st.lucia, here we come! DAY 14 to 15 - what comes after the calm?

what a night! - after having rather little to no wind the last days, the evening of day 13 started with a nice breeze and grey skies which almost had us thinking we took a wrong turn somewhere and are in the irish seas.
towards the night the wind increased to high twenties/low thirties and rain fronts (so called squalls) passed us by.

Mark had gusts up to 37kn in his shift and with only a tiny bit of sail out did over 12kn down the steep waves. I tried to get some rest in the front of the boat, but the noise of maloo running down these waves was almost deafening.

in the morning the wind was still around 27-30kn with the sea now being very messy and the rain fronts changed into walls of water coming down on us. I don't think I have ever seen so much water coming down as rain - which left me rather amazed and totally soaked. our hands swelled up from being wet constantly, making it hard to pull sheets or hold the helm.

this was probably the hardest night of our trip so far (knock on wood!!!!) for us and for our maloo, leaving me absolutely exhausted after a night without sleep and heavy conditions on watch. but luckily maloo went through it all without any damage or complaint, which is quite amazing given the fact the we were thrown around like a rubber duck.

with all that wind though our progress was fantastic....I almost saw us there in rodney bay drinking our well deserved rum punsh. but things come differently then expected - and so the wind left us for the major part of yesterday....so did the rum punsh in my hand! - as we want to keep the fuel for maybe the last day before st.lucia using our penta is out of option.

in the evening a steadier softer wind returned and since then we are under genoa only (rolling less than goose-winging) and making about 6,5 to 7kn straight for st.lucia.

with 587nm to go (at 5:45 UTC-2) we hope to get into rodney bay by saturday morning (if the wind god is with us even friday) - in both cases a really good result for maloo and us!

so on the menu we had potato-salmon patties (which turned our to be rather tasty but otherwise a disaster) with tomato-salad and given the fact that we were all rather tired last night, penne with pesto!