Giant waves crashing over the boat after mad surfs

 The low that two days ago gave us a kicking upwind has moved to the SE and
now we are running in the strong following winds behind the cold front.
All looks ideal on paper and i’m sure it must look exciting to see us on
the tracker dashing at twice the speed compared to just 48 hours ago…
down here however we are getting a little more entertainement than we had
anticipated, the wind has piped up to 40-45 knots, which i hear you say,
is to be expected, there seems to be always a lot more wind than
predicted… as early as this morning we were flying the small spinnaker,
but then we changed down to the solent and now we are flying our staysail
with reefed main and still occasionally hitting 20knots surfs… the waves
are getting bigger and bigger and occasionally we surf all the way down to
the bottom of the wave and dive into the next with masses of spray and
tons of water submerging the boat…

One wave bigger than the others gave us a fright, we nose dived, i.e.
buried the bow in the next wave so deeply that the boat came almost to a
halt decelerating very violently then spinning sideways while the wave
that had sent us flying crashed over us. Hugo was thrown forward out of
the bunk and luckily got away with just a sore head, the wave crashed and
gallons of water washed through the companion way and onto the chart
table… We spent the following hour drying everything, the satphone
packed up as water shorted a plug on the table exposed to the splash,
luckily i had a spare one and we are back up and running.

It really seemed like it was getting out of hand, we closed the companion
way and minutes after a second wave did the same… now however things
have been fine for quite some time and adding to the irony there is a very
pleasant sushine coming in through the windows, but it takes just a look
at the seas to be in total amazement… the wind has dropped a bit and we
are back to the high 30s which is far more civilized, let’s hope we were
just given a slap on the hand so we would not let down our guard,
according to the grib we could be in this weather for the next 48 hours
before any improvement and hopefully it will mean fast progress and
nothing more but i am worried about waves getting bigger still…

Posted by: firstclass