Last night was one of squalls, big seas and strong winds. Fortunately all was from behind, but we would just get the boat set up, running lovely with her two poled out headsails. No sooner would the sky darken hiding the light from the moon, the wind speed increase quite dramatically as the rainy squall passed through. It was exhilarating in a scary sort of way.
The seas were running behind at around 3 meters but higher at times. As the wind started to increase, so would the boat's speed. Looking back at the following seas the blackness of the water blanked out the milky horizon until it was much higher than that of the boat. The foaming wave crests could be seen and heard as they grew closer to the stern. The transom then lifted as if to let the wave pass underneath as Summerwinds propelled herself down the wave with great speed and arrow straight accuracy. Although we have done a lot of sailing over the years, this never fails to fill me with a sense of awe, especially as the nearest land to us is Brazil over 1400 miles away.
All of this under the control of Otto our electric Auto pilot.
We set up our Aries windvane steering today to give Otto a well earned rest. Otto is quite power hungry and we were having to run the generator a couple of hours a day just to feed him and the fridge. We have challenged the kids on the SSB radio net to give our Aries windvane a name. We fitted it years ago with a trip like this in mind and as I write this, he is doing a sterling job and the generator is turned off! In fact earlier today I checked our power and with the solar panels producing and different systems using, we were pretty much breaking even with our power demand.
Just one last thing before we get ready for hopefully a less dramatic night watch than last night's, those of you following the YB tracker will see a mass of boats and like Lizzy, assume that when we pop our heads up, we can see boats all around us. This isn't the case. There are thousands of square miles of ocean between the Canary Islands and the Carribbean. Occasionally we see the odd navigation light in the night, but most of the time it's just the three of us and our boat Summerwinds surging on to St Lucia.
Jim Ann & Emily on Summerwinds of Cuan