17days 9h 34 sec

at 16:29:34 seconds maloo crossed the arc finish line in st.lucia.

apart from being happy that we are here - we are even more happy that neither crew nor boat suffered from any breakage in what would have to be renamed "the atlantic destruction derby for cruising yachts"

the conditions were rough and the crossing was fast - never ever would we have thought to do it just under 18days as we are only a 42 footer and nowhere near a racer!

a lot of boats suffered serious damages and we wish especially the yachts that are still out there all the best for the rest of the journey!

so...how were the last hours?

it started of with probably the longest 5nm in my whole life. sitting and staring on the screen, watching the "distance to waypoint" go down it felt worse that waiting for the christkind and the easter bunny all together!

i have to admit i hardly had an eye for the beauty of the island, as i was just nervously waiting to see the end.

coming into the bay, we could see the yacht that marked the finish line and with a wonderful reach doing 7,5kn i had the honor of taking us over it.

what a welcome that was from the arc (thanks for that!!!) as we opened a well deserved bottle of piper heidseck and proceeded to the marina.

to get into the marina one has to go through a rather narrow channel - with people sitting left and right and congratulating us on our trip we arrived in a totally different world than the one we left 17 days ago.

the best though was definitely all our friends from senta, fabiola, sundancer II, open blue and many more welcoming us on the jetty. (that is surely the best thing of not arriving first!;))

and here we are! it`s 29°C, the sun is shining, the water is lovely 26°C, the rum punch is on ice... and finally our world is not moving anymore. you can not believe how great it is to have a bite to eat without holding onto plate, food and cutlery, to drink a glass of water without spilling most of it....

in short...st.lucia feels like pure heaven!

how is it to sail across the atlantic?

mark answered me the same few things that came to my mind ad hoc: blue, sometimes grey, sometimes petrol colored... but never boring.

days go by faster than imagined - the scenery of the ocean is wonderful and I really enjoyed being out there!

but it is physically also much more demanding than expected. not only because the conditions were mostly rough, you are in a 24h gym - even sleeping you are exercising. 

the result: we all lost weight! - so did everyone I have met so far! even though we ate really well, a couple of kilos were paid to neptune.

I also think that some of us underestimated what they booked in for...having had a rougher trip to lanzarote already, mark and i were pretty well prepared, and although we hoped to have a smoother one, were not that surprised (i wonder if that's purely a good thing ;)

there is no cm on my body that has not seen a bruise in the last 2 weeks...but no serious injury was done.

and even though there's no lie about that fact that some hours were just awful and I wished myself on a couch with buddy at my feet, I do not have a single doubt that I would do it again...in a heartbeat!

and in fact, mark and i are going to to it again - even being out at sea longer: in approximately 3 months from now we are to cross the biggest ocean of our great blue planet - the pacific.

3 months is a lot of water under the keel though and before that, there is an awful lot of caribbean to be conquered!

where the hurricanes are born....becalmed on the atlantic in the first week

st.lucia ahead of us.... the last 3h that felt like 3 years