Race 11 - Day 22
Crew Diary - Not just an everyday 24 hours
21 May

Day watch began with a spectacular red sunrise as we continued sailing in gentle breeze over calm seas within 15 miles off the coast of southwest Mexico, making gradual progress toward the third Finish Gate on our way to Panama. Although we have been treated to many dolphin “shows'' on this Race 11, today we witnessed a thrilling hunt/feeding bonanza (x 2!) where a pod of a few hundred dolphins including juveniles were catapulting their entire bodies out of the water and performing aerial acrobatics to land with explosive splashes to herd and stun their fish prey over several miles. Sometimes 4 -6 dolphins leaped together in synchrony producing a Vegas fountain effect and other times individual dolphins would leap out sequentially producing great bursts of water like a fireworks display, each dolphin seemingly trying to outperform one another with the highest and splashiest leaps. We all felt really lucky to have witnessed this behaviour in the wild!

Into the evening our progress continued as it has been over the last week, gybing inshore and then offshore to utilise the predictable sea and land breezes generated by the warming effect of the sun in a diurnal variation of barometric pressure. It’s somewhat cooler at night than the oppressive heat of the day. Breeze 6-8 kts. But after midnight the moonrise illuminated dark patches in the sky, some of which were confirmed on radar to be squalls. Yippee! We waited for the clouds to bring more wind and hopefully rain to cool things off and wash our deck. Hours passed with lightning in the distance but too far away to hear thunder. Then suddenly the lightning was dangerously close, blinding us in the cockpit and deafening our ears with thunder. Breeze on – up to 26 kts! Pouring rain. It actually felt cold! By sunrise all was calm again. We were many nautical miles closer to gate three, cooler and cleaner, and thankfully no damaged electronics. A very exciting night watch indeed!