Amanda Leffler of Enosburg Falls, WA, asks:

Have you ever been in a storm and what have you done? My dad told me about your trip around the world. We want to take a trip too.

Jim Leishman responds:
We have been in lots of storms, but never really bad ones. The winds can blow up to 30 - maybe 40 knots and the sea gets real rough. The wind blows the tops of the waves off and sprays the boat. Once in a while the top of a wave breaks and splashes over the boat - it's hard to hang on and sometimes you get thrown out of your bunk onto the floor. In this kind of weather there's not much danger - the boat just continues on with the autopilot steering. We have to slow down the engine to reduce the boat's speed for increased comfort. It's hard to eat, hard to sleep - hard to do anything. You get real tired. After a while the wind begins to drop off and the water smoothes out as the storm passes (which they always do).

Right now (Monday - December 10) there's a really bad storm brewing near our boat. We are worried that this may be the beginning of a Typhoon (just like a Hurricane) and we don't want to get near it. Dave Harlow is the Captain now and he and I have been talking about this by phone and Email - all day. We've gotten weather information from the Internet and from our weather forecaster in New Jersey. We don't think the storm is going to be a problem but we are going to divert NORDHAVN to an atoll called Ailinglaplap. Here the boat can get in off the sea and anchor in protected water. We'll wait until tomorrow and see what this storm is going to do. We don't normally see these tropical storms develop this late in December but it can happen.

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