Day 21 - Where did this other ITCZ come from?

Where do I start?

After the equator, we had 2 days of light winds and confused seas. The sails were slapping and would have ended up ripped sooner or later. At 1000AM we picked up a smudged, garbled, satellite photo by weatherfax and not really being able to locate our position on it, we made some assumptions that the weather that we could see to the south of us was the white smudge on the photo and we had to go through it to get to winds and our destination, so we started up the engines and headed directly south.
This weather is the Southern Pacific Convergence Zone or SPCZ. It's location comes and goes. More irregular than the Northern ITCZ. Well, it came.

That afternoon we dodged showers. There were anvil head thunderstorms around but we could see them. It became another avoid the storm day, like we just did 5 days ago in the ITCZ. When night came, there was no moon but there were times when it wasn't overcast that we could pick out the storms by where the stars weren't but mostly we used the radar for avoidance.

At 330AM, I came in for a break but was soon back at the helm. I got 35 minutes sleep at 6AM. We were at 4S and the sky was blue. We're out of it. NOT. By 10AM huge cells were dumping tremendous amounts of water, we were under an overhang, powered up trying to outrun the gust front. By late afternoon, the storms seemed different. There was not the wind force in them that we had earlier. It was becoming just rain, like spring showers, not summer thunderstorms. I knew we just couldn't keep motoring to the south and expect things to change. It really wasn't that bad at this point. So we put up the sails and let the showers overrun us. By now, I think we almost have all the Mexico dirt washed off the boat. The seas got too confused and the wind too light to sail so we have been motoring once again.

It is 9AM, we have been motoring for 15 hours, the seas are becoming more organized. I am hoping the heat breaks up the showers like yesterday and we can dry out.

Cheers, Dave & Booker



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