It has been about 24 hours since anchor up in St George, Bermuda. We are making good progress in light winds, certainly a much more pleasant experience than we had last week!
One of the things I forgot about this trip, it is essentially crossing the Sargasso Sea. So floating weed is very common. Not an issue for the boat, but it is for fishing. Any lures trolled behind the boat quickly become fouled. Without a mate dedicated full time to keeping the lines clear, it is an extremely frustrating experience. So, for now, we’ll defer. But, we have a plan…
The weather forecast for the trip is quite benign, and we hope it stays that way.
So why exactly did we end up in Bermuda? It is certainly a nice place, but wasn’t on our sailing plan.
The Gulden Leeuw, a top-sail schooner gets under way.You don’t see post boxes ike this every day.
The sum of the story is that the weather forecasts were off just far enough to force us to change our plans. For days the forecast kept saying that the wind was going to clock from the southeast, to the south and then the west. But that just never happened. Combined with winds stronger than expected, we just could not get either south or east. And we were getting beat up. Bermuda was two days out of our way, and it was an easy decision to head in there and take a few days to put things on the boat back to proper shape.
Ah, Sailing! So quiet and peaceful!
Why were the forecasts off? Well, a couple reasons. First, they were not THAT far off, but enough that it had a large impact. So Lesson #1 is if small changes between the forecast and reality can make a big difference, be sure to be aware of that, and have alternate plans. Also, the weather systems were extremely complex. There were multiple low pressure systems that were predicted to combine into one large storm in the Eastern Atlantic. That’s what happened, so the grand picture was right, but the details were less precise than usual.
By the time we got to the island with the lovely pastel colored buildings, we had a number of things on the boat that needed attention.
Some stripped threads meant our rudder packing was leaking. Not anything near enough to sink the boat, but it was sure making a mess even with regular mopping up. A bit of fiberglass work to build up new threads and we should be off and leak free for the foreseeable future.
We had our wind instrument break and fall off the top of the mast, probably at one of the pounding impacts the boat took when it fell off a wave. When 18 tons of boat fall several feet down onto the water, the g-forces are large, and at the top of the mast they must be enormous. Even so, this kind of force should be expected and designed for. We have contacted the maker and gave them the details. We’ll see what they can do. Fortunately, we had a spare in stock, so a trip up the mast put us back in business.
As the worst of the weather past us, Karen was looking to the back of the boat, and said, “I’m sure you have already noticed, but…”
Actually, I had not looked that way, so it was news to me that one of our solar planelss had gone walkabout. I guess having 40+ knots of wind hit it from the bottom when we were heeled over was more than the frame of the panel could take. That repair will have to wait a bit. At least the frame I built is still there, it was the panel itself that failed.
We have a good weather window tomorrow to get back underway, hopefully we can get the boat picked up and put back in shape in time. to catch that. Next stop, Martinique!
The forecast had the wind clocking to the South, and then Southwest. Didn’t happen. Left us close hauled in winds of 20 to 25 knots, and building. Boat and us getting beat up pretty hard.
So a consensus decision was reached, and we peeled off and are now head for Bermuda, which is now about 175 miles to the northeast.
Once the weather settles and we recover a bit we’ll be off again. Probably 2 or three days.
The route we are on is frequently called “Route-65” because you head east from the cost of the US and then when you get to 65W longitude, you turn south. On average, that puts you on a comfortable track. There are a couple of caveats to that.
It only Route-65 only works if you are far enough north to avoid the tradewinds in the first part of your voyage. If you try leaving from Florida, or the Bahamas there is no on ramp to Route-65. The other catch is that it assumes that weather will be “average”. One thing pretty much everybody knows is that weather is not often exactly average.
With modern weather forecasting tools we can pretty easily get details about what to expect for the next few days. Our forecasts are telling us that Tuesday morning we can expect a strong front to overtake us, which will pull the wind around to the Northwest as it goes by. At that point we will only be at Longitude 68W or so, about 180 miles east of the expected turn. But it makes little sense to blindly follow the “rule” when we will have a straight downwind shot toward our destination for several hundred miles.
The good news is that we will have winds from a favorable direction. The bad news is we will probably have two days of more wind and bigger waves than we might like, making for a “sporty” sail, albeit almost straight downwind.
It hasn’t been fast sailing, but mostly quite steady. In 32 hours we have covered 212 miles. Only about 1350 miles and 12 days to go!
The weather was pretty much as predicted, except for before dawn this morning when I had to dodge through a cluster of thunderstorms. Most of today was motoring in light, contrary winds, late afternoon brought winds from a good direction, but still light. Right now we are sailing at 4.5 knots in 6.5 knots of wind. It’s calm and quiet, with a full moon.
Our original sail plan continues. We will be making our way east first, and then head south once we hit the tradewinds, that should be in six or seven days. We are currently in a steady southerly flow. In three or four days a front is due to catch up to us, which will strengthen the winds, and switch them to the northwest.
It’s been pretty uneventful. If conditions hold like this, we’ll probably start serious trolling for fish tomorrow.
We are in the final few minutes of policing the boat to make sure she is ready for our next adventure, and will be dropping lines within a few hours. We will be leaving from Brunswick, GA and making one long jump to Martinique in the eastern Caribbean. That is a straight line trip of about 1500 nautical miles as the seagull flies, and is expected to take about 13 or 14 days.
As is common with sailboats, the straight line trip is not the one we will be taking. The issue with heading straight to the Eastern Caribbean from the US East Coast is that you are straight into the teeth of the prevailing winds. Few things are LESS fun than beating into the wind for weeks, and we do this for fun, after all is said and done.
So instead of a course like this:
We’ll be going more like this:
It is an extra 300 miles and a day or two of sailing, but much more comfortable. If you are following us on our SailLogger page https://saillogger.com/svharmonie do not be surprised if we even head north a bit at the beginning. We are NOT lost, just looking for the fastest trip available in the existing winds that is matched with our comfort!
One of the things about a trip of this length is that the weather forecast becomes more and more of a work of fiction as you move out into the future, so the exact details of our course we can not plot with certainty but we will alter on the fly as the forecasts are updated.
We do have a couple commitments once we get to Martinique. One is actually back in the US where I am helping a client install a new C-drive in his Amel 55, and then about April 15 I’ll be sailing away from Martinique on a delivery of an Amel 54, Destination: Portugal. By the time I get back to Martinique in mid May it will be time for Harmonie to start moving north again.
Continuing on our delivery voyage, we cut in off our planned route to anchor in Boqueron Bay on the west side of Puerto Rico to handle a minor repair that wasn’t easily done under way.
That’s been handled, we grabbed some shuteye, and we are back off again.
Between the short delay, and updated weather forecasts our best predicted route has changed. We are now going to head straight up through the Bahamas, pretty much on a rhumb line course for Brunswick, GA.
It’s about 11AM here, and we are motoring away from the PR coast. Once we get clear of the wind shadows of the island, we expect good winds for the rest of the trip. We will be racing a cold front as we approach the Georgia coast. With a bit of luck we’ll get there first!
While crossing the Caribbean Sea yesterday evening, up on our system pops an unusual alert: Tsunami Advisory. There has been a large undersea earthquake off Honduras, and most of the Greater Antilles are on watch for a possible tsunami.
For a boat in the deep, open ocean a tsunami is a non-event. Right now we are sailing in water almost 3 miles deep. Even the largest, most powerful “tidal waves” pass under the boat totally unnoticed.
Fortunately, it appears that the waves are small enough to not be dangerous. The forecast arrival time for the waves has come and gone without reports of significant coastal damage. So we get to add a new ocean experience, sailing over a tsunami, and the local coastlines do not have to deal with a major disaster. Win-win!
We continue to crank out the miles at a fast pace. The boat is performing well, with no mechanical issues. In 18 to 22 knots of wind, we are making 8.5 to 9.5 knots of boat speed, hour, after hour. There is the occasional tradewind squall passing by in the night time hours, but they haven’t presented major issues.
Sunrise behind the last rain squall of the night.
We weighed anchor 43 hours ago, and we have covered 319 nautical miles since then. We have been running a bit ahead of the routing predictions so far, Our most reliable forecast has us at the entrance to Brunswick Harbor about midnight on 16FEB.
We are now about 24 hours from the Mona Channel between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. From our past experiences, this is likely to be the most challenging sailing of the trip. Currents are strong, and confused, and there are frequent squalls and thunderstorms as the tradewinds blow down off the mountains of Puerto Rico.
Once through there, we will turn left, sailing between Cuba and the Bahamas, until we pick up the Gulf Stream off the Florida Keys, and then ride that conveyor belt north.
After an uneventful trip from Georgia down to Granada to pick up our delivery boat. A whirlwind couple of days getting her provisioned, checked out, and launched back into the water, we are underway back north. We have about 1700 miles to go, and that will take about 9 or 10 days.
It’s interesting the differences provisioning a boat for a week and a half when she is fully empty of food. You can not count on things as simple as having flour onboard. There is way more detailed recipe planning needed.
We hauled anchor in Prickly Bay, Grenada to this view. Hopefully an omen for a good voyage!
Our route is a 450 mile straight beeline from Grenada to the northwest. We’ll pass between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in the Mona Channel. The routing models then offer us a choice between the Old Bahama Channel, south of the Bahamas and north of Cuba, or a route traveling up through the Bahamas.
That is not a decision we have to make for a few days, by the time we get there the choice might be obvious as the weather situation for next week becomes clearer.
OK, sometimes our decisions seem a little odd… For example we were in warn and comfy Miami, ready to cross to the Bahamas, and instead we end up in Brunswick Georgia? Where they had real snow on the ground two weeks ago?
Well, I have clients who need a delivery of their boat from Grenada, right back to here, Brunswick, GA. so we took two days, and a nearly perfect weather window, to bring Harmonie up here. An easy trip for us, it is a nice safe place to park Harmonie for the two weeks we will be gone, and it eliminates travel expenses to the client for Karen and I on the back side. Win-win.
The sailing on this trip was ALMOST perfect. When we are looking to sail south along the USA East Coast we look for the back side of a cold front, when the wind clocks to the northwest, and use that to make miles south. When moving north, we look for the front side of the front, where the wind builds and clocks from the southeast to the southwest.
Our timing on this one was almost perfect. As soon as we got out into the ocean off Florida, we set sail, and rode the Gulf Stream north. We continued that ride all the way to within 15 miles of the sea buoy off Brunswick, when the front came racing off the coast and after a very short period of rain, left us with northwest winds, right on the nose. If only we had been clairvoyant enough to have left 4 hours early, we would have been tied up before the front came offshore. Our trusty Volvo came to the rescue and brought us the rest of the way. For the overall trip, we averaged 8.2 knots over 45 hours. Really fast for us. We even had a 24 hour stretch where we covered 211 miles. Not our fastest run ever, but well up there.
We now have three days to put Harmonie to bed and fly off the Grenada. We’ll have a bit of setup on the boat which is currently on the hard, and due to be launched after we arrive. We’ll then check out of immigration in Grenada, and set off on what we expect to be a 10 day trip back to… right here!
In case you missed it…
Recently we posted a video on our YouTube channel that was about the worst example of anchoring we have EVER seen. (There was one worse than this, believe it or not, but we didn’t have cameras ready).
fetchinketch 