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Taistealai - Wind Waves and Weeds



The Atlantic is a powerful ocean, and its moods can turn quickly as we discovered yesterday. After a glorious afternoon of speeding along under big blue, our tradewind spinnaker, in an 8-10 knot breeze, the predicted stronger easterlies arrived. Around us the waves, which had been our playful friends during the afternoon, switched to become broad-shouldered playground bullies; nudging us sideways when they thought we weren’t looking.  Too much for big blue, so we switched to polled out headsail and mainsail.

However, the wind and waves had not finished their fun and laid on some more entertainment for us.  After a friendly chat with ARC boat Aqualuna close by our position, we gybed the boat – changed course by putting the stern through the wind to set our sails on the opposite side. Post gybe, we all noticed an unhappy groan from moaning Myrtle, our Watt&Sea hydrogenerator . Unnoticed by the crew in the falling darkness, we had entered a patch of floating Sargasso weed, which had wrapped web like around the leg of the generator. Niffty work with the boat hook and the weed was cleared, only for another batch to hook on not long after, then, for good measure, a third chunk around the leg of our saildrive, causing worrisome vibrations. To clear this weedy mess, we had to pull in our polled-out headsail, head up into the wind to slow down the boat, reset the hydrogenerator, and then sail backwards to clear the saildrive.

The night was dark; no moon to sail by and clouds obscuring the stars. Twenty knot gusty winds and criss-crossing swells bumped and bashed us around making helming tricky and giving the on-watch crew a strenuous workout. In a flash-back we were again on ARC Day Two, was this Groundhog Day? Not quite, with the warm moist tradewinds now pushing us along, we were all in shorts and T-shirts, not the full foulies we began the voyage in.

Daybreak and winds and seas have eased a bit. Overnight squalls have dispersed and once more we are riding along on the crest of a wave, surfing in the sunshine to 9 or 10 knots. The bothersome bully-boy waves have now been tamed; we ride them like a surf-dude now. Tashy is once again the mistress of these unruly boys.

Stowaway Bird?

We think we may have a stowaway aboard Tashy. In certain sea states, we get a distinctive hooting sound from the steering column. Whilst some folks might dismiss this as a quirk of the engineering, we prefer to think that there is an owl on board; a stowaway, a sort of AWOL Wol. Time will tell who is correct.

This is the crew of Taistealai – Chris, Helen, Will, Jem (and the penguin) signing off for another day at 17 10N 46 22W with 860nm (one and a half fastnets) to run to Saint Lucia.



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