I am writing this at 1:30am Friday June 30th. Today started out nice enough, we had the 3-7am watch and there was good breeze and although the seas were up a little bit it was fun sailing. Our watch tied the record so far averaging a speed of 9.5 kts over 4 hours. We had 5 sails up; from bow to stern we had the genoa, stay sail, main, mizzen stay sail and the mizzen main. Driving this boat is like playing a very old video game. By that I mean you spend your hour at the wheel staring at the compass trying to keep the needle within a 10 degree window, if you succeed your speed increases and you hope for a high score.
I have settled into the routine of living at sea which basically entails completely surrendering any sort of internal clock. I now have a much better appreciation for people who work both day and night shifts... As for me, I have to live by the cat nap. You get 4 hours of being off watch, but you usually aren´t in bed for the 1st half hour of that and then it takes some time to fall asleep so realistically you are looking at 3 hours of solid sleep at a time. Sometimes during the day you get lucky and the next guy lets you sleep a little longer, but sometimes, like tonight, people screw up and decide to cut their watch an hour short and kick you out of bed. not fun. So basically, you try to sleep as much as you can, whenever you can, wherever you can. When you are on standby you sleep on the sails in the salon, but you have to be ready to hop up on deck at a moments notice.
Now for the fun part. Today was the first day we really got to meet the North Atlantic, and she can be brutal when she wants to. For most of the day we were moving along on a beam to broad reach in about 15-20 kts of breeze and late in the afternoon our fearless owner decided that we should set a spinnaker. So 2 hours...yes 2 hours later we finally had all the gear set up after much input from almost everyone on the boat about how everything should be set up. On that note, if you aren´t going to be one of the people up working on the foredeck, then stay off my goddamn foredeck.
By the time we finally had the spinnaker rigged, a rain squall moved through so we waited a bit longer. After it passed, now around 6:30 pm, with an hour and a half left in our watch we finally got the kite up and the genoa down. We were flying along surfing down waves at about 12-13 kts, and were planning on carrying the spinnaker through the night. We saw another big black squall line coming down on us and reconsidered our decision and prepared to douse the spin. Just as we started to douse, the squall hit. 40 knots, impossibly heavy rain and high seas. We had the Genoa up, trying to drop the spinnaker, the spinnaker completely blew up so we had to drag its shreds out of the water, then we had to get the genoa down in 40 kts... then we were still rounding up and flying along so we went up with the stay sail and dropped the main all the way down. We secured the 3rd reef and went back up with the main. it took us roughly another hour and a half to get everything back sorted out and luckily the only damage to anyone or anything was the loss of our heavy air spinnaker. Yes, I was clipped in the entire time. Cameron, the Argentines, Tom (the Brit), and myself were exhausted from pulling down all the sails and getting tossed and sloshed around on bow securing everything. Unlike during the earlier part of the day when we were organizing and setting the spinnaker, surprisingly most the Germans decided to stay back and hangout in the back of the boat during all this. Once everything was secured, I went off watch and attempted to go to bed, only to get woken up almost an hour early...There have been squalls moving through all night so we are flying minimum sails and will likely wait until daybreak before we consider going up with anything larger. As the title implies, I think we finally met the North Atlantic today after 4 days of comfortable cruising. I go back on watch from 4 to 8am and am hoping that the weather has improved by then. Also, since the weather outside is so bad, all the hatches are closed up and down below is like a sauna. I am sweating my ass off typing this and am now going to try to go get a few more hours of sleep on top of a spinnaker hopefully before going up to get pelted with rain. I´M HAVING FUN. hahahahaha
Cheers,
Andrew
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