From Barbara’s diary on the third day:
Everyone feels unaccountably under the weather. No active seasickness, but depressed and broody. Hard to carry out resolutions for making good use of my time at sea when each trip seems to involve this period of adjustment after life ashore. By the time the incipient mal de mer and the regrets of leave-taking have subsided, the pattern of lazy, do-nothing days has already taken hold.
Part of the mood was caused, I am sure, because the expected trades never settled down, the seas remained high, and the weather was vaguely threatening. There was a sense of uneasy anticipation which could not be pinned down by any instrument. This is not aftersight, as I noted in my log that on the fourth night I felt so strangely ill at ease that I was awake most of the night and during my early-morning watch Barbara, who also was wakeful, came up to keep me company as she frequently did at sea.
Barbara’s own diary continues to reflect the unusual atmosphere:
A miserable, rolling, wallowing night with alternate rains and high seas, followed by dropping winds. Rolled violently in my bunk from side to side and dozed fitfully. The swift dropping sensation as the boat rolls down, down, goes against one’s most basic instinct, the fear of falling. A queer shuddering seems to have entered the picture, giving rise to night fancies involving a loosened rudder or working keel bolts! What terrors can suggest themselves and become rapidly convincing in the dark!
The day before we were due to sight the islands, Ted and I spent a number of hours checking the charts and making our plans. The Cocos are low islands, with an altitude of only 10 feet plus the height of the palm trees. If the day continued overcast so that we could not get a good position, we might have quite a job finding them. If the weather was bad, we would have to decide whether to attempt an entrance, to lay off until the weather improved, or give the islands a miss altogether, which would mean continuing on to Rodrigues, 2,000 miles to the west.
That night the barometer began a slow, ominous fall. The next morning the seas were high and the wind at gale force. It was time to heave to. With the wind out of the southeast, we lay under mizzen alone, facing south, with a westerly drift of about two knots. The barometer was by now at about 1000. We were riding well, and I hoped that the worst would soon be over and we could continue on our way to the shelter of the lagoon at Keeling-Cocos.
But the worst had just begun. By the afternoon, the barometer fell sharply to 991, and for the first time in our trip we were in conditions that I could honestly call “storm.” The peak hit at 1400 with solid rain, blown horizontal by the wind. I couldn’t see the mainmast from the cockpit and the seas were enormous. The wind, especially at the height of the gusts, had a strength and fury I had never known before, on land or sea.
Faced with this, we at once changed our strategy. The last thing we now wanted was to be anywhere near the reefs of Cocos, especially with night coming on. What we needed was plenty of sea room. The wind by now was out of the northeast and shifting to north. The current in this area, according to the charts, was about 18 miles a day, generally northwest, but there was no telling what the storm had done to the pattern. Our estimated position, about 25 miles east of the islands, was too close for comfort and, if we remained hove to, it was not at all impossible that we might drift down onto the reefs.
In spite of the weather, I decided we must try to make some easting. We set up the storm jib and mizzen and headed east, managing to make good southeast at about four knots even under this scrap of canvas. It was a very bad night and my log book at this point is almost illegible, for the following reason: