The wind and sea state continued to be challenging all Friday, with the wind speed increasing as the day wore on. Mid-afternoon we took a third reef again and rolled half the headsail away. It was early hours of Saturday morning before the wind started abating and the sea state slowly improved. Of course, it’s always feast or famine, so we were soon motoring, with our hopes of a Sunday arrival receding.
The weather continued awkward, with regular gusts to the mid 20’s on the beam. It was also quite variable, so there’s a lot of shaking out of reefs and then re-reefing, all in an effort to maintain a decent rate of progress, as we need to maintain 6.5 knots to get there in daylight tomorrow. The sea state has been lumpy and we regularly get slapped by a breaking wave on the beam or port quarter, and it is pretty rolly. Not our favourite passage so far.
The ships clock was set forward to UTC+13 as we crossed the International Date Line (at 169.5 degrees west here) in the early hours of the morning (so instead of Saturday it is now Sunday). We are currently ahead of pretty much everyone on the planet, and a day older, which we can ill afford!
I had not appreciated just how arbitrary the date line is. Apparently, according to my mate Chat-GPT, there is no international treaty that defines the line and each country in the area has just made up its own rules, often out of convenience. The line on the map is just an interpolation of the resulting jigsaw.
Fun fact!