"The Sea, The Sea" & 'A taste of what's to come'? (8th day/night at sea to dawn 19/8)

Apart from us in our little plastic shell, that and the odd show-off Shearwater, is all there is to see...

The photos do make it appear rather monotonous, but after a few days on the ocean, it starts to work its mystic magic on my senses and I begin to hear faint echoes of its call to Mointisier all those years ago. It's a bit like the feeling I remember having as a child asleep in the car on a long journey. This time, instead of the swaying of the car, it's the endless ocean vista and the rythmic rolling to and fro, as our little ship, slips, seemingly effortlessly, through the sea, that creates the feeling of being in nature's own realm; cut off from the demands and anxieties of life back in the 'material world'. After 7 days at sea, my body has tuned in to the relaxed watch system that a 3 person crew allows (3 hours on and 6 hours off) and the main decision to make in this realm, is (off watch in my bunk) when to cross the void seperating dreams from reality. Sometimes, however, in the early hours, my slumbers have been so deep, that the vibration alarm set on my watch for 0345, has failed to stir me and poor Agustin has had to prod me gently into wakefulness.

Perhaps I was tempting fate to describe our vista as "monotonous" because shortly afterwards the view from the companionway looked like this....

The weather had quickly taken on an all too familiar feel. Does more of this lurk conspiratorially, with European fishing fleets in the western approaches, to welcome us home? It's a gauntlet I have run before, but it will be no less irksome for that!

A warm front was probably passing. We therefore had lunch below for the first time on the passage. Once again, the core ingredient of which, was a freshly baked loaf, cooked by Agustin ☺️.

Within a couple of hours the bulk of the front had passed and the sun was piercing the blankets of grey above. 

We've been rolling more over the last couple of hours (since 1600 BST), courtesy of a swell from the South West, now on our port quarter, which is overwhelming that produced by the wind from our starboard quarter. The rolling frequently gets more erratic when the swell from starboard decides to fight back! It was a similar, but much more extreme situation with a third swell from astern, that Mick and I had to live with for 15 days on board Arctic Smoke, when we crossed from the Cape Verde to the Carribbean in 2016!

There's nothing more guaranteed to make me lose faith in nature and contemplate the use of unnatural means of propulsion than the absence of wind and that is just what plagued us during the first three or four hours of my off-watch. That, coupled with the ever present ocean swell, sent the boat rocking and jerking back and forth and the sails slamming and snapping loudly. I got not a wink of sleep and so at the change of Watch, with all crew present and my spirits at a low ebb, all thoughts of nature's harmony were forgottten and I committed the gravest of sins and suggested use of the engine to go in search of wind.

The mate, as is his want in such situations adopted his 'Mr Spock' persona and made two points in response. Firstly, despite the noisy and jerky ride, we had in fact never sailed slower than 1 knot and had quite frequently touched 2. Secondly, we really had little idea of where to head in search of wind. The information we had indicated there was decent wind where we were and without more information, we could just as easily move away from wind as towars it. 

I therefore muttered something sarcastic under my breath and returned to my bunk for a further installment of that well known nautical volume, "How to sleep in a tumble dryer in the company of a tin can"!

Things must have improved shortly afterwards because I did finally get some disturbed sleep and when I took over the Watch from Agustin at 0400, he reported that we were racing along at 3 knots! We were heading for Ireland with the wind from behind and the barometer had fallen 5 millibars in the last 16 hours (the crew, including the skipper, having neglected their duty in recording its reading at the end of every Watch) and so there seemed some hope that more wind would turn up before too long. Indeed, as I write this at 0522, I think I can detect a slight freshening of the very light breeze from astern.