Sunday 15 January 2012

Atlantic Crossing - DAY 12

Hi from Clare, Saturday 14th January 2012

All is well on Eye Candy

In the last day we have sailed 159 miles. The swell is 2-3M with a wind speed of 22-25K gusting 30K. We are sailing with the storm jib and poled out genoa. The weather is warm, overcast with a number of rainy squalls.

The highlight of the day is "rain". Eye Candy has now started her journey back to cleanliness.

Today background information is on how quickly conditions can change. It was Friday 13th (of course) when the calm weather and our glorious spinnaker run came to an abrupt end. The waves changed within halt an hour from half a metre to 2M; we changed from shorts and T-shirts to wet weather gear. Yesterday the waves were close together and coming from all directions. One would think from Eye Candy's motion that she was blessing herself - up, down, left, right, up down, left and right. I served Bronwyn and Andrew some scones in the cockpit. They sat opposite each other at the table. Bronwyn put a scone on her plate. It shot across the plate up over the lip onto Andrew's plate then up over the lip and Andrew caught it. He said "I should have this one" so he put the scone on his plate and the exact same thing happened in reverse; Bronwyn caught it. They had to ditch the plates and settle for paper towel.

Today the swell is much further apart making the movement more manageable. We are encountering dark skies, increased wind speed, squalls, rain and then sunshine. With the wind whistling through the rigging it sounds really wild from below. However once on deck it's not too bad and it is quite interesting watching the power of the sea.

Andrew is hoping to do some fishing this afternoon. I should think it would be quite a challenge trying to land a fish in these conditions - I will have the camera ready.

Cheers from the Atlantic Team
A,B and C

At 5:52 PM14/01/2012 (utc) our position was 13°24.51'N 054°11.39'W

----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com