Bumpy Sleep & A Rain Shower!

Imagine this scenario:

You wake up suddenly in the middle of the night in a strange place. In the split second it takes for you to figure out where you are, you also discover you’re hanging in mid-air. That is, until you fall the inch or two back down to your bed. Followed by a few more rollercoaster-ride-worthy, stomach-dropping, weightless bumps.

You’re sleeping on a sailboat! And the waves are coming on the broad side and it’s really choppy. Specifically, you’re on a catamaran, which is lucky because otherwise you would’ve fallen clean off the top bunk. (Monohulls do have a mechanism to prevent this from happening.)

That was my midnight adventure. Followed by a change of watch where I had a one-person dance party in the cockpit while the boat rolled gently wave over wave. Spent the night listening to a bunch of downloaded music I forgot I had, watching the radar for squalls and, once they had passed, the sky for shooting stars.

The wind is lighter today, but when I say lighter it’s like 15 or sometimes hitting 20 knots. So lighter compared to the last few days and nights anyway. Last night on Jan’s watch, a squall came through with sustained 35 knot winds for 5 minutes or so. Intense. It’s why we reef before night falls.

With the lighter winds, (again, lighter comparatively) we tried to put up the gennaker but with the winds at the speed they were, it’s a much more difficult process:

First Try: the working sheet came loose (bad bowline). In all the flogging, it got tangled with the loose end of our jybe preventer and couldn’t be pulled tight through the winch. Before we, very smartly, decided to give up and try to start over, I attempted to detangle the preventer line and took a whipping sheet to the face. It was like a giant rubber band snap. Luckily, I was wearing a pair of $8 sunglasses I’d picked up in Cabo Verde so it didn’t hit my eye. Mostly, the force got transferred to my nose through the glasses. I am unhurt and mostly will just come home with a wacky bruise (and maybe a shiner). Jan said it was good for the season, he called me Rudolph… :)

Second try: fixed the working sheet knot, the sail went up beautifully. But then 10 minutes later it wrapped around the jib and then after much effort we unwrapped it from the jib only for it to tie itself into a giant knot. Decided to take it down again and store it in the forward hatch and let a rainstorm pass.

Third try: this wasn’t really a try. We had to untangle the gennaker and then raise it in order to verify we had done it correctly. Well, it was detangled but this time twisted inside the gennaker sock and so, once again, we decided to take it down. We’ll troubleshoot some more tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures of our gennaker chaos for you. I do, however, have a picture of my lovely face and my new bruise. :)

As soon as we made the decision to abandon the gennaker for the day, it started to sprinkle. After all the chaos I decided it would be nice to take a mid-afternoon shower to get all my oily sunscreen off and cool down.

This was, by far, the best shower I’ve taken. Right as I got up to the foredeck and got out the fresh water hose, I looked up to the horizon behind the boat and saw the rain coming towards me. The front line of the approaching storm was starkly visible on the water where it looked gray and muted and rough. The rain came fast and heavy, and soon big droplets were splattering, my face, the deck around me, and making puddles. The waves around me, normally fairly smooth even in the swell, looked like tv static - every bit of it was pocked and textured from fat falling raindrops. The horizon, normally a stark cobalt against a light blue sky, almost disappeared in the gray haze, one gray blending into another. The sea itself actually seemed to calm, massaged by the rain to a steady state. The other great thing about rain on the open ocean? They make for some pretty incredible rainbows.

Today, in the protection of Nam Thanh’s roomy salon, we taught the skipper how to play gin rummy, and I think we might be getting through to him in card game department. Just have to find the right one. :)

Overall, it’s been an exhausting day. Looking forward to sleep. Not many days left now.

E