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Lea - Log Day 20 + 21 – Friday + Saturday/Broken pole and potatoes and… paws.



21:30 Local Lea Time, Saturday

We have now logged about 1700 nautical miles, and have about 500 left. So we’re all expecting palm trees in the horizon any time soon now. It’s come to our attention that the leading ARC+ boats have already reached Saint Lucia within the last 24 hours. Considering we have about 4 days to go, I find that kind of crazy but also kind of cool. Go them! In our defense though, they all have the superpower of a spinnaker (in addition to being bad ass sailors) and we no longer have a spinnaker pole (that we use for our sail that isn’t even a spinnaker) because, well, it kind of broke.


The nonstop fun these past few days started Friday afternoon, when Erin was cooking dinner and had baked potatoes in the making. She was on a good roll with the whole ‘spreading food all over the place’, and as she opened the oven to check on the baking, the potatoes decided to do a little dance in the rhythm of a wave. Potatoes everywhere. Everything we’ve eaten since we left Mindelo seems to fit in the category ‘hey this tastes kind of funky,’ so to nobody’s surprise, we ate them anyway. I strongly believe the reason for the potatoes decision to jump around, is because they were just very excited about us running into our Swedish friends on S/Y Corona Aq, the second boat we’ve crossed paths with in these 10 days at sea. We were so happy to suddenly see them out here in the middle of nowhere, and we even got to have a little chat thanks to the brilliance of radio.


This same night is when things went from fun to not too exciting. During the night 20-25 knots wind had us surfing the Atlantic like a speed boat. We may have gotten a little too excited, because it didn’t take long before the spinnaker pole decided it needed a break. Like physically, it broke. It’s now bendy like a hot dog. So that really sucks, considering this downwind sailing doesn’t give us much choice but to spread our sails for speed, whereas a spinnaker pole supporting the foresail is essential.  But with no ability to fix this problem at sea, we decided that life must go on. At least until our skipper tripped on the staircase and sprained her ankle in a “it hurts so bad I think I may have broken it” kind of way. You could say the pole kind of took our skipper down with it, she is now parked on the bench with a painful, compressed ankle held high.


Luckily we’re at the point where we’re closing up on land, and not moving further away from it. We’ve settled with the fact that these last 500 miles will just take some more patience than we expected, but eventually we’ll reach the land of the rum & coke. We feel like we’ve missed out on a few of those really slow days where the calm wind provides the possibility of fishing, taking a dip in the ocean and even having time to be bored. But hey, it’s Saturday night, we’ve had the inevitable (Friday night) pizza à la me, the Christmas calendar is keeping everyone happy, and even the injured skippy has agreed to enjoy these last days of this adventure.


517 nm to go


-Lene



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