All Posts

I am sitting in the cockpit in the pitch dark, with just pinpoints of light from the other boats in the anchorage and from the shore. Shepherd Moon is gently rocking from side to side and, in the distance, there is the faint sound of surf breaking on the reef. It’s all very soporific, or at least it was until the peace and tranquillity was shattered by the wild whooping of monkeys.

For those of you following the YB tracker, you can see that we’re on the move again. Our all too brief visit to Colombia surpassed even our high expectations. The country is vibrant, the people are lovely and it’s ridiculously cheap. Most of our time was spent doing minor repairs and re-stocking the food cupboards, but we did manage to take a trip up the mountain to visit a coffee plantation.

We’ve sailed to Colombia, near neighbour of deepest, darkest Peru. That sounds a lot more exciting than we’ve sailed to Saint Lucia. The past 24 hours have been a rollercoaster ride. The seas pile up in this corner of the Caribbean Sea and so we’ve been surfing down big, steep waves, which is great for our speed if not our nerves. Unfortunately, Eddy, a close friend of Equatorial Current, did take offence at our faux pas over the name and has been doing his best to push us back the way we came.

Thankfully the Equatorial current is very forgiving and hasn’t gone off in a sulk just because we called it by the wrong name in yesterday’s blog. It has continued to whisk us along westwards at a couple of knots, helping us achieve a noon-to-noon run of 179 nautical miles. The sea has lost the glorious electric blue of the mid-Atlantic and is now more grey-blue, with splashes of white where the waves over steepen and tumble in on themselves.

We have made excellent progress over the past 24 hours. Between noon yesterday and noon today we have covered 170 miles, compared to the miserly 110 miles per day we averaged across the Atlantic. Picture a finely tuned crew, constantly tweaking sheets and grinding winches, eking out an extra tenth of a knot here and there - that wouldn’t be Shepherd Moon. Picture instead the skipper lounging in the cockpit in just his pants.