Transatlantic, day 5 – GMT-2 & jumping dolphins

11-Jan: Another VERY rolly night in 20-30Knt wind. Sometimes CB seems to find a sweet-spot and is both stable and fast, then without rhyme nor reason she starts a horrible resonating roll that has us gripping on, and anything & everything rattling and creaking down below. A particularly loud creaking has developed in Ellie’s bathroom at the forward lower-shroud plate. But impossible to attend to as it’s behind the washing machine. So its double ear-plugs for Ellie if she has any hope of sleep!

At 3am we passed into time zone -2 (2 hours before GMT). Feels like progress. Oana emerges for her watch at 9am and confesses that she was thrown out of bed twice! Glen wants to know who was in there to throw her out!

After breakfast we again play with the sail setup. It’s a team effort to repair yesterday’s damage and successfully get the set up right with twin head sails poled out ( cutter on pole and genoa on boom) and the mainsail furled away. The waves still set us rolling, yet CB now seems to recover quicker and so the ride is generally more comfortable. But it’s all relative, and Oana comments that rolly anchorages will never seem so bad ever again!

Lovely warm day today. And the sea temperature is up to 22degC now, from 18 in Lanzarote. After our energies on deck – where everything becomes monumentally more difficult with the severe movement – we soak up the sun on the aft deck. Glen practices sunsights and is happy with his progress using the sextant. Now to the difficult part of celestial navigation, all those calculations to get our actual position.

As the sun heads to the western horizon we are suddenly surrounded by a huge school of dolphins – maybe 50 or more. And just like in Blue Planet II, they are surfing in the steep faces of the waves and jumping high out the water, sometimes spinning as they do so. Can’t help but wonder if it hurts as they belly-flop back into the water. Oana’s screams of joy only seem to encourage them more! Ellie fills her camera SD card in just a few minutes! Then the results later, when she downloads the photos, are spectacular. But you’ll all have to wait till we have connectivity to show you the best ones!