Smoke on the Water

Most of the day on February 28, there was a lot of wind. From 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. (GMT-2), we had a steady forty knots of wind. On the Beaufort Scale, that is a Force 9 out of 12, or Strong gale. Force 12 is a hurricane.The wind sometimes dipped down to thirty knots or went up to fifty, but generally it was in the low 40s all day. That is a lot of wind!

In the morning, the wind piped up to fifty knots. Daddy, who was on watch, had to steer because there was too much wind for the auto pilot to handle. I was sitting in the cockpit, protected by the dodger from any splashes. The water was a dark indistinguishable mass. Spray was rising off crashing waves and soon the air was thick with the white of the mist as it roared by us. The columns of mist swirled and twisted like dancing spirits. They raced over the waves, making it hard to see the horizon. After the squall settled and moved past us, the sun came out. The bright white glittering reflection of the sun was almost blinding to look at. The dark foreboding squall turned the water in front of it an ugly grey but on the other side of Sila the water was blue and friendly in the rays of the sun. Even though the squall had moved past us, it was still blowing 40 knots and there were very few sudden gusts.

By noon, the wind had picked up the waves, and they were getting gradually bigger. By late afternoon, they were four to five meters tall (about thirteen to sixteen feet high) with the occasional six meter one. The waves reminded me of castles. The main body of the castle is like the swell. Then the smaller white caps and wavy ripples are all the towers and spires. Occasionally, a big wave would crash over the side of Sila and the water would rush into the cockpit. We have two small holes in the bottom of the cockpit and all the water would drain out but anybody behind the wheel or on the benches would be soaked. We still always wear rain gear and the water does not do much damage.

The bright side to all this wind is that we were going a good eight to nine knots all day. Quite a few times, we went ten or eleven knots. Typically, Sila goes a steady six knots, so it was nice to cover so many miles. It used to be that the twenty knot winds made me nervous but now, as I type this, it is gusting near thirty and I am completely at ease. -Jack Rabbit

Editor's Note: The day that Rabbit described, February 28, was our last full day in the latitudes known as the "Roaring 40s." It was our second day of big wind during these first five days on passage, and by far the most weather we have seen on Sila. We all breathed a sigh of relief today when we crossed the 40th parallel into the 30s. As of 2 pm (GMT) on March 1st, we are at 39°36 S 29°54 W. We have covered about 950 miles since leaving Grytviken, South Georgia. We have more than 3,500 yet to go to get to the Cape Verdes. All is well and the crew on board Sila is settling into a nice routine.