Forced to abandon our overnight sleep at anchor

Woke up a couple of times during the early morning to check on Rowan who was managing to have short little cat naps, setting the timer on his phone for 15 minutes so that he didn’t fall asleep for long. I got up to see a glorious sunrise but the sea has changed incredibly from the flatness of yesterday. The trade winds have roared in and the easterlies are back in force with big choppy waves, with this wind we are making very good speed through the water. So much so that at current speed we hope to reach landfall at 8pm. Rowan has found this remote little island, Barbuda, that we are going to risk anchoring at with our Quarantine flag up, so that we can have a good night’s sleep. So looking forward to finding out what’s happened in the last week!

Sunrise

Sunrise through the bedroom window

Phoeb’s phoned us on our emergency satellite phone this morning as they were worried we were not at land yet. I think I may have underestimated the days at sea on the blog, or maybe that was R’s way of not getting me too wound up! Actually the reason was we decided to take our weather guru’s much longer route after we had departed, and just lost signal before I could alter the blog and tell everyone it would take at least an extra day or two. I was dead against this route before lockdown when we were still in the Bahamas and here we are doing it! Our Predict wind tracking is working on the Blog again, and I think quite a few people have been following our progress. It’s a bit confusing as it shows a line straight up north from the Dominican Republic to east of Turks and Caicos which is where it actually started working again.

No chance of a cooked breakfast today as we roll about in these huge waves, but thankfully just managed to boil the kettle for a cup of tea. Breakfast is Granola with pecan nuts from Muden, the farm I grew up on in South Africa. I treasure my stash in the deep freeze and so grateful Widge (my sister) gave me a large bag to bring back in January. Our favourite and only pudding is caramelised bananas (fried!), yoghurt, Muden pecan nuts and honey from the farmer’s market in the Bahamas. It’s our guilty pleasure on our own, as our children all want to gag when we cook bananas – we obviously force fed them when they were kids!!

Around lunch time we could see this big storm ahead, very eerie the drop in wind beforehand and then the fury unleashed as the rain chucked down. What is incredible is how the force of the rain seemed to flatten the waves. I must say Polepole handled it incredibly well, noisy but stable and because of the huge roof over the outside cockpit we don’t have to put everything away. We roared through it, and had a wonderful sunset with dramatic clouds as we seem to be surrounded by squalls (sailing term for storms?!). We loved passing our one and only sailing boat we have seen so far. 67 feet with 3 sails, sadly just too far away to wave, but a comfort to know that someone else is out there sailing in this lockdown pandemic.

Storm through the window

Rowan cleverly remembered to put a reef in the sails as we began to realise we were only going to get to Barbuda after 9pm and looked like the winds were picking up once again with all the squalls.

We had no books or downloads on Barbuda just a map which showed the anchorage, but also mentioned it should only be navigated by daylight. So R was waiting for us to get near the island so we could pick up wifi and get more details. After a pretty intense sail with winds peaking around 28 knots and huge waves we finally got close enough by 9:30pm. Sadly the book confirmed in no uncertain terms that you can only anchor here in daylight (over 200 ship/boat wrecks!), so sadly with these big winds we had no option but to continue straight on to Martinique. Disappointing as we are both pretty knackered, luckily as soon as we got into the lee of the islands the sea was much calmer, and things became less hectic. I was on the second watch so went to bed hastily. I resisted looking at my 368 WhatsApp messages. I was also happy that we had managed to reassure the kids we were safe and nearly at our destination.