Last night was wild, this morning (Wed) is not!

Last night was wild, this morning is not!  We got up to 8th on the 0400 position update then decided to put some west in to avoid this huge area of light winds off the Portuguese coast but to back  track……. the wind built throughout yesterday afternoon as we approached Cape Finsiterre, we changed down sails as required pushing each sail combination to the limit.  We went into the night with our small masthead spinnaker reefed to make it factional (a clever french invention where you zip up the foot…..more on that later) and had two reefs in the main, as the wind built to a steady 30 knots we were really flying down the ever increasing sea state. 

In the pitch black we survived one or two near broaches and it was all hands on deck i.e. both of us, all the time.  We were not only making great ground towards the cape but we were also working our way out west which was the part of the  plan when looking at the bigger picture.  To cut a long story short, the wind kept increasing and our fun came to an abrupt halt when the reefed spinnaker decided it wanted to unreef itself….perfect, we were hardly in control as it was! Anyway, we just about got her down in one piece and reverted to the solent and two reefs in the main for the remainder of the night, no  bad thing as we had a steady 38 knots for a while and a huge sea.  Top speed was 23.6 knots with this sail combination.

In the early morning, the breeze started to ease and we prepared the small spinnaker once more only to notice a halyard issue with the solent which, in brief, complicated things….. and the end result was me up the rig in 20 knots pitch black and a big sea, actually it wasn’t too bad and we got it sorted quickly before going up through the sail  combinations to full main and big spinnaker as the wind slowly dropped.We are desperately trying to avoid the light winds coming our way, looks like those who got west last night will make a gain. We are petty much near the middle if  anything slightly east so we better get back to it!

Position: 42 N  11W  Speed:  7 knots  Course: 195 degrees Nick and Tanguy