The eastern side of the stream

Tuesday saw us on the eastern side of the stream, deep reaching across the deep blue
Atlantic, six, seven's even long surfing periods at above eight knots, plumes of
white water flowing out from the bow. This favorable 20 knot breeze had whitecaps
rapidly forming, but over the afternoon the breeze continued to increase from 20,
through 25 then 30 and as night came we were in consistent 40 knot blow. Ultimately
we saw a brief 55 knts on the wind indicator, and Sylvain and I, on watch together,
both looked at each other with a 'did you see that?' look. With hundreds of miles
of fetch, and after twelve hours, we had huge, steep ocean breakers cracking the
side of the boat, and occasionally dumping into the cockpit. I guess they were
about 15', but when you're in the trough of a wave, and looking up through the icy
blue colour near the wave's top, they seem to tower above before the boat rises up
to meet them. We kept reducing sail, from the morning's second reefed main, to our
deep third reef, while also furling up a few roles of the jib every few hours. Once
the waves started to break, collapsing down on themselves in big flowing piles of
white water, I started to get a bit nervous. We hoisted our storm trysail, and
reefed the jib down to a slither the size of a folded hankerchief, and tried to
choose the least difficult course.

The effect of the trysail was amazing, the boat stayed upright, slowed to about five
knots, and we could steer a path around and through the wave crests, and still
largely head in the direction of Bermuda. Ultimately, inside these super dark
moonless nights weve been having, nothing but the howl of the wind and the roar of
breaking waves (their breaking tops causing a glow of phospherescence), we were
still able to hand over steering duties to the tireless Otto (Sylvain's nickname for
our autopilot, it's full name actually Otto P. Lot) and work through our three hours
on, three hours off until the western horizon slowly appeared.