Force 7/8 down to Curaçao!

Date: 24th January, 2024

Where am I? 

Latitude: 012°04.8N

Longitude: 068°51.7W

At anchor in Spanish Water, Curaçao.

How is the weather?

The sail down from Antigua to Curaçao was definitely heavy weather sailing – quite a test for Fujin and her crew! Winds, apart from a wind hole on day 1 for a few hours, were a minimum of 15 knots and max of 40 knots – gale territory. Winds were mostly 24 to 30 knots. Heavy rain squalls were pretty miserable but yacht and crew coped  well with the adverse conditions.

PredictWind predicts a break in the weather by end of this week – hopefully they are right!

What am I feeling?

I’m delighted to be in a safe anchorage after three long days of Force 6 and 7 winds, gusting to Force 8! A hot shower and a whisky in the cockpit have made all the difference! And very proud of the crew and the yacht for taking the tough conditions in our stride.

What has happened this week?

This past week has been all about final preparations and welcoming aboard my brother, Rod, who will be with us for the next couple of weeks. And of course, our passage down to Curaçao.

We finally received our new dinghy cover in Toast WeatherMax fabric, with all the necessary chafe pads and straps – it fitted first time, so kudos to Rashidi and the guys at A&F Sails in Nelson’s Dockyard. Now we are able to store our grab bag plus any garbage under cover in the dinghy and not have to worry about it filling up with rain water, which would then need to be drained regularly to avoid weight build up.

Our grab bag contains essential items that we would take into our life raft if that requirement ever arose… We also have a medical kit and extra water in the dinghy for the same purpose – it makes everything more accessible in an emergency.

We brought up on deck all the kit we need for downwind sailing, such as boom preventer line, aft and fore guys for the spinnaker pole, blocks and shackles, etc. Patrick and I tested out everything in port before we left and just as well – setting the spinnaker pole in a Force 6 wind is an experience to remember!

We ended up sailing with poled out genoa and mainsail way out on port tack for much of the sail towards Curaçao and the boat performed very well in the conditions we experienced.

After we passed Monserrat, we lost connectivity via StarLink – we’re not sure why and “Elon” is back up and running now. We will be keeping an eye on this during the next couple of legs and hopefully we won’t see a repeat. It’s tremendous useful for our weather updates and keeping in contact with family and friends.

We also took the opportunity to repack the aft lazaette, a cavernous locker accessed from the aft deck. This has created enough space to store our top down furling gennaker sail which we do not expect to use until the Panama to Galapagos leg, given likely wind patterns. This leaves our foredeck clear of any clutter. In hindsight, this was a very good move given the amount of water we saw across the foredeck on this leg.

We used a two man, 4 hours on, 4 hours off watch system for this trip which worked quite well. In less arduous conditions, we would do one man 3 hour watches – hopefully on the next leg!

Anyway, we are now snugly at anchor in Spanish Water, Curaçao and will take a few days to catch our breath and see the island. There looks like a weather window this coming weekend – if so, we will be off on the next leg at that point.

Fujin out!