Stumbling over mountains

Day 10 of the Return Trip

We are on our tenth day of conquering this mighty ocean, and surmounting all of the challenges that such a passage presents. We are currently: over

1000 nautical miles from Montevideo, where we departed; about 1000 miles from Tristan da Cunha, which is our hopeful stopover; and 2500 miles from Cape Town.

We have made some really good time in the last few days. We are chasing for a 200 miler (200 nautical miles in 24 hours). We are pretty sure that we've hit it at least once, but our chart plotter has bombed out, and our log trip keeps resetting. so we are not 100% sure. One thing that IS for sure though, is that this boat has been rocketing. "full moon, clear skies, surfing the massive waves, Ricardo's epic lunch... hmmm..." reflects Raf.

We have had a taste of some serious South Atlantic rollers. Looking backwards here is equivalent to looking down when climbing a cliff. You just don't. Gina did once while she was driving, and couldn't suppress a little yelp. The waves are big, but also mostly gentle.

We have dealt with a lot of rain in the past few days, but yesterday afternoon, Ric and I saw some strange blue stuff appearing behind the sky.

Today, the sun is out in full force, but it's still a bit windy and rough to hang clothes and mattresses out to dry.

Yesterday was another eventful one. Immediately after sending yesterday's position report and blog post, the *jargon alert* Jib which was poled-out pulled out of the tuff-luff, and while Ric and I were dropping it, the sail split at the foot and ripped the whole tack off the sail. So basically, we wrote off one of our sails.

We replaced it with the storm jib, poled-out with the full main. The breeze had died down to about 25 knots, so it was decided to hoist the small spinnaker and make the most of the down-wind conditions. We put a reef in the main before this, just to be safe.

When the kite was up, we were hit by an unexpected squall with wind in the high 30s. We rode it out for a little while at light-speed, but couldn't prevent *jargon alert* a broach when the pole-downhaul strop snapped. So with the boat on her ear, we scrambled to get this kite doused and packed away. In the flurry of activity, Dave cut open the top of his foot. So with our first broach, we had our first casualty. Casually, Dave cleaned it and patched it up with super-glue and a bandage. All was fine, and we were back to square one, but with an added reef in the main.

The second casualty of the day was the loss of our lucky Golden Rapala fishing lure. The one that has bagged us most of our edible fish. We don't know what happened to it, but reckon it may have been a hungry Wahoo. Pure speculation.

Ja, nee. Aside from that, everyone has had a turn to do some driving and some surfing - with Gina and Raf especially showing some great prowess and composure in the big breeze and big sea.