Crawling to the finish!

Hi Folk,

           At one time or other ,during the night,both of us declared that...." we cant take any more of this bloody rolling!" Neither of us have everexperienced anything quite like it. Going downwind, in 10-12 knots of breeze, with 2 to 3mt swells coming at you from all directions. It was definitely exacerbated by having an uneven split of the triple reefed mainsail  By morning, the wind had dropped to 8 knots, not enough to even fly "Jocko". We were both going ballistic with frustration! In desperation, we unpacked the aft cabin, and pulled out our No #3 hank on jib, which is intended for beating, and is flown from the new removable forestay,attached at the bow of the boat. We then rigged up the second spinnaker pole on port, hanked on the No #3, fed the sheet throught h pole, centered the main to midships,left the genoa poled out on stbd, and gave that a go! It did'nt stop the rolling, but it reduced it to the extent that we no longer wanted to jump overboard!

          No sooner had we finished doing all those changes, than we noticed a dark black line approaching on the horizon behind us. Radar confirmed a whole host of squalls, lining up to nail us! We waited, and waited... one would miss us to port, and one would miss to stbd. When we got lucky, we got hit!! They packed about 26-28knots of wind, buckets of rain, and lasted all of 5 or 6 minutes! During  half that time, we would scream along at 7-8knots, and just get drowned in the other half waiting for the wind to hit us! Just after lunch, there was a break in their line up and the sun came out! So Mary and I decided that it was a good time to take of all our clothes and have a nice warm cockpit shower. One really should'nt tempt fate! Mary had barely finished drying herself, and I was all full of soap suds, when the sun vanished, and the next squall appeared out of nowhwere! Right now the wind is back down to 4-5 knots, and we are hoping to get hit by another sqall just so that we can move a bit!

     By 12.00 noon, we had scraped together 116nm, leaving only 339 to go. The gribs indicate winds of 10knots or less, plus a huge band of squalls through the night! Just what we really would have wanted..... an nice smooth and easy run home!

It looks like we will have to content ourselves with an arrival in Fatu Hiva, on Wednesday morning, as there is now no way we will get there before dark on Tuesday evening with the winds forecaste! So now we can just chill,get used to the idea of 3 more night of watchkeeping, and look forward to Tuesday! After all, that will still be the morning of our 21st day since we left Galapagos, which is quite a bit quicker than we had anticipated!

Cheers for now, lets see how things pan out!      Love and regards, Rod & Mary