Day 13. - Happy New Year - 162nm
Mor Toad / Moy Toad
David and Jocelyn Fawcett
Thu 1 Jan 2015 13:04
We hope you all had a good New Year. We had a wee drink around 5pm. though Dan lost most of his beer to the bilges. When will we learn to hang onto everything - however keeping a ' hold on ' and keeping hold of things at the same time is a challenge and when you haven't, because of not enough hands it's that odd sideways wave that sneaks in and throws you.
The sail overnight: Apparently there was a 4 metre swell with between 25-30 knots of wind so the boat was reefed down for a comfortable night with a furled poled Yankee. On the change over at 10 pm. Dan put his head out of the cockpit and found we were surfing down a wave at 11.7 knots. As he said it would have been good to see in daylight though with the moon he says he saw most. The boat kept straight and ran out of the bottom of the wave with no complaint thankfully. The water was breaking over the cockpit and Dan said he got wet several times and I also had a dousing this morning whilst drinking tea. Water's warm - over 30 now!
Even I find surfing down the waves exhilarating - it's the odd sideways ones that throw you unawares that have to be watched. I can understand why Ellen McCarthur found the noise at sea quite daunting/ wearing and she was going three plus times faster than us. The noise of the water rushing past is quite something and for her she had howling wind which added to the noise levels plus rigging noise and we very rarely get that noise too.
We managed to email one of the Christmas Rally boats Bianca Rosa yesterday. We had met them in Marina Rubicon.They are now less than 500 miles away from Antigua and left 5 days before us. They have had interesting weather too even managed a swim on Christmas Day but now are travelling fast like us on the last bit. They were in radio contact (the boat in question was putting out a call to see if any ships in the area and they happened to pick it up) with a boat Tiger Lilly with a lone Scotsman on board who had lost part of his rigging, lost his dinghy, been hit by lightening and lost function of his computer hence was unable to get weather forecast and hadn't found the trade winds. It sounds like a pretty desperate situation but apparently he didn't want them to go to his aid but wanted a weather forecast and asked them to email his wife for him. We are keeping our eyes open - we don't want to hit him and add to his woes!
The course we've taken from Falmouth to Barbados is around 4200nm and at around 14.00 UCT today we expect to have 1000nm to run so 3/4 the way there . If we carry on at this pace dare I say it ' the end is in sight '
No further wildlife spotted other than the odd flying fish but what is noticeable today for the first time is seaweed in the water.
Again thanks very much for all the messages and I will try and reply to them at some stage .