On Thursday the wind and waves started to pick up, as we expected they would. For the next day a low pressure system would move over just to the north of us. Most of yesterday the wind and waves slowly picked up until the late afternoon when it build up very fast and got up to 35 knots of wind. We sailed through the night with the third reef in the main and the inner staysail up. At the most we had 42 knots of wind which isn’t to bad especially considering it was from behind. Some waves landed in the cockpit, I spent my watch with Ollie and Ronja – who were really enjoying the rougher weather – in the pouring rain and lightning. I tried to explain to them the difference in lightning and that what we were seeing now was mostly sheet lightning, because of the rain and our layers of clothing they thought I’d said sheep lightning ( the one that makes a bhee sound when the thunder comes 🙂 – it caused some laughter =D The system moved over us very fast, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a rather big low flying over like that. By morning the lightning was already way in front us and the rain and wind has ceased considerably. We are now sailing under a blue sky and nice sun again, two reefs and a boomed out triple reefed Genua. 15-20 knots of wind from behind. Today we will pass our Halfway mark, at the moment of writing only 10nm left. We were worried we wouldn’t be able to bake a halfway cake but as the weather has improved a lot I have good hopes. So, from now on we will be sailing closer to land again instead of ever further away into open ocean 😉 

Laura