Day 10 – Tuesday 18 February.

By Cathleen Hughes.

Editor’s correction: In the previous blog towards the end of the first paragraph a description of the GRIB files was incorrectly described as “North America.” This is incorrect and must be corrected to South America as we do not have any intentions of going that far north in the near future.

After the high winds and rough seas, it was a relief to find that the early hours of the morning brought calmer seas. We decided it was the perfect opportunity to open up the first bar of chocolate for the night shifts since we had arrived in Rio. It was a milk chocolate Hershey’s bar that provided just enough sweetness to get us through the next few hours.

After all the crew members had eased their way out of their evening slumbers, there was not much going on. Crew were lazing around in the cockpit enjoying the drier air while some were in the saloon reading books. A particular book is Godforsaken Sea by Derek Lundy which follows the journey of a single handed race through the Atlantic and Southern Ocean. The Vendee Globe race is a circumnavigation of Antarctica that starts and ends in France and south of the ‘three stormy capes’; Good Hope, Leeuwin and the Cape Horn. The first page of the book describes how, on average, only six out of the possible sixteen entrants cross the finish line with six being forced to retire or disqualified, three being saved from sinking boats and one mysteriously vanishes with their boat. We decided that the descriptions in this book of six-storey waves and cyclonic storms in a similar part of the ocean to us at this present moment, was not an intelligent read on board. After three chapters loaded wi th stories of capsizes, going into survival mode and disappearances, the crew started to become tense and so the book has been hidden away until the boat is moored once again in Cape Town.

The wind remained shifty all day with it picking up to 20 knots and dying a few moments later. With the storm over the past few days, we have unfortunately acquired three tears in our main sail. The first is a large one below the second reef, the second is on the leech just below the third reef and the third is a small one above the very first batten. This also means that we will not be hoisting the main as there is chance that the tears might be ripped open and it will become unrepairable. It is a simple fix with sticky back or sail tape but first the main needs to be dried out and cleaned for the repair to hold properly and to dry is out, we need sun which we seem to have a lack of. GRIB files say that we may encounter sun tomorrow thank goodness.

With all the talk of sunshine and smooth sailing the crew began pointing out holes in the clouds where they thought they could see blue sky. Even though they were told that this was all wishful thinking, they tried to stay positive and kept dreaming of the rays of sun pushing through the clouds. Although Renier and Rory have both had their own bathtubs in their cabins, they say they would now like to dry out the mattresses and give the bathing a break for the rest of the trip.

After a few cloudy days the solar panels were barely providing enough power to the boat and we found ourselves needing to start the motor to charge up the boats power. We motored for a long while in an attempt to make some headway to the south after travelling north east for most of the day. Due to our back tracking south, we landed ourselves back into the storm which we were travelling north east to avoid. It began around 20h00 when we started noticing lightning in almost all directions around us. It ranged from single bolts between the clouds and the horizon to sheet lightning behind the clouds that lit up the outline of the clouds while the sea remained pitch black. Our electronics technician, Chris pointed out the extremity of the storm and even said that this would be one of the most intense lightning storms we would ever experience. In order to prevent the boat from being damaged if struck by the lightning, we attached a chain to the port shroud and hung it over the side of the boat. This would allow the flow of charge to travel from the mast (being the highest point it is most likely to be struck), down the shrouds, through the chain and into the water bypassing the rest of the boat. The lightning carried on for most of the night with white hot bolts of electricity, enough to power Cape Town for two years, lighting up the entire night sky and leaving booming thunder that at one point made the whole boat shudder. The lightning was accompanied by brief periods of heavy down pours. Night shifts were hair raising and certainly kept us on the edge of our seats.

A note on our tracker: As you may remember our switch box got wet during the broach just as we entered the Rio bay on the 1st of February. This causes the tracker system to occasionally malfunction which is the reason the tracker on the website doesn’t seem to work all the time. Our current GPS position is 27 degrees 30.64 minutes south and 028 degrees 24.57 minutes west. We are heading towards Tristan de Cunha.