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15th June
By midnight we were doing seven knots steady. The battering and banging, pitching and rolling make it exceedingly difficult to rest as well as being tough on the gear. Michael dropped the mizzen and we slowed to a respectable 5 knots, which felt much better.
In the morning the horizon looks as though it was smudged with a dirty thumb. Rain falls. We haul up the mizzen to make good time during daylight hours. From out of nowhere it seemed, a large wave collided with us. Was it a storm generated wave we wonder?
16th June
We continue to skirt the highs to pick up the westerly winds on the lower fringes or to ride the troughs as they roll through. The air temperature is surprisingly comfortable for winter. Our heavy clothes remain in their lockers. The cat has finally emerged to curl up once more in the sea berth.
We have now sailed 1,000 miles. Rapa Island in the Austral Group is 1,000 miles to the east. On our original intended course further south, we would not have contemplated the detour going to Rapa would have entailed. But now she is practically in our path.
Under reefed mizzen we thunder through the nigh. The radio man t told us another front threatens. Where in this wide ocean is there to flee?
Moonlight as though spilt from a caldron, flows across the dipping waves, lighting even the far horizon. Now the sky is so bright, even jeweled Scorpio is but a faded ghost of herself.
17th June
A furious wind screams under a brilliant sky the next morning. The temperature has fallen. We are togged up warmly and the boat drives forward as though the Devil were in pursuit, even short rigged.
At midnight I call Michael from his tossing slumber. "I can't hold the course any longer in this wind."
Like a gray blur on the foredeck, a Michelin man in his oversized slickers and harness, he labors to drop the genoa. It falls in a paroxysm of wild fluttering to drift harmlessly in the sea until he can haul it in.
We guess at the speed now, for the log has stopped working. The boat is bucking around too much just now to consider fixing it. Later.
A new low is forming somewhere northeast of us. It is not a happy thought.
18th June
The days become blurred; everything in our watery world seem so transient: the cloud, the wave, the wind --- strengthening or faltering. The great silent birds that never stay long. The light, which by is phantasmal beauty makes us happy or fearful. Within our perfect circle of horizon we lift and fall ---- but always remain immobile in its center, as static as a butterfly pinned to its board.
Here there is no silence. Water speaks and mutters. The least breath of breeze sends sibilant sounds to the sensitized ear: whispered conversation, a clearly enunciated phrase, the sound of an overheard radio, an orchestra, opera, the throaty sound of a flute! All, the music of nature!
Michael says to me, "I never imagined such varied conditions. Even within a single isobar line as shown on the weather faxes. Winds pick up, winds die away. Sea conditions and swells change. We can rarely set a sail and just leave it. A couple of hours later we must re-adjust it. Not at all like crossing the Atlantic, with the sails set wing and wing, day in and day out!
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