Location: English Harbor, Antigua
We woke up on the day of our second-night passage, moored in Nevis. We had a delicious pancake breakfast and began a cleanup of our boat to prepare for the night ahead. At around 11 am, we began departure by slipping our mooring lines and raising the mainsail. We took Dramamine to ensure that our shorter night passage would be free of seasickness symptoms. After setting sail, we had a lunch of Top Ramen that was gentle on our stomachs, and we began the watches. The first group was Nick and Aidan, followed by Mark and myself, then Ari and Ian. We breezed past the first three, where we then ate a dinner of red sauce and tortellini before it became dark, and we started clipping into our safety harnesses. When It came to Mark, and I’s watch, we stood in the power tower for the first two hours, aside from when we conducted hourly boat checks and plotted our positions on the chart. At around 00:20, we had to tack the boat to sail on a starboard tack, as the wind was quite strong that night, the tack had caused our starboard Jib-sheet to vigorously tangle into our Port sheet, so Margaux had to climb carefully onto the hard-top to untangle. All of a sudden, after that was fixed, we heard a loud snapping noise, this noise Margaux assessed to be a line that held the last triangular section of the mainsail along the boom. The line is referred to as the outhaul. For safety purposes, we dropped sails and motored the rest of the way to Antigua, which was luckily only 7nm away. This was definitely an eventful end to our watch, but I feel as if it was a good test of our problem-solving skills. Once arriving in Antigua at 2 am at the same time as Meow or Never, we set anchor and had a very restful sleep.