fetchinketch

One thing about sailing far offshore, you never know what you are going to see. Most of the time, you DO know. Water. Sky. More of the same. But every once in a while, the ocean surprises.

This morning I was setting the fishing lines off the back of the boat while Karen was on watch. As the lures dropped back, in the clear water, I saw a large white shadow. “Hmmm,” I think, “How did Karen almost run over that big sheet of floating plastic and not see it?” Then I glance away, and then the shadow is gone. I see a large swirl in the water, and I am trying to process what I am seeing. Suddenly, it all resolves, when the white shadows reappear they are the flippers of a large humpback whale who is shadowing us about 100 feet astern. A few breaths, and he disappears, apparently deciding we weren’t all that interesting.

In weather news, the distant high pressure system that has been driving the trade winds we have been riding for most of the past week has been slowly approaching. It has now arrived at our location, and that means a clear sunny sky—and no wind. With a wind speed of 4 knots and a boat speed dropping below 2 knots, I finally surrender and start to burn some more dinosaur juice. If the models are correct, we’ll have about 24 so hours of motor time before our arrival in Antigua.

Last night was the most challenging time of the trip so far. Keeping the boat moving in winds that were very shifty and gusty. Over 10 minutes the wind would go from 8 knots to 25, and then back, and would shift even faster 30 degrees or more. It was slow and difficult sailing.

But today, that is all forgotten. The weather is glorious, sunny, perfect temperature, the boat is working well, and the wind is giving us a chance to scratch a few miles east. It has been hours since we have had to touch a thing on the boat, and she is sailing like on rails. If you have to beat your way to weather in the trade winds, it’s hard to pick a better platform than an Amel Super Maramu. Comfortable, dry and seakindly, she is taking good care of us.

As we near the islands, detailed decisions about course depend a lot on exactly what the weather will do, and as that gets more difficult as we start to narrow down the area we are looking at. The models agree in broad strokes, but the fine local details are quite different. All we can do is play the averages. Make our way as far east as we can, while we can. If it turns out that we need to tack our way upwind for a bit, so be it.

In normal times, we might plan on pulling into Puerto Rico for a fuel top off. We did burn a lot getting through the windless patches at the start of this trip. Now, however, that would be very problematic since it would reset our “quarantine clock” with the Antiguan health authorities, and need an additional COVID test before we could leave port in PR… all in all a huge hassle. Better to struggle with some light and contrary winds if need be.

585 miles out from Charleston, 795 miles from St John’s Harbour in Antigua. Tomorrow will see us cross the halfway point. Based on this morning’s forecast, it looks like our arrival day might slip to at least the 7th.

The plan to make further east early has paid off, as the wind for last night and most of today dropped down to almost straight out of the east, putting us hard on the wind to keep going in the direction we need to go. It is complicated by the North Equatorial Current running about 1 knot to the west, a bit stronger than average.

It was a bit of a struggle, dealing with a different boat, different sails, and a different autopilot, getting the performance we needed to make progress on an upwind heading, but with enough tweaking, we got her almost all the way there.

The wind has laid down a bit, now true wind speeds are running from 12 to 15 instead of 18 to 25 which makes for a more gentle ride, albeit one that is a fair bit slower. The forecast has the lighter winds continuing, and shifting back a bit more toward the north.

Happy New Year!

And Happy 21st Birthday to Megan.

Since they started yesterday, the trade winds have been living up to their reputation for being steady, reliable sailboat pushers. Fifteen to twenty-five knots all the time. Those steady winds build big waves, and we are driving fast into them at a steady 6.5 to 7 knots. Lots of bouncing, and lots of spray. It looks like we will have another 4 or 5 days of exactly the same ahead of us.

Right now we are about 500 miles due east of Daytona, FL making our way east-south-east on a close reach. In flat water with these winds we could go quite a bit faster, but we are reefed down to make the ride comfortable for the boat—and for us!

The boat is running well, no major issues. Sometime on the 6th of January still looks like a likely landing date in Antigua.

After most of three days motoring along under an atmospheric high pressure ridge, finally the ridge has broken down, and the wind has picked up. We are now moving faster, and quieter than before, and not using fuel sailing with all plain sail up, on a beam reach in 14 knots of wind. Just about perfect. The current conditions are supposed to be stable for the next several days. Model forecasts have us arriving sometime on January 6.

The excitement of the day, besides a beautiful sunrise, was a pod of eight whales.

We are now sailing through the Sargasso Sea, that large gyre in the middle of the currents of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is not exactly paved with seaweed, but there is enough that it discourages us from putting fishing lines out. We did miss a small tuna that struck the hand line yesterday. Hopefully we’ll get another chance for fresh sushi!

Within 12 hours of leaving the coast we were in warm weather. Still no wind, but warmer! Over night we did have a couple spots of wind, and even some real sailing. Right now we are in between the southwesterly flow along the coast, and the Northeast Trade Winds. We expect to pick up the trades this evening, and have a fast, fuel free ride most of the rest of the way.

A bit over 150 miles from the coast as we were motoring along on a calm and glassy sea, we come up on a chunk of floating debris. No idea what it actually was, but a square about 4 feet on a side in water about 3000 feet deep. Like any such feature out here in the open ocean, such a thing rapidly becomes a fish attractor. For at least 100 yards around it there were swirling jacks and trigger fish, and a few mahi-mahi, yellow tail snapper, rainbow runners, a shark or two, amberjacks, and deeper down, wahoo.

We do have a minimal fishing kit onboard, so we stopped and tried our luck. We quickly hooked a small jack, and then another. The jacks are fun to catch, but not our idea of a great meal, and even though I could see the mahi-mahi following the lure, I couldn’t figure out how to get them to bite before the aggressive jacks latched on.

Sending the lure down a lot deeper, 100 feet or so, resulted in an instant hookup, and an almost equally fast cut off. A sharp toothed critter, almost surely a wahoo, sliced through the line. Another try resulted in a hook-up with a very small wahoo, about 5 lbs or so. I managed to get him boats side before even he managed to bite through the line attaching the hook to the lure, and that attainment is 300 lb test Kevlar cord!

On a beautiful day like this, would could have spent all day there if our time was our own, but with the limited fishing gear we have, and being on someone else’s clock, we fired up the diesel and set off again.

We left Charleston City Marina with the morning tide. Next stop: St. John’s Harbour, Antigua.

Under a sparkling clear, cloudless sky, we have been motoring without the benefit of wind for all afternoon, and expects the same overnight. The ocean is a flat as we ever see it, and the engine is driving us at an economical 6 knots.

For the rest of our trip our weather is forecast to be driven by a very large, and slow moving, high pressure system that will be passing west to east over Bermuda. As it tracks, we will see strong and steady trade winds pick up from the NE or ENE. Right now we are aiming a bit north of our rhumb line course so we can finish the last leg to Antigua without having to work too hard to windward.

We are beginning to cross the Gulf Stream, and the water temperature is already 25F warmer than it was in Charleston Harbor this morning. For now, we have the full cockpit enclosure up. Hopefully, by tomorrow evening, it will be warm enough we can stow the extra canvas and better enjoy the world around us!

Today we got buried in details with things taking longer than expected in the morning, and lost enough time that we ended up missing tide, and daylight for our departure.

We did manage to finish everything we need to get done, (eventually!) and are now ready for dropping lines first thing tomorrow morning and getting our delivery on its way to warm and sunny Antigua. We are really looking forward to sailing south. While it will be cold sailing at first, within a few days, we’ll be back into warm weather.

How cold is it here?

Now I know many of our readers are giving us very little sympathy right now… but hey, we are tropical birds! Used to migrating!

Merry Christmas everybody! For those of you who live where it is cold, stay warm! For those of you who live where it is warm, enjoy! And everybody stay safe.

We are finalizing the last details of what we need to take with us on our delivery trip that starts tomorrow. It is actually a different kind of packing than either of us have done in a long time. The boat we are moving came with almost nothing. One set of linens for the large bed, and some serving ware in the galley. Certainly no food or other perishables, although it does have a good stock of spare parts.

The boat’s new owner did a great job thinking ahead, and remotely ordered things like tools, cookware, and other things much more easily and cheaply obtained in the US. This made a huge difference in the amount of things (like tools!) that we needed to haul along.

But for everything else, we have to take it along, and unless we eat it or drink it, we then need to bring it back home. Normally when we travel, we are onboard our boat, Harmonie. So packing really isn’t an issue, we have everything we own onboard. There is no opportunity for forgetting anything. Any time we travel by airplane to a land based destination, forgetting something isn’t a big deal. Leave your toothbrush at home? Buy another.

This is quite different. From the moment we untie the dock lines, until we are released from quarantine in Antigua will likely be at least 14 days. During that time whatever we forgot, didn’t think of or break in route, we just have to live without. It is not that we will need a LOT of stuff, but what we need we can’t just hop off to the corner store and get–at any price. Especially difficult are the things you do not EXPECT to need, but might…

We will have to take an unusual (for us!) assortment of clothing. Tomorrow morning here in Charleston it is forecast to be 26F. That’s about as cold as we have experienced in years. Within 2 days we’ll be sailing in water of 75F, and hopefully be back to our comfort zone. We do have a watermaker and laundry machine on board, so we don’t need to take a LOT of clothes, but will need a variety!

Then there is photo gear, a small selection of fishing tackle, our satphone, prescription meds, in addition to the normal toiletries and grooming supplies. All this… and all the stuff we need to do to leave our boat at the dock for a month!

We have spent the last couple of days getting everything we need in shape for our delivery. Just to recap, we have a sister ship to our boat here in Charleston that we have been hired to deliver to her new owner Antigua in the eastern Caribbean. The boat is in good shape, and pretty much ready to go.

The trip itself will be about 1400 miles and 9 to 11 days of sailing. The health authorities in Antigua can potentially require a 14 day quarantine before releasing us from the boat. Quite reasonably, they do count the time you spend at sea toward the quarantine period. If we add a bit of buffer that means we are provisioning for 3 weeks. Everthing has now been bought, and stowed on the boat. We are waiting for a rather nasty cold front to pass by, and we will be off on the 26th. The morning we leave the temperature is expected to be in the high 20’s Fahrenheit here. Seems a good time to head for the tropics!

Based on what we have seen, Antigua and Barbuda (that’s the official country name) has had some of the most reasonable COVID regulations around. Rational, careful, and not responding to the international “whim of the day.” They have had excellent success in keeping local spread in the population to a bare minimum, and still allowing commerce. Hopefully that attitude will still be present when we arrive!

One of the requirements for arrival by yacht into Antigua is that you present results from a rt-PCR Covid test taken within 7 days of departure from your last port. We found a local drive-in testing site offering same day results, and went and had our noses swabbed this morning.

Sure enough, we got the results by 2PM. Negative, so all is good. OH NO! Wait… the test report says they ran the less sensitive antigen test NOT the PCR test that Antigua health authorities require. It’s afternoon on Christmas Eve, and we need the results in two days so we can leave, and they close within the hour! We ran back to the test site. They were completely helpful, and re-ran the test we actually needed without extra cost, even let us jump the line of cars waiting, and again had the results by the end of the day. NOW we really are ready to go!

We expect to arrive in Antigua on or about January 5, endure whatever quarantine the locals request, and then spend several days introducing the new owner to his boat before flying back to Charleston and rejoining Harmonie for our own adventures.