The wind came up so unexpectedly and so rapidly, and was unforecast, so we weren't sure it was going to hold. At 4pm it was flat dead calm, at 4:15 we had 7-8 knots, and at 4:30 we had 10-15 (and later, almost 20 knots). The forecast said we should expect almost nothing.
We sweated keeping our speed up all night, as we had to arrive at the 'Waiting Room' waypoint by 1 hour before high tide. We figured if we could average 5.5 knots, we could make it. So we kept more sail up than we would normally under the conditions. At one point we were doing 6-7 knots (and cheering) in about 20 knots of wind. I had to switch plans for dinner as I hadn't planned on such a boisterous sail--we ended up with 'augmented leftovers'.
Later in the wee hours of the morning, the wind eased some, and we eventually had to turn on the engine to keep our speed up.
Just when we thought we were going to make the required arrival time with no problem, we got a call on the radio. "Vessel 6 miles off my beam, this is the survey vessel... Scan (something)". We had seen the ship on AIS all night long (we picked it up from 25 miles away and it was only moving at 4 knots). The AIS said we'd pass clear astern by several miles, so we hadn't worried about it.
What we didn't know was that he was towing a 6 mile cable that we had to clear also. So we had to turn away from our waypoint and head south for about a half an hour, to get around his towed subseafloor survey device. Then, it was clear he was approaching shore and would have to turn... so then we (I, mainly) worried whether he'd cut us off again. When we told him we were headed for Bahia de Caraquez, he said "Where?" (it is not labeled on the chart). But he was moving so slowly, we managed to get inshore of him before he passed by again.
The one good thing about the survey vessel was that we were pretty sure we wouldn't run into any fishing nets during the night. The survey vessel had two 'outrider' boats that were running interference for him, to move boats that didn't have radios. And we could see them heading off fishing boats.
Nets in the night was another thing I was worrying about! One boat had said they got tangled up in nets 3 times in one night. It would have been a bad night to have to go over the side with a knife in your teeth to clear a net off your prop!
After all my worrying, we arrived at the 'Waiting Room' about an hour before the required time. So we ended up just motorsailing in a racetrack pattern to kill time. Dave didn't want to bother anchoring.
We were amazed at the number of fishermen in open boats in the bay ahead of us. There were nets and fishing boats all over. So we hung out just beyond the nets.
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