Back on Guppy after my excursion in the mountains, the meteo called for a good weather window on through the next coming days. It made me so happy that I felt like setting sail right away. But then I thought it would be better to have a full night of sleep first because coastal sailing and sleeping don’t go together… And it seemed odd that I would have been riding a horse in the mountains in the morning and sailing in the evening of the same day… So at dawn I manoeuvred ‘Gup’ out of the harbor. The weather was great this time around and as soon as we reached the Agulhas Current, Guppy was sailing at a fast 10 knots! Going with the current ‘Gup’ beat all of her previous speed records.The coast flew by. That is when a whale came out of the water ten metres in front of Guppy’s bow. I got scared when the huge animal that was much longer than Guppy suddenly blew half the ocean at us. I disengaged the automatic pilot and ran inside to grab my camera, but when I came back all I could see of the whale was a brownish mass disappearing in the deep under Guppy’s keel. Many hours later I was still worried that a wave might be a whale, but happily there were just ordinary waves left… This morning the wind faded but it came back a little later blowing from the south at 20 knots! Headwind and the current against it at five knots don’t make for ideal sailing conditions. The waves rapidly built up and Guppy started climbing and falling down the other side of the waves, on and on, up and down … and again. Even though I had carefully studied the weather forecasts back in Durban, none of my weather charts had shown any signs of a southerly wind… Together with the Agulhas Current, storms from the South West can create extremely high and dangerous waves that in the past have sent many good ships down to the ‘basement’. I hope to be in Port Elizabeth tomorrow. Till then I won’t have much chance to sleep since I have to keep an eye on the course, the ship traffic, the rocks and more. This will be my second night up in a row and I am beginning to long for more than ten minutes cat naps..

Laura