This is an extract from my diary of last year.
Day 12 Cape Verde’s to Antigua
Very calm night last night, I actually went to bed about 5 o clock and slept until 9 so felt so much better. With just the two of us on the boat sleep is pretty essential. Last night the sky was lit up by two things, one was a huge moon coming more and more to the full, streaming over the waves, like a beacon showing us the path. Moonlight illuminated the whole boat, so much easier to see the sails and the waves around. Some nights out here it has been so dark we have been cocooned in our little world of lit cockpit, green starboard and red port light shining ahead.
The other light is a low level satellite which lingers in the sky lying so low that three times I have mistaken it for a masthead light. The fact is that we have only seen one other yacht right in the distance in twelve days, although we can hear them on the single side band radio. We hear nothing on the vhf so obviously nobody is that close. The stars were like talcum powder on a blue velvet cloth last night; we sat in the cockpit roaring along at 7 knots, a beautiful soft warm breeze and listened to loud reggae to get us in the mood for the Caribbean! Yes we really are going there and will actually have a couple of days to enjoy before we fly home for Christmas. The temperature is increasing and becoming quite balmy now, we have 423 miles to go,
We managed to speak on the single side band radio net today, our net controller Ellen has a deep American southern accent, she always sounds so calm and reassuring even when she is announcing hurricanes!
Later
11.20am 16.21 54.22
Suddenly we noticed a line of dark squalls, at least it was daylight although as we have not adjusted our clocks yet it only got light about 9.30 am, soon we will go back 4 hours. The amazing thing is how our bodies take not notice of the clock and we find ourselves having lunch at the appropriate local time even if the clock says differently. We had one of those squall moments of inattention. We were chatting and had been trying to make the Genoa fill in light winds when we realised it had wrapped itself around the forestay sheets and all just as a screaming wind appeared and made it flap alarmingly, the mast juddering with every flap. We decided to pull it in as much as we could which was a very slow and painstaking effort, it looked terrible and we could see the water ‘smoking’ ahead, not a good scenario. So we started the engine and drove away from the squalls as fast as possible. After about half an hour we found a patch between squalls and their grey fingers snaking down to the sea.. We undid the sheets and managed to unfurl the tangle. This was not so easy in a huge swell, the landscape of the sea had changed again and soon we were glad to be sailing again, exhausted, on top of huge waves looking down into valleys. It reminded me of the earth works at maiden castle, strange really the way your mind works out here.
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