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Atlantic Crossing

the fridge, and stick to the minimum of instruments at night.

On December 5th we started to suffer from violent squalls. The direction
of the wind was changing during the gusts, and the wind regularly took
back the jib which was slapping hard. We tried and came a little more
downwind. Then during an uncontrolled gybe, the mainsail sheet whipped
the Lowrance plotter attached to the binnacle and propelled it into the
ocean. Gilbert also flew across the cockpit, and escaped luckily without a
bruise. From this event we inspected every day
and secured all instruments and shackles on the
boat.
On the evening menu there was two exocets that
had been stranded on the deck. Going towards
the pan, they made a last flight across the cabin
in a big roll. On December 6th the conditions re-
mained the same. We were beginning to better
understand and anticipate the squalls that ac-
companied each passing cloud. These huge
clouds were pushing wind and torrents of water
Exocet or flying fish ahead of them and then left us flattening the seas
ready to cook after their passage.
We were accelerating well, but the other boats even more than us, and
they were starting to take distance from us, except Lubilu III which was
only fifty miles away and seemed to be moving a little slower than us. We
decided to catch it. Hallucine, Régis Guillemot’s boat had just arrived in
Saint Lucia.
On December 7th, the sea was more agitated with a main swell of 4m, plus
two crossed swells which superposed on it, all this with rather short peri-
ods, around 4 to 5 seconds, and the rolling was constant. The rain, the
gusts, the rough sea, all this was far from the bucolic images of the cross-
ing in the trade winds that we had seen in the brochures. The windvane
was struggling to keep control of the boat during the gusts, but by taking
the helm in hand we did even worse, and triggered unintentional gybes.
One of the boom retainers gave way in one of them: the knot, a sheet

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