Sunday 4th - Tuesday 6th Dec
Its early hours on Sunday and RAPAREE has been running all night under goosewinged main and genoa. Beautful moonlit night, but skipper sitting below fuming as it's a pain in the bum trying to get the sailmail and pactor modem HF comms system to work. It's incredibly slow and takes hours to download. Call the hands 0730 and its a pretty morning....excellent for big floppy coloured sails. After some frantic efforts, the chute is once again pulling us along and by 0845 we are having our boiled eggys and toasty bits. Our very first foreign visitor is a lone hungry young gannet who circles Nick's trailing lure several times. We start reeling in and he loses interest (the bird, not Nick). Our daily radio conference shows most of our group have now gone south of us, although we are still holding our position. Late morning and its on-deck body washing time by the sea-water bucket over the head method. Skipper, who only ever washes manually, or once a year, actually joins in. By now we are well into the third 15 degree sector of our crossing so its time to put our watches back to UTC -3.
Pleasant lunchtime of Nick's freshly baked bread and spanish ham, followed by the skipper's special fruit melange (today's selection of dodgy bits of fruit with green furry bits from the chainlocker).
Afternoon forecast shows wind going SE so we need to gybe south before this happens as we don't want to be caught out later. Rather than dropping and rehoisting , we decide to make our gybe a complicated 2 pole affair. This involves a lot of knitting, every rope in the boat, and much shouted instruction, but once done, this set-up keeps us going at a slow but steady pace until evening, when we drop the kite and re-pole out the genoa and get the boat safely secured for the night. Another cockpit Sunday evening gathering, this time with music and with gin and warm flat tonic and slightly off lemon, followed by dodgy Chinese-ish type gunge by Mike for supper.
Overnight Sunday the wind is fickle and frequently drops, leaving us uncomfortably rolling slowly as the enemy lights threaten to reappear from astern.
Monday was a busy working day with much sail changing, but pleasant and sunny. Good spinnaker hoist at noon and down at twilight, in time for skipper's fish and chip supper. Pretty average really: lump of tuna shaped like a fish (the one that fell off Nick's line today), and some flaccid home made chips and tinned peas. Monday evening through to Tuesday morning was pretty dark 'n 'orrible with incessant squalls, heavy rain and wind changes. All are soaked through like drowned rats (particularly the now-bearded David). Sails up and down and in and out. V exasperating.
Now Tuesday midday and crawling along with wind in wrong direction and 2 e-v's in sight. Would you Adam & Eve it? A WESTERLY wind in the NE Trades. Less than 500 miles to go, and in our final week, we can start calculating our ETA at St Lucia. Even though for 1st time in 2 weeks we're almost becalmed, we need to see if we can put a spurt on somehow and avoid coming in embarrassingly far down the list.
RAPAREE @ 16N, 53W (midday 6th)
Cap'n Buglet, Dr beardy Mac, & Lofty the Gringo Miller