The wind has been howling in the rigging all morning, and we reduced sail to just the staysail, which is too small to be much use except in a hurricane, which this isn't......yet! So we rather stalled and pottered along at 3-4 knots while it rained heavily.
Then the wind eased and the sun came out, and it feels very pleasant, so we put up a bit more sail. But the regularly updated weather map shows that in the next few hours we will get very strong winds from the south, known locally as a "southerly buster", accompanied by 5-6 meter waves. So we await this with a degree of anxiety, trusting that the good ship Tin Tin will see us through OK....
With luck we will emerge the other side on Saturday in one piece, at which point the wind will die and we will have to motor, until the next gale hits us from the north, blowing us down towards Durban, or maybe to closer Richard's Bay. There we will have to wait out the next southerly buster before trying to make our way to Port Elizabeth to meet Richard and get Justin onto his plane home on the 28th. We might just make it if the weather allows!
Fortunately Mark has been busy in the galley and we have enjoyed the smell of fresh bread baking, and then a banana cake to use up all the very black bananas in our fruit hammock. However with our freezer now dead, we have been hurrying to eat up any once frozen supplies, and a sad procession of mouldy food keeps flying out of the galley window as each watch tries to prepare a meal....most frustrating!
On the positive side the loss of the freezer means that our batteries are holding out much better and I don't need to jolt Justin awake each night when I fire up the generator, cunningly hidden under his berth.
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