After lunch yesterday we broke free from the seemingly never-ending shackles of ocean calm to finally get some hours of proper sailing under our belts. Slowly modifying our course further to the west to pick up, hopefully, the trade winds, and our passage across to St Lucia, Lancelot fairly charged along in the late afternoon and into the early evening.
Helming the boat in these kind of conditions is a fantastic experience as you weave between the waves, steering as close to the wind as one dares and enjoying the yacht’s pitch as she crosses the undulating valleys of the building Atlantic swell.
Overnight our sailing conditions changed again and we took a downwind tack to continue our westerly course. With the spinnaker set at the front it is quite a challenging sail set to navigate in as the sail, lying perpendicular to the yacht, only has a narrow range in which to move before she collapses or ends up being wrapped around the rigging. When coupled with sailing in quiet conditions this can be a tricky task as the sail has a tendency to flop around even more, and last night’s seas weren’t helping in this regard either. This all requires a lot of concentration and our watch decided to split the responsibilities with one person helming following the compass heading, another watching the spinnaker for signs of collapse and another on knot speed watch! But many hands make light work and we achieved some pretty good speeds.
By my last watch of the morning Jacko decided that a change of course was required so we gybed to the south and took on a much more stable course, which was perfect timing as I was about to hit the sack at 8am! And sleep soundly I did only rousing myself at midday to find calm conditions had returned leaving the yacht more or less marooned once again. After a late breakfast I was back on the helm to trying to coax as much speed out of the weak winds as possible as we inched our way forward. Thankfully the wind gradually picked up and as I write this just past 5pm we are fairly rolling along, happy days! Some time off now before our next watch at 8pm.
Morale on the boat is good.
It certainly is better when the wind picks up and we’re rolling along properly. Piddling around at 1 knot just doesn’t cut the mustard really. We’re nearly a week into the crossing and everyone has settled into the routine now. It’s interesting to see how we’re all interacting, given that we were all strangers up to a week ago, Lia and I apart.
One can observe certain frustrations at times but I think we’re all getting on remarkably well. Compared to a tallship the space on here is very limited so patience and good humour are very much required!
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