It is just me and Marcella onboard and we tried to pick a good weather for our first cruise. However as soon as we leave Cape Town there are 2-3 mt of swell from about 60-80 degrees port side with 15 kn apparent wind from about 100.
The sea is quite messy, a good test for us, we wanted a big cat to be more comfortable in big sea, but I would liked a calmer day to start with.
Eidos does not roll as a monohull however it moves in a very odd way. Marcella copes very well with it while at first I really do not like it. Timetama would roll a lot in this sea but I was used to it. Eidos has very fast and short accelerations that my body cannot anticipate with a resulting uncomfortable feeling of losing balance and seasickness.
Coming from a monohull it is unbelievable that even with relatively big swells from the side nothing moves around and we can keep our coffee cups on the table without any problem, it makes life so much easier.
Taking out our 120 sqm heavy mainsail is easier than we expected but it would be even better with the control of the electric winch at the helm so one of us could help the halyard or the sail from the mast. Added to to my list.
When we take the sail down with today’s swell it is not easy to help the main to fold nicely in the lazy jack. As it is already quite old we are considering to replace it with a higher lazy bag. We really need to make the management of the mainsail easy to use, in our previous trip we saw many boats with big mainsails motoring for short passages just to avoid to all the work needed to take the sail up and down.
We have a lot of new electronic instruments that we do not master yet so we take the opportunity to understand better how they work, especially the AIS, the radar and the plotters . These new instruments by default present more information than needed, most of the work is to hide what not needed and make them easier to read.
After about 35 miles around 15:30 we reach an amazing anchorage at Dassen Island – House Bay.
As always we immediately forget the uncomfortable passage and it is great to be at the hook again. We are the only yacht there, and it reminds us other places we were anchored alone. Dassen Island is very flat and we can see waves breaking on the opposite side of the island.
It is not allowed to go ashore so we enjoy a sunny afternoon on the boat that also made easier test our solar panels and the new MPPT regulators. I discover that our panels on the right do not work as well as the panels on the left – to investigate if the problem is with the panels, the MPPT or the cabling.
Soon comes the night, the sky is completely clear with no artificial lights, the perfect conditions to admire the moon eclipse of the century.
Before the eclipse 
Start of the Eclipse from Eidos at Anchor, 200mm at f2.8 – ASA12800
And finally it is easy to have a great sleep after our intense day.