Sorry about the lack and irregularity of the blog over the last few days. As you'll see, conditions weren't always conducive to jotting down a few jocular notes and then taking the frustrating half hour with the satellite phone that it often takes to send that day's blog off. Now that we're bouncing along in good breezes and blue seas, Horta just 757 miles away, we're back on the job.

I'm sitting at the chart desk looking at three different bits of information. One is the Atlantic Pilot Atlas, a compendium of all available wind, current, and tidal information for the North Atlantic, broken down by month. It tells us that the percentage chance of a gale in May in the part of the ocean we're currently occupying is nil.

The second is a download from the web of a weather forecast for our area for last weekend derived from data gathered by the US military and interpreted by a US weather service. It tells us that the strongest wind we could have expected to encounter would be around 22knts (F5/6).

The third is our log, updated (more or less) hourly. It tells us that for most of Saturday and Saturday night we were in a light gale (F7) and most of Sunday and into Sunday night in a full gale (F8). The entry for 1800 ship's time (2200 BST) Sunday reads "We have now been in a F9 for twenty minutes". It also goes on to say "Mrs Brown is stirring" but although the two events may well be connected we won't go into that. Just because we like to keep each other informed of our "status", often through the pages of the log, doesn't mean that you need be up to date on that particular area.

Now there's nothing intrinsically dangerous in being in a yacht like Severance in a F9. She's certified by Germanischer Lloyd, the German equivalent of Lloyds, as a category A offshore cruising boat, which means she's designed and built to cope with just about everything you'd expect to encounter anywhere on the world's oceans, except perhaps a full blown hurricane. The problem with a F9, with sustained winds of over 42kts, in Sunday's case regularly up to 48kts, is not what's actually happening but what you think is happening, based on what you're seeing. It's visceral.

We'd got used to being in a gale - it's surprising how quickly you get used to conditions. I'd even had a shower during it. Sarge, his strong surgeon's forearms covered in flour and wearing, inexplicably, a head torch, broke away from his latest batch of eccles cakes, cream horns, shortbread and Battenburg to pump the foot pedal for me. Sargie was helming and Aisling was mysteriously writing whatever it is she mysteriously writes for hours in her mysterious diary. Sudsing away it was only the sudden hideous crash and shudder of a wave exploding against the hull and window right beside my ear that reminded me we were sailing in a gale. Life goes on. Waves crashing on hatches above our heads are ignored as are the frequent crashes, shudders and slams that reverberate through the hollow hull of a boat in a big seaway. Tea is made, jokes are cracked, watches change, the log is written up with its laconic remarks. There was even horseplay involving a pair of my underpants and some vulgar abuse. I ignored it.

But the Force 9 was different, looked different, felt different. As Tom said later, "you can recognise the different wind forces just by looking at the sea". As the wind increased it flattened the smaller waves- by which I mean the mere twelve footers - creating long smooth valley floors writhing with steaming spume and spray and foam, slung between the massive ridges of relentless rolling 20' waves about one hundred metres apart. And the noise is an unceasing battering, of waves, wind, rigging and the thud of the hull into wave and trough. The sky is wild, feral, and to the horizon all you see is furious boiling white and relentless rolling gunmetal grey.

Now initially, yes of course this is scary to see and yes there were a few anxious looks and some quiet spells. Mrs Brown probably paced up and down more than one veranda. Why is it she always seeks attention at the most inopportune moments? You'd need to be a fully qualified circus acrobat and contortionist to conduct your motions with any sort of decorum. Sadly, evidently, Tom lacks the training.

But as I say, the fear is a visceral reaction. You have to ask yourself, what is the real, not imagined, problem here? Thousands of people have been in a force 9 before. Is the boat OK? Do we have the right amount of sail (almost none), are we approaching the waves well, is she riding them smoothly, does the boat look or feel at ease, free of strain or tension ?

Am I OK?

And the answer is yes. Because we had the minimum amount of sail up the power of the wind on them was negated and you could steer Severance literally with one finger. That's not an exaggeration - literally with one finger, through huge seas and 48 knot winds. She was responsive, felt relaxed, wasn't heeled beyond the usual. Taking it in her stride.

And when you realise all this and counter your intuition you start to enjoy it. If you're at the helm, life jacketed and securely strapped in, it's fabulous. You cut across the running sea at an angle of around thirty degrees, the huge wave lifting you smoothly to its peak. The bow tilts up and up and like a roller coaster slowly breasting the first peak you go over the crest and accelerate down the other side, the hull creaming and streaking down the back face of the wave, a surfer's wake hissing behind, the boat shuddering and shimmying beneath your hand on the wheel, down to the broiling valley floor to start again the smooth elevation on the foothills of the next massive wave. It's a hell of a treat, helming in a surfing twelve and a half ton boat.

And if you're relaxed enough there are some unrepeatable experiences in being in a storm at sea. (It's a shame the word "awesome has been kidnapped by cretins - back in St Lucia I heard an American describe the doughnut he was eating as awesome.)

For Aisling it was in the early hours of Sunday morning, a 180 degree panorama of cloud around the horizon brilliantly lit from inside by lightning. For Sarge it was the 45kt wind flattening the previously invincible gale force waves. For Tom it was an entirely white wave that suddenly reared up beside him in the cockpit. And a comedy cup of tea where the instant he raised it to his mouth the strength of the wind blew all the tea out of the mug and into his face and off to the four corners of the earth.

For me there were three.

It was the prelude to the storm, at around dawn on Saturday and The Two Sargies called me from sleep up to the cockpit. I'd gone to bed in star and moonlight on a flat windless sea. What I was now blinking at was ominous, sinister, initially unsettling. We were sailing on flattish water in a good wind, the sort of wind that should have been creating bigger waves. But what disturbed me was the lowering sky of thick, smoking cloud. And placed evenly around us, a few miles off, were four wide columns of this malevolent cloud, enormous, reaching from the sea to the overall gloom above. It was like being in a large meadow on a thunderous day, surrounded by wooded copses of dark, threatening impenetrable trees. Slowly the breeze started to come around our bows. Sarge at the wheel headed us off the wind but it kept coming. Within 60 seconds we'd turned quietly, without fuss, through 180 degrees as the wind silently, unnervingly, reversed direction. You just knew something was coming.

The second was a torrent of rain flattening the large waves but leaving little hollows on the surface. The rain was so intense that it appeared to form puddles of fresh water on the sea water before sinking into it. Puddles of water - on water?

And the third was the sight of Sarge at the height of the gale, inexplicably wearing a head torch, holding out a sandwich of bacon and ketchup on toasted fresh baked bread.

No sandwich has ever, could ever or will ever taste better.

Andrew """