The forecast was good so we had to leave Chagos unfortunately. We had a 12-15kt SE breeze and had beautiful sailing heading down the west side of Chagos bank with another boat "Ever After". That was until the 2nd night out when it went to custard and the wind came almost from the south with lots of rain and a big swell running and the breeze up to 25kts. We made slow progress then, we really had to nurse our Headsails as we didn't want another casualty! The next day it eased but still a lot of rain about the place but went back to the SE at least and then the following day started to come around to the East and then we had great sailing once again for the next 3 days heading south the last under Spinnaker. The seas were calm and we made good speed but unfortunately we were just a tad behind the most of the breeze that was just a little further south than us and then as we got a couple of days out from Rodrigues the wind died altogether and went NE which was directly behind us so on went the engine. The trip took us 8 days for the 1000 mile journey and we arrived fully rested and ready to go which was a great surprise. Geez, Julie even made a cheese cake towards the end of the passage the weather was that good! I really don't think there are many weather windows that you don't get smashed about and break lots of things on this passage from all the stories we heard and blogs we read, maybe we are just lucky??! Sunflower went great once again and we really enjoyed sailing with the Yankee And Staysail as a proper Cutter rig as we don't normally do when we have the Genoa. Julie also got very busy trimming sails and playing around which was great to see!
And some other news is that I popped the question just before we left and the answer was yes, Happy Days!!
No comments:
Post a Comment