Position: 24 degrees, 13 minutes south; 159 degrees, 45 minutes west

…and rain and wind!! We won the trifecta.

Yesterday around 5PM local NZ time, we saw some lightning off in the distance, downwind of us. It seemed to be clearing where we were so I didn’t think too much of it until half an hour later I noticed the whole sky was rapidly clouding over and the lightning was getting closer. Holy cow!! It turned into the biggest lightning storm we have ever seen. For five hours we were trying to avoid cells by tracking on the radar and adjusting course. We sailed upwind hoping to get “above” the line, but there wasn’t a line, it just appeared everywhere at once and enveloped us. After an hour or two there was no-where we could go that there weren’t lightning bolts. At one point we sailed between two bolts that struck the water on either side of us. It wasn’t pretty. And it rained. Poured, actually. So hard and noisy you couldn’t hear yourself think.

Then, after five hours of insanity, suddenly the wind died down. I went forward to tighten the preventer and as I got back to the cockpit it quickly started building and by time I got to the helm to adjust our course (the wind changed direction about 90 degrees I think, it was all confusion by this time) and in ten seconds was blowing 40++ knots (at one point during a relative “lull”, I measured 43 knots at the deck with a hand held). The gale driven raindrops were like a thousand BB gun shots on your face. Charisma went crazy as I struggled to find a groove where she’d settle down. Fortunately we only had the third reef in the main and a little storm jib. I steered downwind to lessen the load on the rig, and we went surfing away. If the sail had been any bigger, we would have blown it out for sure. I have no idea how fast we were going as I couldn’t take my attention off the red glow of the compass for even a moment without risking careening out of control. After maybe ten minutes I realized this was no ordinary squall and it wasn’t going to blow out, so waited for a slight lull and threw the helm over to round up and (hopefully) get Charisma to heave to. We turned and heeled until the water was up to the cabin, but she came up and settled. A little. Problem at this point, she doesn’t really heave to with any kind of jib up. I had to go up to the bow and take the storm jib down. Took me a few minutes to psych myself up for that one, but finally left the relative safety of the cockpit. Yipes. The wind was blowing so hard it literally felt like it was going to lift me out of the boat. I crawled. 37 feet. One hand hold at a time. Finally with Ann’s expert help managing the lines, I got the jib down and secure and we spent the next roughly four hours riding it and wondering where the heck this beast came from?

Wow, what a night. Don’t want to E V E R do that again. Charisma did really well. We’re both a little shaken and just riding hove to in the early morning with the wind now around 10 knots, catching up on some sleep and cleaning up in anticipation of getting going in another hour to two after the morning net at 0715 local. Then we’ll do a boat inspection to check on any damage and see about moving on.