Day 14 - Double Rainbows

Today's day started with my morning watch. And in the background there were dark ominous clouds about one hour and a half into my watch. Not sure what to do with the radar information and whether or not we should reef the sails I woke up Christian and we looked at the clouds and the radar together for a while determining whether we should do anything. In the end the clouds passed us with a few kilometers distance to the boat. But squalls like this are more and more common the closer we get to our destination because the air gets more and more warm and humid the closer we get and some of these clouds can easily be localized thunderstorms, so a lot of caution is necessary when one sees them on the horizon. But once the sun came out everything looked much more peaceful and the clouds much less menacing than the shadows at night.

The rest of the day was relatively uneventful, and I read a lot of Peter Attias "Outlive" book again. The points he makes about nutrition, sleep and exercise are as contrary as can be to the sailing life. On the boat the amount of exercise is limited because you can't really do much in the limited space on a rolling boat. The food is also basically high carb, high fat unhealthy sort of stuff. Especially the Coca Cola at night to stay awake. And the sleep is highly disrupted non regular and never enough. But I tell myself that once I'm back on the land that I'll fix these things and finally act on all the knowledge I have around metabolism and health. Not just from Outlive but also from all the other sources that I've read or listened to in the past. David Sinclair, Andrew Huberman, Ray Kurzweil, Edubily, Tim Ferriss and co.

At some point during today in the afternoon the wind got so low that we thought of putting up the Spinnaker. However when we started to prepare everything for the Spinnaker to go up, we realized that there was a giant Cumulonimbus cloud to our starboard (right-hand) side. The thing about a Spinnaker sail is that it's very light and hence good for low wind conditions, but it can easily be destroyed by stronger winds too. So one has to be careful with squalls and rain clouds because they bring strong and sudden winds with them and this was one big squall off in the distance. So we decided against putting up the Spinnaker and actually left the foresails rolled down too and turned on the motor for some time... A good decision.

After a few more minutes the clouds got closer and we could feel the wind picking up rapidly. First 10, then 15, then 20 knots. 25 in the gusts of wind, shaking the boat and the water around quite a bit. Had the Spinnaker been out at that time we would have almost certainly damaged or completely destroyed it. Even the foresails are better off inside in gusts like this, because you don't know how close the little local storm will get to you.

This one luckily passed us by without us even getting a single drop of rain or even worse winds, but when you're inside one of these things 25 knots of gusts will seem like child's play and the winds can go up to 50 knots or more for some time and get truly dangerous. Can you see the storm cloud in the distance in the next picture? Seeing things like this on the horizon makes my heart jump a little. This one even passed us much closer to the right side before overtaking us and going away from us again. So far we haven't seen any with lightning strikes emanating from it, but over the next days, the size and frequency will increase just as the warmth of the water and the air. Let's see what happens.

After the whole thing blew over, the sun was in our backs, shining on the remnants of the rainclouds, forming a wonderful albeit soft double rainbow. The idea of being on the watch becomes much more important in these waters and I am glad that we have the radar to track this sort of weather. Especially at night it shows you pretty exactly where the clouds are, something that helps tremendously with making decisions about what to do with the sails.

After the big rain clouds had passed us, we put the sails back up, but reffed them in a little because the wind was still stronger than before. Cruising along with a nice 6-7 knots we made good progress and the rest of the evening we could just our free time sailing again.

The sunset looked fantastic with all the rainclouds turning orange, yellow and red and I was sitting at the bow of the boat, smiling, my arm hooked around the forestay–a steel rope attached to the mast. This spot on the boat is my favorite because you are close to the sails and the water and you can feel how the boat sails. And the view from there is amazing too.

After watching the sunset like this there is not much else to do, so we start cooking the meal for the day. Tagine, Moroccan style, with fish, baked potatoes, carrots and some couscous. It's an absolute treat. It feels like I'm back in Tangier in Morocco at the fish market, even if I am now almost completely at the other side of the Atlantic.

Now during my night watch I have trouble staying awake because I ate so much of this delicious food that my brain thinks that now should be the time to sleep. Writing this diary doesn't quite help like it usually does and I am thinking what else I could do not to fall asleep as easily... I just put on alarms every 20 minutes and put on headphones with music, dozing off and waking up again for some time until the drowsiness of the food settles down. And that worked. Now it's about 1 hour remaining of my shift and I'm back awake.

I just realized that today it's been exactly two weeks out at sea. It's crazy to think that we've almost made it. Three to four more days and we're there in Guadeloupe.