[password] STUART32
[position] 10 25.216N 142 38.554w

[date] 2018-12-06
[status] We had a memorable last 24hrs, not in a good sense. There are times when you need to be careful what you wish for, as we wanted some rain to wash the boat down. We also made the mistake of doing a load of washing at sea; you can always be sure of rain at sea when you are trying to dry your washing. Well once we got above 0830N we encountered a nasty squall that took 5 hours to exit, it had torrential rain and highly variable winds in every regard and terrible seas. When we exited we thought we had hit the 20NE trades early, but that only lasted an hour before we got hit by the next squall which was a an absolute thumper that joined up with the last squall to make a super squall. It has 0-30kt winds, even heavier and more persistent rain, thunder, lightening, horrible seas, it took around 8hrs to exit which was not until we got above 10N. The rain we experienced in that 24hrs was worse than what we saw in Shelter Bay Marina, Colon, Panama in November 2012; which was biblical having rained every day of the month with a dry day being a mere 2" of rain and a wet day a whopping 12" of rain. When we look back at the distance we traveled before we could exit the squall we estimate it to have been around 2-3 degrees in diameter (i.e. unavoidable). Suffice to say that we are somewhat sleep deprived and wet. That said, we had no leeks in the boat - woo hoo!

[weather] Winds are ENE20-25kts, Heading is 310T at 7kts, 95% cloud cover, 3m ENE confused short interval swell. Barometer reading is 1011.
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