North Atlantic Ocean
Passage from Bermuda to the Azores
 
Thursday, June 15th
 
    
Zia at the dock at the Royal Hamilton Amateur Dinghy Club where she stayed while we went to Annapolis for a quick visit.
    
The islands of Bermuda receding from our view as we depart for our trans-Atlantic passage.
 
By noon today, the start of our second day on passage, we had put 200 miles between us and the islands of Bermuda.  The sailing conditions have been perfect with relatively mellow seas and good 20 to 25 knot winds on the beam (side) or aft of (behind) the beam.  The temperatures are warm enough for shorts and a T-shirt during the day and just a light jacket and sweat pants at night.  The girls are not as happy with the rowdy sailing conditions, but they aren't complaining too much.  Juliana got a little sea sick this morning but she has since gotten some soup down and is currently playing Crazy 8s with Glenn and Cassie.  It sure is great to have not only a good sailor but an all around good guy onboard for crew. 
 
We have been sailing along, I'm sure, MUCH too fast for the fish, which explains why my fancy new reel has not yet produced dinner.  We did, however, catch a couple of flying fish that landed on the boat overnight.  I saved them and plan to rig them up as bait when we slow down a bit.  I think if we put them out at these speeds, they would just fall apart. 
 
The forecast is for good wind for another day or so but after that a big high is going to sit on top of us producing light winds.  We will try to sail north of it in the hopes of staying in more wind, but we don't want to go too far out of the way.  Alberto and his remnants are well north and west of us and we continue to move away from this system.  There is a line of squalls, just as Chris Parker predicted, that will head towards us but should die out before they reach our location, especially since we continue to move pretty much due east.  We'll start heading more northeast tomorrow afternoon. 
 
Our basic route takes us from Bermuda, located at 32 22 North latitude and 64 50 West longitude, to the Azores, at 38 31 North latitude and 28 37 West longitude.  As we go north, our latitude increases and as we move west our longitude decreases.  Every degree of latitude (north) we travel is equivalent to 60 miles.  The longitude lines converge at the North and South Poles, so the distance between them is not constant as it is for the parallel lines measuring latitude.  The closer to the equator, the more distance between each degree of longitude.  At our latitude, however, every degree of longitude is about 50 miles.  I'm not sure if this helps you visualize our course at all, but I hope it will.  Cassie and I studied latitude and longitude in geography this year so that helped me a lot.  Latitude lines run parallel to the equator, which is the 0 degree line of latitude, and increase as you travel away in either direction.  The prime meridian, which runs from north to south through Greenwich, England, is the 0 degree line of longitude and they increase as you travel in either direction.  We will be traveling in the East longitudes once we cross into the Med this fall. 
 
I'm not sure how many times I will be able to update along the way but I'll try to keep a log to publish once we get there so you can get an idea of how the passage went.  I also posted an article that Joe wrote and appeared in the June issue of SpinSheet Magazine.  Thanks for all the good wishes and support.  It is so great to share it all with you. 
 
Saturday, June 17th
 
My attempts to update the website while underway were fruitless.  I think I just have too many pages on the site so when FrontPage goes to get the list from zialater it takes too long and the server times out.  I'll have to ask my FrontPage guru, Craig, if there is a way to fix this. 
 
We just logged a 216 mile day at noon.  Yesterday we traveled 206 miles.  It sure is sweet, even if we know we can't keep up this pace.  We are chasing the wind along a band in between isobars, trying to avoid the large high pressure area of no wind currently to our west.  Unfortunately, there is no way to know if the predictions will pan out, but both our independent critique of the weather graphs and Chris Parker's interpretation point to more wind in the direction we are traveling.  We should also get some favorable current farther north.  Our friends on Cenou, who arrived in the Azores on Thursday, reported a full 3 knot push; well worth traveling a few hundred miles out of the way.
 
Monday, June 19th
 
Welcome to the Bermuda Azores high!  Our wind started lightening up yesterday evening and today it virtually ran out.  The good news is that as the wind died, the sea around us came to life.  We sailed through a pod of Sperm Whale followed shortly by a school of dolphin that kept us entertained for hours.  Glenn spotted a couple of whale spouts about a mile out to starboard.  As we strained to keep them in our sights, we saw a back and then a tail broach the surface.  It is always a huge thrill to get a glimpse of these huge creatures.  It wasn't long before more spouts appeared in front of us.  Joe headed the boat up towards them so we could get a closer look. 
    
    
We were amazed to get so close for such a long period of time.  The whales didn't seem to notice or mind our presence despite the squeals of joy emanating from ZIA.  One of them kept broaching the surface and sticking its tail way up in the air and flopping it back down on the surface of the water.
   
 
The girls were busily writing up an account of our encounter for the kids' page and drawing pictures of Sperm Whales, when Glenn again shouts out;  "Dolphin!"  We all scurried forth, hoping they would come close.  We were not disappointed as half a dozen of them came over to swim off our bows for a few minutes.
    
Although they did not stay in our bow wake for long, the show was far from over.  We realized that we were surrounded on all sides by dozens of them.  They were frolicking through the swell, leaping and splashing, putting on an incredible show for the ZIA crew.  We realized that we would have missed out on all this wonderment had the wind continued to blow.  Not only would we be going much faster, but the seas would be too rough for us to be able to spot these things easily.  The contrast between a 4 to 6 foot swell with 20 knots of wind and a 2 foot swell with 10 knots is astonishing, although hard to capture on film. 
 
In fishing news, the catch and escape program continues.  About an hour before dinner yesterday, we got a hit on Glenn's reel, which he had mounted on the stern rail.  Seconds later, my rod started singing out with a fish.  We immediately went to slow the boat down, rolling up the headsail and turning into the wind.  It didn't take long for Glenn's fish to break the line.  I kept my fingers crossed, strapped on the fighting belt, and started working the rod to bring in my fish.
     
It was a great feeling, having all the right gear to fight whatever it was on the end of the line.  I got it all the way up to the boat, Glenn was stepping behind me with the gaff, we had just gotten a glimpse of the yellow and green back of a large Mahi Mahi, when it broke to port and came right off the hook.   With the kids around, we managed to keep our reactions in the PG-13 rating, but needless to say, we were all disappointed.  Luckily, I had planned a taco dinner for Fathers' Day so our gloomy mood didn't last long.  Plus, we had not lost any gear, which was a step up from our more recent episodes.
 
With all our recent fishing woes, I had concluded that it was just my bad luck.  We were trolling five lines all day today, of course, and had had a couple of strikes this morning, but no solid hits.  I had just asked Glenn, "What's up with the fish?" when his reel started singing.  Back off the engine, turn the boat up into the wind, roll up the gib, bring in all the other lines, and wait for Glenn to reel in dinner!  I was sure something was going to break between the swivel and the knots and the big fish.  It made a couple of good runs, but everything held and he got the thing all the way up to the boat. In a last valiant effort, the doomed fish gave a big tug ...and vanished.  We never even got a glimpse of it except for the piece of lip it left on the hook.  I guess it's steak for dinner after all! 
 
Thursday, June 22nd
 
Motor-sailing along in 8 knots of breeze, we are anticipating a Sunday arrival in Horta.  We are close to the end of Day 8 of our passage, and we are all pleasantly surprised and pleased by how well it is going.  The girls are happy that it hasn't been too bumpy and are thrilled with all the wonderful sea life we have seen around us.  The adults remember fondly the first four days of exceptional wind.  The abundance of dolphin, whales and sea turtles has compensated for the lack of wind over the last three days. 
 
For most of the day yesterday, the sea was a pond.  From time to time a breath of wind would travel across the glassy surface, leaving behind a rippled imprint of its passing.  The colors of the clouds and the intermittent sunlight were amplified and reflected in the mirror of the ocean's surface. 
    
    
    
 
Schools of dolphin are plentiful, and many of them make a detour to come and check out ZIA.  They don't stay for long, but even a brief visit leaves us giddy with joy and gratitude for the moments they have shared with us.  They entertain us for hours off in the distance with their leaps and back flops.   
                                
Rather than the bottlenose dolphin that we are used to seeing, these are Common dolphin and have patches of yellow and grey along their sides and a bright white belly. 
     
 
We saw another whale close to the boat yesterday.  Although we cannot be sure, we think it might have been a Blue whale.  They are very rare, with only about 5,000 left in the world.  The shape of the nose and dorsal fin are right, and it seems the color was closer to the Blue than the Minke whale.  I heard it sing as it came up for a last breath of air before diving for deeper waters.  We watched and heard it blow half a dozen times before it escaped from our sights. Even on the surface, most of it is invisible to us, with only the blow hole, just behind the bump on its head, the back, the dorsal fin and rarely the tail breaking the surface of the water.
    
    
 
We have also seen a lot of green turtles lately.  Their primary diet is jellyfish, and we have also seen hundreds of very strange looking jellys.  Small individual jellyfish, oblong and mostly translucent with a brown head in the center of one end, seem to form ribbon-shaped colonies that drift along on or close to the ocean surface.  Floating on top of the water, they are mostly coiled up into large circular shapes.  A foot or two beneath the surface you can see them stretched out into bands up to three feet long.  In fact, the only thing we have managed to snag with our fishing hooks are bits of these strange creatures. This turtle had been floating on the surface, feeding we assume, for so long that a portion of its back was totally dry. 
    
 
Saturday, June 24th
 
We are in our last day of our eleven day passage.  When we started out we couldn't say exactly how long it would take but we all agreed that 10 days would be the best case scenario and two weeks the worst, barring extremely adverse conditions.  We are thrilled to have made it in eleven days.  Knowing the end is near, I cannot wait to get off the boat.  Although it has been a great passage, I'm definitely feeling a little stir crazy.  It's like being confined to your home for that long, without even going out into the backyard.  I'd have absolutely no complaints if we had caught at least one stinking fish. 
 
Our friends on Cenou are in Horta to greet us.  They left Bermuda while we were back in Annapolis and have been here for nine days already.  It's a great feeling to know that we have friends waiting for us in this strange new country.  It will be our first really foreign port of call.  The Caribbean and the Bahamas are so close and well traveled by Americans that it never felt too far away.  This landfall will mark the beginning of a whole new kind of cruising for us.
 
We actually passed between two islands of the Azores at noon today.  Ilha Das Flores and Ilha Do Corvo are the most western islands in the archipelago.  Cenou, plagued by no wind and no gas, made their first landfall in Flores, where they stayed for four or five days.  We opted to continue on to Ilha Do Faial which is the typical first stop for cruising boats.  By some stupid oversight, I neglected to buy a cruising guide of any sort for the Azores so we are winging it until we can find some more information about the different islands.  We do have a chart that shows the nine major islands in the group.  They are all volcanic and much taller than the islands of the Bahamas and most of the Caribbean.  Everyone we have talked to who has visited the Azores tells us that it is a step back in time.  Out in the middle of nowhere, it is not hard to imagine how modernity has bypassed the area.  The natural beauty is also said to be breathtaking.
     
 
We aren't sure how long we will spend here.  There has been some talk of trying to make the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain during the second week of July.  The mainland is another five day passage from here so that might be rushing it too much.  I'd hate to miss the opportunity to get a real glimpse of life here.  Who knows when we will be able to come back!
Next entry >>>>>>>
 
Many thanks to our friend Craig Homenko for his assistance in setting up the website.
We also would like to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who has been kind enough to host the website on his server.
   

 
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