We sailed down the Chesapeake over night taking advantage of mostly favorable winds, and arrived at the mouth of the bay at about 6AM. We are continuing to sail at a good pace with favorable winds out along Virginia Beach, and Kitty Hawk toward Cape Hatteras, where we will turn south. Right now the wind is still out of the south southwest, which is nice for our current course. We are counting on the wind backing toward the north as forecast about the time we turn the corner at Hatteras to make the trip south more comfortable.
I did just happen to look at MarineTraffic.com to get a longer range picture of the traffic in the area, and Holy Cow! It looks like over two dozen boats pulled out of Norfolk anchorages this morning and fell in behind us on the migration south. In the following image, the purple boats are the recreational boats like us…
Now the challenge will be: Keeping all of them behind us! 😁
Time to catch up… I’ve been slacking on blog posts as I have worked on other things.
We spent a lot of extra time in Brunswick GA. Bill did a couple of deliveries, including one from Ponta Delgato, Azores to Plymouth, UK via Roscoff, France, and some sail training, and a fair amount of work on other Amels both in Brunswick and around Chesapeake Bay. It has been quite busy, considering we are supposed to be retired! I have also put together some videos, that I have attached to the end of this if you haven’t seen them. Most of them are technical sailing stuff, but some are just fun too.
Right now we are in Annapolis, watching the woods around us change color for the fall.
Hidden in the beautiful fall colors of the woods here is the shadow of death. Scattered all over the above image are the dead skeletons of Northern White Ash trees, killed by the emerald ash borer, an invasive insect that is rapidly killing off one of the premier trees of the North American deciduous forests. Many woods look like this:
Stacks of dead trees. Only a few years ago there would be a raging debate amount serious players of American Baseball about which wood made the best bat. White Ash was the traditional favorite, but some argued that maple or birch was better. That argument is now academic, there is no more ash.
Ordinarily, any gap in a forest is quickly filled by new young trees freed to grow by the sudden presence of sunlight on the floor of the forest. In many places, that is not happening. the forest floor is staying barren and bare until grass starts to grow. The reason is:
Yep, Bambi. The deer populations are so out of control in many places that the death of a tree in the forest just leaves a permanent hole. Unless we can figure out a way to manage this problem, the forests of the northeast will be shrinking over the coming decades.
Our Plans…
Our plans are to head south out of here as soon as tomorrow. A cold front is due to pass through in 2 days and set up a steady wind from the north for a few days. We expect our first stop to be in Savannah, a town we have not had on our sailing stop list yet. From there to Hilton Head, and from there to Fort Lauderdale where we have an appointment to lift Harmonie out of the water, and get her bottom painted.
From Fort Lauderdale, we will hop over to the Bahamas, and take our time moving south toward the Caribbean. I have a tentative scheduled delivery from Martinique to Portugal in mid-April, and, then our very tentative plans are to take Harmonie to the Azores in mid-may, and then on toward the UK. But that all seems a million boat years away at this point.
One trip up the mast, and we got our sail put back where it needed to be. After a night’s sleep at anchor, we are off again! Pretty much back where we expected to be 24 hours ago. Right now we are blasting along at 8 to 9 knots on a beam reach, the temperature is moderate, in the low 80’s, and mostly cloudy. Overall a fast and comfortable sail.
Weather allowing, our next stop will be the weather buoy located 125 miles off Cape Canaveral to see if we can’t put some tuna in the freezer.
Speaking of fish…
We had a pair of strange visitors last night. We had the flood light on off the back of Harmonie as we frequently do to see what we can see.
Getting a photo of a fish underwater at night from the deck of the boat is not easy, and rarely are great results obtained, so apologies.
Fish with the body size of about a silver dollar, and long fin filaments off the top and bottom stretching almost 2 feet in length.
Hampered by these exaggerated appendages, swimming was slow and inconsistent. Strange creatures.
What they are is juvenile African Pompano. Normally at this stage of life they are pelagic drifters, and not seen inshore. The adults are big, tough, mean looking members of the Jack family.
Not the best way to wake up. We were making good time on a comfortable broad reach sailing with just our genoa and our mizzen. The genoa had come detached at the top of the mast, and was quickly settling down into the water.
It wasn’t going to go anywhere, it was still attached at the bottom, but it is a very big, heavy sail that gets REALLY heavy when it full of water. It took about 20 minutes to drag it all up on deck, and get it tied down safely.
Back on the boat, but not doing us much good like this!
It seems the lashing that holds the head of the sail to the swivel had come undone. The good news is I had not tied it on, the crew in Martinique did that as they were reassembling things after the work they did. The bad news is that without the weight of the sail, the swivel is stuck at the top of the mast until I get up there to pull it down. To do that, we are headed into a calm anchorage. We are motorsailing in that direction now, and hope to be there late tonight.
Tomorrow we’ll get the sail back up, and be on our way.
After a little more than a week anchored off the uninhabited Plana Cays in the Bahamas, it is time to move on.
What does one do for a week on an uninhabited island? You hike miles of beaches with no footprints in front of you. You explore all kinds of interesting things the ocean has tossed up, seemingly just for you. You catch fish. You bird watch. You are surprised one morning when you wake up to a sister ship to your boat anchored a few hundred yards away, and discover they are old friends we haven’t seen in several years.
But like all great things, this great playtime comes to an end, and we had back to the coast of the USA. We lifted our anchor this morning, and set a course for Brunswick, Georgia which will be our base for a month or two while we get some boat projects done on Harmonie, and on some client’s boats.
We are now sailing in easy comfortable weather through the Bahamas. It will be about 4 or 5 days before we make landfall in Georgia. Right now we are under a full moon that is sliding in and out of the clouds. Winds from behind us at about 14 knots. Seas calm and comfortable.
If we believe the weather forecasts, the trip should be mostly just like this. Time will tell!
Unfortunately, the weather took a turn on us, and staying anchored at Hogsty Reef was no longer tenable. We packed up and sailed off, first for a night in the well protected harbor at Mayaguana, and then onward to one of our favorite destinations in the Bahamas, the uninhabited Plana Cays where we hope to spend a week or so.
We do however have some more photos of Hogsty Reef. At Northwest Cay, there is an unusual stone tower.
This was obviously a rather complex construction project for such a remote site. Built of cut stone blocks, and originally covered with ochre colored plaster. I have found no information about why it is there. It would hardly be tall enough to be much more visible than the island itself. There used to be a light on the island, but all that remains of it is a bit of its foundation sticking out of the sand.
On the north side of the cay is the remains of a wooden ship of significant size, mostly buried in the sand, one of the three wrecks visible above water. The reef has always been a serious hazard to navigation, even to quite recently. It does not project high enough to give a significant radar return, and it rises so quickly from the depths that sonar would give you only a few minutes of warning.
The small hill is covered with nesting sooty terns, and anything higher up has brown boobies perched on it. With this number of birds, the population of small fish in the shallow waters is quite limited!
The other two wrecks are steel hulled ships providing more roosting places for the brown boobies. They are on opposite sides of the reef about 3 miles apart. Aside from the two tiny cays, they are the only things above the water surface at high tide.
The one on the far side in this photo is quite a substantial ship. It is the SS Richmond P. Hobson, one of the Liberty class cargo ships built in American shipyards by the hundred during WWII. It met its end on Hogsty in 1963.
The nearer wreck is the Lady Eagle, an offshore supply vessel that was sailing under a Bahamian flag when she ran up on the reef. All I can find online is that she was built in 1967, and was likely one of the fleet of inter-island ships that are locally known as “mail boats.” I am not sure when she ran up on the reef.
Not a lot of places can claim to be truly “unique”, and actually one of a kind. Our current location, Hogsty Reef, is one of those. It is the only official atoll in the Atlantic Ocean. It has been on my list of places to see for some time, but to visit the weather has to be pretty stable and cooperative. Finally on this trip, we got here.
Our trip here from Great Inagua was straightforward, and uneventful. 45 miles in 8 hours, mostly motor sailing through somewhat contrary winds.
An atoll is a central lagoon surrounded by a coral barrier reef. In the Pacific Ocean atolls are more common and are most commonly produced when a volcanic island sinks beneath the waves, and the coral grows faster than the land subsides, leaving a ring of coral around a lagoon. Hogsty Reef has a different origin story. A couple dozen feet higher, and it would have been a typical Bahamian Island, but as the water levels rose after the last ice age, the upper surface ended up below sea level, and the coral grew in a ring of reefs around the submerged land in the middle creating a lagoon about 4 miles across.
A least one blogger has pronounced it as “the most isolated place in the Bahamas!” Nice headline, but not true. It is only 35 miles from two other islands, and there are Bahamian islands with more space around them than that. But is does FEEL remote for sure, and visits are rare.
There are two “permanent” patches of land, Northwest Cay, and Southwest Cay. We are currently anchored off the larger of the two, Northwest Cay.
We will not be going ashore here because the terns are still nesting on the island. Certainly one of the smallest places we have ever anchored at. This is also a marine protected area so we will not be fishing or collecting here.
If the weather holds as forecast, we will be spending another day or two here, and hopefully have a chance to get you some more photos from above and underwater.
We are sailing to the northwest off the northwest corner of Puerto Rico, crossing the Puerto Rico Trench. Over five miles deep, it is the second deepest place on the world’s oceans. At the end of the afternoon it is mostly cloudy, cooler than we have gotten used to (maybe “less hot” would be a better description.
Our sail for today has been easy, and comfortable. A steady wind on the quarter of 1pm to 12 knots, and a boat speed of 5 to 6 knots. The autopilot has been steering full time and no adjustments have been needed to the sails.
Last night was a bit more challenging. After dark, numerous small squalls popped up. Nothing violent (except for some truly thunderous downpours), but the convection associated with them caused the winds to vary dramatically in speed and direction, requiring constant active sailing of the boat to keep moving more or less on course. Especially since they were so close together, predictions of the wind shifts proved impossible to make ahead of time.
The forecasts for tonight have things a bit less active. Time will tell.
We are now about 3 days out from Great Inagua where we will check in with Bahamian customs which will leave us free to move around the Bahamas. We expect to arrive in Brunswick, Georgia a few days before the beginning of July.
We are just about 3 days from leaving the dock in Martinique. Our expected next stop is the island of Great Inagua in the Bahamas where we will check into customs for a stay of a couple weeks. After sailing for 360 miles, we are in the Spanish Virgin Islands off the east coast of Puerto Rico.
We have another 5 days and a bit over 500 miles before we reach our destination.
Sailing has been easy, all downwind. Other than a bit of rain from the first tropical wave of the season, the weather has been perfect.
We did stop at a seamount to add fish to the freezer. A place 80 miles from the nearest land, and 100 feet deep surrounded by water half a mile deep or more is always a place to expect a good catch.
A red hind grouper from Gibbs Seamount.
We expect more good weather and fair winds for the rest of the trip.
We have had a couple of deliveries lined up over the past month or so that have kept us busy, and some what off line. If you think that job might be all fun…
The romance of the open ocean! Sailing boats to exotic places! The glamor! The fun! All while getting paid! What’s not to love? Ha!
Reality
Nobody (well, almost nobody!) hires a delivery captain to move a boat downwind, in good weather, from one desirable port to another. That’s the kind of sailing the owner wants to do! We just got back from a delivery, and while we had a fun time, all is not rainbows and unicorns.
This boat needed to move from St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands to Martinique. This is about 330 nautical miles as the seagull flies, and it is almost always an upwind passage into the tradewinds. There was an extra complication, the boat’s engine was not reliable. While it was working, it had a history of recent problems that had not really been definitively diagnosed and repaired.
Off to a Good Start
We left the marina in good weather, and motored out. Everything was running fine, and spirits were high for a passage easier than we expected. But it was not to be. A few hours into the trip, the engine stopped running, and would not restart.
Oh, well, it is a sailboat, and we have wind!
Strategy
The wind was forecast to continue blowing from the east at about 15 knots, with no real changes expected. On most cruising boats this passage would be taken down close to the island chain, but I decided not to do this.
Some of these islands are quite high, and have dramatic wind shadows where wind speeds are dramatically reduced. Off Dominica the wind shadow can extend 50 or 70 miles to the west. Not usually a problem, just fire up the engine, and push through the calm… Oh… Wait… We don’t have an engine…
We trimmed the boat for a close hauled course on port tack, and just kept it like that, sailing as close to the wind as we could until we reached the latitude of our destination, and only then began to work our way east. Instead of the 330 miles of the direct rhumb line course, this took almost 490 miles, and just about 4 days.
On arrival at the outer harbor in Martinique, we used the dinghy as a tug boat to push us into the marina, and get docking lined up. The marina crew at Marina du Marin was, as usual, helpful and professional. They used their boats to push and poke at us until we were secured at the dock, just 5 slips down from our Harmonie.
From Here…
Within a couple days, we will be preping Harmonie to start our migration northward, almost the exact reverse of the delivery sail we just completed, except this time (Cheers!) it will be a downwind route. Our first planned stop will be in the Bahamas, which will be about a week’s sailing from here.
fetchinketch 