to realise that her sea legs weren’t quite as good as she had hoped, she began to feel a little sea sick with the constant pitching and rolling but at least she didn’t actually throw up. Just as Gerry went down below for his 16.00hrs nap the fish alarm went off, excited at the thought of fish for dinner we began to reel it in. As the lure got closer to the boat we saw that the fish on the hook was only small but it was being chased by a huge fish who obviously thought its dinner was being served up on a hook! The big fish managed to snatch our catch off of the hook without getting itself hooked – what a bummer! We checked the lure, it was almost shredded and the hook was bent well out of shape – it was another near miss! Not put off we changed the lure and trolled for another couple of hours without so much as a nibble before putting the gear away for the night. Dinner (another pre prepared meal as it was too rough to be down below cooking) and night watches began, this time Abigail went to bed early as she wasn’t feeling too good. I took over for second watch at 22.00hrs and nothing much happened until just before midnight when I picked up an enormous rain cloud about 4 miles off to our port side, it was moving quite rapidly and I began to close the curtains and called Gerry up to help me furl the jib away, by the time he made it on to deck it was just half a mile away and closing rapidly, the wind speed had rocketed up to 20 knots and we rapidly furled the jib in as the rain began to pound us.