Saturday 24th January
- dawnysmiff
- Jan 24
- 2 min read
(Covering the last 24 hours)
Hopefully this is the penultimate blog of this leg. By tomorrow evening, if all goes to plan, we should be sipping rum punches on the dockside in Antigua 🍹.
The first 12 hours of the last 24 were almost perfect — aside from the now very familiar rain showers that seem to have haunted this crossing. We had lovely surfing waves, fast conditions, and were genuinely enjoying ourselves, the only real debate being whether or not to slow down to guarantee a daytime arrival. On our pace at that point, we were looking at a 3–5am arrival on Sunday morning.
In the end, the decision was made for us.
Around 7pm, the wind completely dropped and then veered round to an unexpected angle — something that hadn’t shown up on the forecast. I could see a weather system passing to our port side and assumed that was influencing the wind, so I wasn’t overly concerned. I expected it to return to forecast conditions once the system moved away.
Unfortunately… it didn’t.
The wind stayed light throughout the night. It did gradually back to a more helpful direction, but the residual swell from the passing system continued to hit us hard on the beam, making for a pretty uncomfortable and frustrating night. By 10am this morning, things had finally started to align again and pick up — though still nothing like the glorious conditions we had yesterday morning.
It seems the ocean isn’t quite finished with us yet.
✨ Night-Time Wonders
During the night, Paul witnessed an incredible light show. He’s fairly sure it was a meteor, tearing through the sky and changing colour from blue to green to red as it went. Nothing either of us has ever seen before.
Meteor?
UFO?
We’ll never know… but it was spectacular.
🐦 Signs of Land
We can tell we’re getting closer to land because the bird life is changing. One species in particular looks like something straight out of the prehistoric era — wings spread wide like a pterodactyl. We watched in awe as it effortlessly swooped around the sky, then to our amazement, it spotted a flying fish and caught it mid-flight.
It must have been very hungry — because it then went on to catch fish after fish. I’ll find out what this bird is called, but whatever it is, it’s an incredible hunter.
I think I’ll mark the occasion with pulled pork for my penultimate breakfast on the Atlantic Ocean.
Not long now.
Dawn
“Together Paul and I are rowing home — the long way round.”
Hometown Row
Leg 1 – La Gomera to Antigua
Leg 2 – Antigua to Florida
Leg 3 – Canada to the UK
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