Parson Jack - PJ Blog 4th Dec

The rest of yesterday was uneventful and hot, hot, hot. During happy hour we played trivial pursuit and as usual the boys; Charlie watch, cheated, beating the girls; Lima watch by a small margin and leaving the old gits; Delta watch for dead.

However we did have another interesting night. Just before nightfall 1900 ship's time we noticed a huge weather system just off our starboard bow and being cautious by nature we decided to bear off to may be run parallel to it or pass it to the south, unfortunately it had a mind of its own and we eventually steered away from it keeping it to our stern. A major impact of such a large system was that it sucks air into itself thereby creating 20 to 25 knots winds on our port beam and since our sails are currently configured for down wind sailing i.e. twin headsails poled out you can imagine this caused a great deal of flapping and thrashing so we furled our sails and motored for several hours trying to get away from it. We were treated to an awesomely spectacular lightening display with bolts bouncing around the heavens. Finally when every thing had calmed down we resumed our course, heavily reefed. For the rest of the night due to a large number of squalls all around us we alternately sailed and motored Steve and I finishing at 0740, almost 12 hours on watch, with a large Jameson's.

The radar really came into its own last night; squalls showing up as large yellow thumbprints on the screen so we have an indication of their size and proximity. Last night's weather system measured some twenty miles long and over five miles wide and growing it probably rose to over 30,000 feet.

We have become very adept at furling and reefing quickly.

The weather now is sunny, with a nice SSE force 3/4. We have just had another squall alert, fortunately running away from us to the north west. Happy days.

In between navigating, sorting out the comms, checking the weather and servicing the generator, Craig has made banana and toffee cake and chocolate chip cookies this morning, he really is becoming an awesome chef!