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Sweet Dream - Thursday January 16, 2020



Morning brought the first rain of our passage. Sunrise was a long time coming, the sky stayed dark way longer than it has been, then suddenly the downpour hit. The barometer had dropped yesterday afternoon from 1020 to 1010 and the wind had been building all night. We tucked a reef in at every shift change. The apparent wind was showing 26 when we were flying straight downwind at ten knots just before the rain hit. After a good hour of boat wash the morning light showed up and the wind laid down and backed to the south south east. For some unknown reason the brand new chartplotter decided it wasn’t going to give us wind or current information anymore (in addition to not showing radar) ugh! Captain and I took turns reading the manual and troubleshooting, but after all day, neither of us have an answer. We received an email from Charm that they’d been boarded by a following wave, with open hatches, and also had an electrical fire. Oh my! Our hearts go out to them. What a frustrating mess to deal with at sea. They were going to make Landfall at Ludderwitz, Namibia but there was too much wind, so their email said they were going to try for Waalvis Bay, but were still in 25 knots of wind. It would be really uncomfortable to anchor in the big winds we’ve been having every evening. We hope it calms down for them to be able to stop and regroup! I’m so very happy that Sweet Dream decided to skip Namibia and head straight for St. Helena. As I write this at 23:15 I think...hmmm we must be close to the halfway mark. So I do a check n the chart plotter and there is 851 miles to go...close enough to halfway to 1700 miles! It has been very pleasant sailing. Captain has read two books in four days, plus the cruising guides and lonely planet guide for Brazil. I am slogging through James Michener’s ‘ The Source’, a beautiful fictional account of the history of Palestine, but as I only read it at night watches it’s taking me a long time to get through. In the daylight hours I read one of the same books as Lars did; ‘Song in the morning’. A very bittersweet novel about a British agent positioned in South Africa during the ANC’s fight for freedom. We found it very interesting coming on the heels of our trip to South Africa.

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