The winds were good for sailing and I made progress. The meteorologist told me that a front was passing through around midnight and I’d reefed both sails to account for 25-30Kts of wind. When the front passed at 23:30 the winds were stronger and I had several hours where the wind read around 38Kts (70KpH) and I had too much sail out for that. I furled both sails in until the helm felt balanced and I was doing 10Kts boat speed – this meant I had only little tiny portions of sail out there, I’m glad I have roller furling rather than classic reef points. While doing this in a hurry I moved across the cockpit without holding on to something and a boat movement had me fall heavily. I managed to bruise a rib and wow, that hurt. I am so happy that my winches are electric, as I don’t think I could done an adequate job tightening sheets one-handed with a manual winch.
It was cold and miserable and I was getting sprayed with water from below and above; but the rain gear did a good job of keeping me dry but all those layers of clothing wasn’t keeping me warm. I set the autopilot and hid under the dodger to get out of the worst of the weather, but it was a very miserable night for me despite making good mileage.
The winds settled to 30 knots until late in the next day. While I was making excellent progress the waves were being built up by this wind and the fetch was long, so I had the boat rolling around in the 4m waves (according to the weather model I had received). I was joined for a bit by a weary seagull, but it tried to stay on my bimini and those webbed feet aren’t made for holding on to slick surfaces and I watched the shadow of the bird slide across the bimini as the boat rolled. It worked at this for 15 minutes before departing again. Luckily the wind settled in the late afternoon and by the time I was ready for bed the wind was a lot lighter and I opted to set the AIS and Radar alarms and do my sleep in 1-hour intervals. My first sleep was really uncomfortable and I was afraid that I’d gotten a fever because I was perspiring heavily. Then I realized I still had all those layers of clothing on and the ambient temperature had gone up. So now I’m down to 2 layers of pants and 2 layers of shirts (one of those being thermal underwear).
