The Atlantic Crossing

18 days. 18 very long days. We left Los Cristianos in Teneriffe heading south west until we hit the trade winds then due east. The sun came up the sun went down and we kept on heading east.

We were very lucky with the weather. Pretty constant winds around 20kts with only 2 days when the wind died and we motored. When we arrived in St Lucia we spoke to people who had been hit by squalls of 60kts (a gale is around 50kts) which had lasted for 5 hours. Hardly any rain - when it did fall it was a case of standing under the bimini until it passed a couple of minutes later. And the huge seas I was worried about never materialised. Apart from one day we had long rolling waves of 3-4 meters which you hardly noticed.

But it was still bloody awful! And I'm not doing it again. Even in those light conditions the boat rocked and rolled, rocked and rolled. You could just about put up with the rocking but once the rolling set it in it was a challenge doing the simplist of things like brushing your teeth. Making lunch or worse dinner was for heroes and Mark and Hayden (one of our crew) did more than their fair share. I felt queasy for the first 6 days then very average for the rest especially in the galley.

We had 3 crew join us in Gibraltar for the 5 week trip. 5 days to the Canaries, a week in the Canary Islands, 18 days to Barbados, 2 days in Barbados then on to St Lucia. We arrived at the same time as the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) which has been a lot of fun hearing about other passages. One boat lost it's rudder and sank. Another was abandoned. But several hundred made it. The rum parties have left their mark and we are leaving St Lucia tomorrow for a rest before Christmas.

Some photos from the crossing attached. Fishing was a major occupation and we caught around 12 fish - tuna, dorada and one unidentified. They were very expensive fish given the amount of lures, line, etc that they took. We kept a tally and I think it was 18 to the fish for the 12 we actually caught. We also had a mid atlantic stop for swimming and for Hayden to do some kitesurfing on his birthday which was followed by a lamb roast and a couple of bottles of red wine - went to our heads as it was the only alcohol we had on an otherwise dry passage. The other crew were Dave from Chester and his girlfriend Hazel from Bucks. Dave had done a couple of transatlantic crossings before and was our weather and comms man. Hazel's parents have a house on St Lucia so we got expert local knowledge of where to go when we got here - more rum was inevitably involved.