Iliohale had been enjoying classic Tradewind sailing for the past 4 days, reeling off record distances... almost 190 miles per day. The evening of the 30th started innocently enough, but we noticed a slight uptick in winds, with gusts to 25. In prior nights, the wind had settled into a familiar pattern, filling the gennaker with 18-20 knots of true wind and 11-14 knots apparent, all pretty safe and controlled, if a little fast and loud.

Around 11pm, winds quickly increased to 27 knots sustained and the gennaker was in danger of being overpowered. Rina quickly woke Nic and I to help furl in the sail and get the boat back under control. We had discussed exactly this scenario when running the gennaker at night, making sure we could furl the sail from the safety of the cockpit. While not fun, but with fantastic teamwork and a fair amount of adrenaline, we furled the gennaker and unfurled the genoa, with a barber hauler line to the mid-ship cleat to keep the sail open with the washing machine-like wind waves. The smaller sail helped slow the boat down but changed the motion from a loud surfing up and down motion to a twitchy back and forth one. The incredible power of the gennaker had been keeping the boat motion very stable. Without the same power, the genoa allowed the boat to shimmy more, making for an overall less comfortable ride.

With a full cloud cover, we had no moon or stars to help guide us, so we went into full instrumentation mode, watching wind shifts very carefully on the chart plotter and adjusting the autopilot in 2 degree increments to keep the wind and waves where we wanted them. This made for some very tiring watches.

We woke up to cloudy skies and a warning for rain squalls and lightning 15 miles in front of us. A quick check of our weather resources confirmed that a 50 mile long by 25 mile wide disturbance was descending upon us.

As that dawned on us, we quickly pulled out our full canvas to provide protection in the event of rain. Unfortunately, we were 15 minutes too late as a wall of water descended upon us as we snapped our canvas in place. We were all drenched by the time we zipped the last panels.

We had on and off rain and fluky winds the rest of the day but continued flying the genoa at 5-6 knots of boat speed. Late in the afternoon the wind finally died, and we motor sailed overnight, waking to clear blue skies and 16 knots of wind. Up went the gennaker and we are now headed towards the equator, 330 miles away. We should arrive midday on Thursday where we plan to toast Poseidon with a particularly good bottle of champagne.