Atlantic Passage

Shortly after I went to bed last night the wind picked up to a force 8-9 Gale. Since we were hove to the ship began to seriously roll, like 45 degrees or more. All sorts of things rattled and crashed as well as the seas pounding against the side of the hull.  Needless to say I didn’t get much sleep.

This morning we wore ship to get back underway in a steady force 7 with much larger seas, the captain says 18-20′. Still rolling, making movement very difficult.  Starting to feel a bit queasy after 12 hours of this, blah.

Moving food around is difficult and doing the dishes an exercise in acrobatics. I found sitting at the stern to be the best even though the motion is greater simply because I can wedge myself in and not have to worry about sliding around.

The nice thing is that the sun is shining at least, there are rainbows in the spray when the rollers come crashing aboard.

Last word goes to the Bosun Kolin who said “This is what you paid for right?”  Right

Thanks for reading
KJ

P.S. When I went on night watch at 4:00 I had first lookout. The seas  were too rough to be on the fo’csle so we had to stand watch on the bridge, which is just in front of the chart house.  About a half hour into my watch a great black bank of cloud blotted out the stars and the wind began to howl. The gusts were strong enough to knock me off my feet. The mate says they were easily 50 knots in the gust close to Force 10 steady!  We hove to again to ride it out then wore round and reset the sails at 8:00am.  We are now sailing South again.  Hopefully that is the last we’ll see of that system.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under On Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.