25 knots, 15 foot, confused, seas...
Pura Vida yaws and shudders between crests and troughs. Every second wave feels like its going to put our rails under the frothing pitch yet she somehow manages to swerve and veer, unsteadily back on course...
It's not a truly terrible day as sailing the open seas can be, but its not exactly a cake-walk, either. The closer we seem to get, the longer it seems to take! The conditions are too wet and chaotic to spend any time outside, other than to check our sails and horizon every fifteen minutes.
Every five minutes the cockpit is doused in heaps of water, great, tumbling, rogues come piling over the safety lines, like nutter football fans making a drunken rush at the losing goal keeper. They fly at us, in a mutinous rage, chasing us down the decks or leaping for our faces as we try and get a quick peek at the instruments before we scramble back down the hatch.
This will be the way of things (even a little stronger, most likely) until we turn that corner into the breakwater in roughly 36 hours.
Ahhhh...breakwater.
Haven't seen one of those in a LONG time.
The kids don't complain, a testament to their toughness, because things are pretty greasy out here. They giggle in their bunk, read, watch a movie with one of us on an off watch, mostly we talk about what we want to do once on terra firma. Hike a Volcano is pretty much numero uno on their list, after rest and food...
and seeing Nana, of course.
With a double reef in the main and a scrap of the Yankee jib out, we're doing 6-7 knots but with the big seas pushing us around, our actual SOG is probably more like 5 knots...
As long as Pura Vida can scrap it out, her steady crew will too...
Even though its gonna be a rough one, here's hoping tonight is our second to last night watch before landfall.
LAT:17*28.56N
LONG:152*09.23W
SOG: 7.2 knots
DTW:214NM
No comments:
Post a Comment