Day 15 - Passage to the Caribbean
Misterx
Tue 15 Apr 2025 23:59
15/04/25
8:30 pm
Day 15
South Atlantic Ocean
DTD : 2,311 NM (83NM)
Not going there very fast but going there we are!! We are now in the Northern Hemisphere, we passed the equator around 2am last night. As tradition requires, we had a little tipple with Neptune, I got up especially for the occasion. The lucky chap got the last drop of our La Bourdonnais, best rum from Mauritius, no less! Admittedly he had to share it with Ian, who only had a sip, he was very generous, letting Neptune have the majority of it, so he said! After a few words of thanks for letting us be in his watery world, for watching over us and keeping us safe, and for sending dolphins and pilots whales to keep us company, we reflected that we now really were on the home stretch and that we would not see the Southern Cross anymore at night. The full moon was up but in hiding, with only a vague glow where it should be in its full glory, a beautiful night.
The sunrise today was spectacular, having all these clouds around really make for an interesting and colourful dawn. I have not got the words to describe all the textures, shapes and forms I can see and how the light bouncing back on these illuminates the sky in a very dramatic way, but I will have a few pictures!!
Once I'd stop the marvelling, I worked out that we were aiming at a bank of very high turbulent clouds stretching from the West as far as I could see right up to about where the sun was rising up so prettily in the East. Looked like we weren't going to escape them today. From where I stood, I was pretty sure we would get a walloping at some point. Like yesterday, the skies were very shades of blue at the back of us and both on our left and our right, we were at the edge of it again. The thing is, it is impossible to gage how far these cloud banks are and how fast they are travelling, we haven't got a radar. So it is all guess work and my guess was that to avoid a full day of wet misery we had to go East, so we did. I aimed at the end of the menacing cloud bank and made our way as fast as possible. I ended up taking the wheel, I could go faster up wind, (yep, we reached a dizzying 5 knots of boat speed in 10 knots of wind at some point!!) and I could adapt to the morphing mass in front of us, shifting shape as we were approaching.
Took us all morning, but by lunch time we finally reached and went around the menacing blob, we could see how deep it was and how much rain was actually under it when we got close. We got away with only a sprinkling of light rain, barely wetting us as we skirted the edge of the bank... we made it!!we were now travelling in a patch of blue sky stretching as far as we could see in front of us, hemmed by towering clouds on the left and on the right. It would seem that these were moving like trains, in a line, as long as you were between them, you were pretty safe from them. Not one crossed our path this afternoon, we could actually study how fast they build up and disintegrate, how they merge and collapse from a big towering white mushroom to a thinly spread veil, from the classic storm anvil shape to the benign summer afternoon cotton wool fluff. Fascinating stuff! Just as well we have nothing else to do!!
The wind was a bit fluky though and we had to motor sail for a couple of hours this afternoon. Our boat speed had dropped to below 3 knots at some point. Fortunately, the sea is pretty flat. Our Weather Gurus are confident that the trend is for less disturbance for the next couple of day, and I can see tonight that the moon and the stars are actually out in force. Maybe they are right and maybe we won't have to play hide and seek tomorrow... but I don't quite believe it, I would be very surprised!
M