V18/11 - Day 6

2011-10-23

This post is part of the series Young Endeavour.

We had a pretty chilled morning sailing on the sea, with a descent speed and good weather. After dinner this awesome looking cloud came.

Turns out awesome looking clouds like that mean there is a storm coming and we got smashed by some pretty intense weather and had to bring a lot of our sails down.

{{< vimeo 31721183 >}}

After that taking that video I got to climb to the topgallant yard to tie the gaskets (fold up the square sails), and while up there saw what was either a sun fish or manta ray come up next to the ship. It was huge but you wouldn't have been able to see it on deck. Climbing during the storm was not as scary as I originally thought it would be, and if fact was a lot of fun. Despite being the highest, the topgallant is actually a fairly small sail so Matt and I had no trouble doing the sea furl, but the guys working on the topsail really struggled and took ages to get it tied up.

Due to the poor weather we changed course and headed in towards Eden so that we could Anchor again, but we were still a fair way out at sea. We (white watch) had morning shift, so we went to bed pretty early and it was quite hard to get to sleep due to the massive rocking of the ship. During our watch we got pounded by waves and the wind had picked up to 40 knots. I got to take the helm for about an hour and it was quite an experience steering the ship during a storm and the intense weather. In the early morning we did a one-watch wear and while I was up at the bow of the ship heaving in the tacking lines it was an intense experience because the waves were breaking over the deck. I had to clip in and got absolutely and repeatedly drenched as the waves smashed over the ship.

That was probably one of the highlights of the trip for me, and despite the weather being rough as guts and making it almost impossible to sleep due to the rocking of the ships it was immense fun. I was especially impressed by Kristy who was our staff watch officer for the night, who remained cheery for our entire watch, even though she went off every now and then to spew over the side of the ship.