Sailing can be a very peaceful way of travel, but let me tell you, when you are out on blue-water passages on the mighty oceans, there are rarely days with small seas and light winds where you sail along peacefully. The Hollywood romantic vision is that when the wind dies you put up your sheets and slip through the ocean, with barely a whisper drinking some refreshing rum punch. Ha Ha! The reality is most often in light winds the seas roll you from side to side and all that canvas you have up slams back and forth...back and forth...violent, chaotic, and oh so not peaceful. Motor-sailing sometimes helps a bit keeping the forward momentum going and counteracting some of the rolling. But not always and not for us right now.
And so welcome to our peaceful sailing world for the last 15 hours or so. Bam...Bam...Bam...feels like the rig will come crashing down at any minute.
"So why don't you take your mainsail down", you may be asking, thinking we are just crazy whacked out salty dawgs and didn't even think about just dropping our sail. Well, let me tell you about taking your sail down....
With your sail down in 8-15 foot seas rolling underneath you and nothing above to counteract the rolls, your boat will soon be going from toerail to toerail back and forth...back and forth...and throwing everything in your boat off the shelves and onto the floor, including yourselves. To put it simply, it just makes the rolls exponentially worse. There really is no "fix it" solution except to be patient, put some earplugs in, and wait for the wind to arrive again.
But, overall, even with the slamming of our sails and rolling of DK, we are good. Like I said, we are now on the countdown and looking at possibly a landfall on Xmas Eve Day or Xmas Day...which would be pretty sweet for our last year of this journey.
The fishing lines are out again, but no luck lately. I've seen only 1 pod of dolphins, and those were at night, and no whales since leaving the Cape Verdes. We see other sailboats from time to time, but none closer then a few miles. Basically, we are pretty much alone out here...just us and the hundreds of flying fish we see skimming the ocean's surface when big scary DK comes too close.
Nic and I are still reading voraciously. We are each on our 8th or 9th book already. Nicole just finished the last "Twilight" book in the series. She's been saving it for this passage. It was worth it, she says. Good sappy chica reading...better her then me. She read it in a day.
One thing we are appreciating is the moon getting bigger and brighter. It is getting closer to full and definitely nice to light up our world at night. It changes everything. We both love the new moon times too when the stars pop and take over our beings, but the big bright moon at night allows you to really see the world and capture the essence of all the waves and movement around you.
It's still a mystery to us whey we have seen so many shooting stars in the last week. Meteor shower??? Amazing. Sometimes they really explode and light up the whole sky.
Please send your good vibes to the ocean mamma to bring us more wind. Bam...Bam...Bam....
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