Friday 18th October 2013
Day 6
17°16'S. 162°23'W
683nm to go
5.30am
Well here I sit trying to get my eyes to focus and man is it hard, I have actually been awake for an hour or so and still am struggling.
Through the early hours we have dodged storm clouds on and off and lucky for us they have just past us by.
Well the good weather has not lasted man we have had shocking seas, big waves and hitting Gail force winds.
Man we have been thrown around all over the place, it's shocking.
And talk about waves I can honestly say these are the biggest momma's I have ever seen.
These guys wear you out real quick as its just way to rough to even let go of something in case you get thrown across the other side of the boat.
We have both tried to sleep a bit but its just not working real good.
Sometime in the night we heard a crash, the wind has been blowing so hard that we are going off coarse so much the Captain has had to start the engine and motor back on coarse so many times, one particular wind gust threw the Yankee to the other side so hard something had to give.
The big problem was we still had the spinnaker pole attached to the Yankee, and basically way too much sail out, but it's just been to rough to go out and get the pole down first as that's the start of bringing in the sails.
That was a mistake, with this sudden wind gust the spinnaker pole went crazy and bent almost in the middle at a 90° angle, which is now useless. So The Captain had to go out and tie it down as much as possible, if there was any bright side of it at least we could take in some sail and slow us down some and finally get some control over this boat.
And on it goes.
Well tomorrow is another day.