It is 3:45am. There is zero wind and we have lightning storms behind us and ahead of us. The currents are tricky, here one moment and gone the next. As I write, our course is 290 degrees and our heading is 325 degrees. We are fifty miles from Durban. There is not a breath of wind as we motor on.
We have been kept on our toes the last couple of days as conditions have ranged from "calm", to "rolling right along" to "OK, now you have our full attention". We have avoided anything like "downright perilous". At worst we may have seen the wind at 40 knots, though the anemometer at the masthead may have been fooled as the mast swayed back and forth; the low thirties is a better estimate of the maximum. Our top speed of was 14 knots as we ran down the face of a wave, but again a better estimate of our top speed is 10-11 knots, which sounds glacial on land, but out here it feels pretty quick. Grand whooshes as we run down the face of a wave, seas breaking around us, broken water caught by the wind washing over us. In one memorable moment we went out into the cockpit to reduce sail. We were running along the glassy trough between two waves, almost too high to see over, both having broken crests carried away by the wind. Being broadside to the waves is not the sort of place to be in a monohull, but the catamaran was as steady as you could wish for.
It is now 5:00am. The lighting has faded away it is flat calm and on we go, somewhat sideways, westward to the now looming lights of Durban.
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