Monday 1st July 201:
Day 7
4am my watch.
Once again our watches are all over the place, we really are not doing it real good this trip, we try to at least give each other 5 hours sleep at night and then day time is what ever goes.
Its not working out real good, and the strain of not enough sleep is starting to show. Sometimes we do get five hours but most of the time, it never works out.
Last night on my late watch, I noticed a cloud on the radar, now from previous entries you will know I try to dodge these guys as much as I can, so am sitting here keeping an eagle eye on it.
It's starts to get bigger, and then I see lightning, man I wake The Captain real quick.
He starts to reduce sail, while I race around getting all the covers zipped down, and we sit and watch and wait.
We decided to start the engine to try and out run it, we have two choices, we can go flat out and try to out run it, or head straight for it, it was on our port side, the reason to head straight for it was that as we got to where it is now the wind should have blown it well away from us, this meant going way off coarse but hell we sure didn't want to be in the middle of this lightning storm that's for sure.
So The Captain makes the decision and off we go heading straight for it, I'm sitting here thinking I so hope he made the right choice, to me heading straight for a storm felt all wrong.
But it worked by a mean effort from The Captain, man he battled with this storm for hours, it kept changing all the time, it would build up then go this way and that, we were headed in so many different directions, even back to Sint Maarten at one stange.
But it eventually caught up with us, it made such a drastic turn with a lot of wind behind it and we coped it.
How bad we'll I'm not real sure, I had hit that brick wall, and fell asleep a few times sitting up, so decided to lay down, I do remember, getting up a few times and pulling up zippers as it got real hot and stuffy, and then pulling them down, also a lot of thunder, wind and rain.
I woke at about 4am to see The Captain sound asleep in front of the radar, the poor guy, was so warn out, so he is now snoring away beside me with some much needed sleep, he did real good, I may have to rename him The Storm Captain....hahaha
9pm my watch.
We are trying to do 4 hour watches from now on and see if that works better, the problem is, that we both hate waking the other one up, as we know we both need more sleep than what we are getting, but it's not doing either of us any good in the long run, so we shall see.
Now to this ocean, well we have no wind, from gusting over 35knots, to now gusting 2knots....it is a mill pond, well was almost all day, now we have a gently swell that just rolls us a bit from side to side.
We also have had the motor going as well all day, and got to talk to the weather guy on the radio, and it's going to be like this all the way to Panama.
We never thought we would have three full days of motoring, this ocean sure is crazy some times.
We are hoping to get to Panama now sometime on Wednesday, with any luck.
Well tomorrow is another day.