It’s not all popcorn and Jimmy Buffet

The last two days we have had huge swell and erratic wind waves in varied directions with white tops. In addition, the wind has been gusting constantly from about 18 to upwards to 30 knots. Huge spread in speed making for all sorts of crazy. Often a very large rogue wave will be accompanied by a huge blast of wind which takes you careening sideways down into the crevasse of the wave. The auto pilot then tries to correct your course and sometimes in these corrections it takes the boat to a point of sail that could lead to an "accidental gybe". This basically takes the loaded up main sail which is leaned way out to one side of the boat and even tied off with something called a "preventor" and with a tremendous amount of force it swings hard to the other side of the boat. The preventor should basically prevent these accidents but if the wind gets on the other side of the sail and you don't catch in time there is no stopping it.

Unfortunately this happened to us and the force was enough to snap the preventive line in two. The noise sends chills through you and the boat bucks in all the wrong ways. It's very hard to stay calm and level headed in these circumstances but we did all manage and after only about 30 minutes a new line was on and we were back on course. Luckily the preventor did ease the force of the gybe even though the line broke.

A catamaran doesn't heel over but it does buck and bounce and rock side to side. In these two days it was very difficult to walk about. My outer thighs have bruises on them from knocking into things. You can't count on the motion like you can on a monohull and I seem to guess wrong often. It basically feels like you are in a washing machine. The motion feels so wrong that the first night of these conditions I kept getting up and checking on the other crew thinking we were in dire straights. Graham in his exhaustion, as we had just come off our shifts barked out, "if you are going to keep getting up and checking than sleep in the cockpit"!

Surprisingly we all manage to mostly keep our wits and humour. You can imagine the challenge in having 5 people on the boat with varied opinions on tactics and changing opinions based on how much sleep we have had and if we have read the latest ARC boats position reports. Even given all this we have all gotta along surprisingly well. We really lucked out with both boat and team.

We are now about 1-2 days away from arrival. The seas have eased way back and the wind is down. It's 1am and Graham's watch. I'm up with him in the cockpit and we just finished a bunch of popcorn and are listening to Jimmy Buffet sing Mother Ocean. It's a full moon tonight so really light out and the air is warm and the breeze is beautifully filling our light wind sail.

Seems everyone is itching to arrive but I'm sadly realizing tonight that I only have two more sunrises and one more sunset over this big beautiful sea. Man I'm going to miss this.