Day 15 - Chasing the storm clouds

The first thing to tell about today is from the night shift itself. I went to bed after my night shift ended at around 04:30, only to wake up again almost immediately after because I could hear how the wind picked up and Christian tried to bring in the sails.

Coming upstairs in my underwear, asking what's up, he told me that there was another squall coming in and that the wind was changing fast.

That moment it also started raining heavily. The wind blowed in the rain from the side, me, still in underwear, got soaking wet, and I screamed and laughed like a maniac: "hell yeah, I can get a freshwater shower." We brought in the foresails almost completely and where still cruising along with a crisp 7 knots. The rain was still going so I decided to get a sweet water shower under the rain. With soap and all. But once I had everything ready, towel, soap, and bucket the rain had already stopped again. So I instead sat in the cockpit, completely naked, in the darkness and took my shower with only salt water. It was super cold, but so refreshing and nice at the same time. Surreal moments, like this one: a mix of crazy and beautiful are why you do this sort of adventure. It's building memories of moments you'll never forget.

After my night shower I went to bed, and for the first time in days, I was feeling too cold and cuddled myself into my soft and warm sleeping bag.

In the morning I woke up because the sails and ropes banged against the ship and made loud noises again. Creaking, and clacking around. Coming up to the cockpit I could already see the dark storm clouds, and then Rebecca and Christian working the sails, making sure that they were set correctly. It was a picture for the gods, with part of the storm clouds already behind, and we had fun goofing around for the camera.

But situations like these are typical for the last days of the Atlantic crossing. The weather gets warmer and warmer every day and the added energy of the air makes the water evaporate quickly and form fast locally moving rain clouds, also known as squalls. These bring their own winds, which makes the local weather always different from what is predicted for the region. And they move. Fast. One minute you have nice steady winds and sunshine. Ten minutes later the wind comes with three times the strength from the opposite direction and it's raining buckets. This makes squalls somewhat dangerous because if they catch you off guard and you still have full sails out it could rip out the sails or otherwise damage them.

Luckily you can see them on the radar and on the horizon and therefore roughly know when to bring in the sails to avoid damage.

After we had successfully navigated through this morning squall, and got another bout of pelting rain, we could see the light coming out behind the clouds and were greeted by a most mesmerizing sunrise.

But just like the morning, the rest of day was spent bringing up and down the sails, unrolling the genua, rolling it back, unrolling it, rolling it back in, making between five and seven knots the entire day. This was sailing.

I am still somewhat afraid of these dark clouds, because sometimes they also bring thunder and lightning, and then it's not as much fun anymore because it can get quite dangerous on the boat quite fast.

Mostly because the lightning strikes can kill the electronics which means you have to be quite careful around thunderstorms. You can hide things like phones, the "Iridium"—our satellite telephone, and the navigation tablet in the oven because of it's properties as a faraday cage. But still, lightning strikes killing all the instruments, the lights and all, is not a fun situation to be in.

But still, the rest of the day the clouds looked like this dark and menacing, every other hour or so. Luckily without any signs of thunder. But then just as quickly as they appeared they moved and disappeared again and gave way to blue skies and stupid amounts of sunshine. It was just like that: heavy rain and winds for 30 minutes, then getting roasted by sun for 30 minutes. Then again Rain. Sun, rain, sun, rain, sun. And us bringing the sails up and down every time it changed.

For lunch that day Christian made his long promised "Kaiserschmarrn": a German delicacy, somewhat close to cut pancakes, but much more delicious and fluffy. We also had leftover cake from the day before that Rebecca had made. And so we feasted in the sunshine between squalls.

Sweet stuff 🤗 but we definitely earned it with our work today.

Besides the stormy nature of the sea that day, nothing much happened. I read Peter Attia again for quite some time and we had a beautiful sunset.

For dinner we had some oven roasted potato and sweet potato, mixed with fried Frankfurters from a can. It was a weird dish, but somehow still delicious. And then we went to bed and got ready for our night shifts and ended another day on the Atlantic. The rain clouds mean one good thing, we're getting closer and closer to our goal: Guadeloupe.

Just a few more days. The feeling of excitement starts to get palpable.