Passage Westward Across the Atlantic
From Santo Antão, Cape Verde to St. Anne's, Martinique
2,080 Nautical Miles
departure November 30, 2008 @ 1530 zulu
arrival December 13, 2008 @ 0630 zulu
 

     After months of preparation, endless boat lists and shopping trips, and three long intermediary passages, we were finally setting out to cross the Atlantic.  Our route consisted of only two waypoints forming a straight line between Santo Antão and St. Anne's.  The course read 266, just south of due west.  We would be crossing three time zones and over two thousand miles of open ocean.  We were full of excitement and anticipation to be finally starting out on this epic journey; our second trans-Atlantic passage and our longest trip to date.

     We discussed the watch schedule with our crew, Gregg.  He got stuck with the "dog watch" between midnight and four am.  Joe took the 8pm to midnight watch and I got the sunrise watch from 4am to 8am.  There are some distinct benefits to the crew wanting to keep the chef onboard happy!

Such would be our schedule for the next thirteen nights.  We did not set formal watches for the daylight hours, being comfortable with working it out on the fly each day.  Someone is always happy to sit in the helm seat, keeping an eye on the course, sails and any other traffic that might be around. 

     The image of our little floating home out there in the middle of the ocean, all alone, just us against the elements, isn't entirely accurate.  The Atlantic Rally for Cruisers departed Las Palmas, Gran Canaria on November 23rd.  Most ARC boats travel the same route south that we followed to the Cape Verdes, in order to pick up the more reliable trade winds before turning westward for the Caribbean.  In reality, we had more than 200 other boats out there making the passage with us.  In addition, we had Following Tides who left right with us, and two or three other boats that we knew of also crossing from Cape Verde. 

     All this made for a busy social calendar.  Our SSB short wave radio was our most valuable communications tool for the trip.  We used it most importantly, to stay on top of the weather forecasts.  There was the daily noon ARC weather forecast which provided one weather router's synopsis of the anticipated conditions in the Atlantic for the next three days.  We also tried to listen into Herb's 8pm routing every day.  Herb is a legend in the cruising community.  He has been providing detailed weather forecasts and routing advice to vessels making Atlantic passages since 1987.  Ten hours a day, seven days a week, Herb provides this service absolutely free of charge, as a "hobby."  There were several boats in our area making roughly the same passage as Zia so we listened in to see what conditions Herb was predicting for the area.  We also downloaded our own daily GRIB file through our SailMail email-over-the-radio service so we could have a look at the computer generated forecast files for ourselves.  Luckily, aside from one area of low pressure in the middle that was causing some squalls in our path, there was nothing to worry about.  In fact, the winds were much lighter than usual at this time of year.  We tried to stay within the windiest segments of the ocean along the way, and in the end wound up staying very close to the rhumb line. 

     Our next priority on our communications calendar was keeping in touch with Following Tides.  Both boats tried their best to stay close enough together to use the VHF to communicate, but it just proved too difficult.  You would think with the same boat in the same conditions, sticking close together would be an easy task.  A number of factors conspired, however, to make this a surprisingly difficult one.  In the first place, our boats are rigged a little differently.  Following Tides has a masthead genniker and spinnaker.  Those sails are significantly bigger than ours, which are rigged about seven eighths of the way up the mast.  This makes them a faster boat.  Secondly, Joe and I tend to be a little less conservative when sailing in night or in heavy breeze.  Robert and Dar, for example, will typically put a reef in their mainsail when night falls, just in case.  It is amazing how quickly these small differences can add up to miles between the boats.  We spent the first four days playing around with sail combinations based mostly on keeping the boats together.  On our fifth night out, we hit the line of squalls that had been looming in the forecasts.  Following Tides was about twenty miles in front of us at that point.  They elected to go with bare poles, having seen gusts of fifty knots.  Still in VHF contact, they warned us of the high winds.  Joe and I put in three reefs in the mainsail and rolled out the smallest of our headsails.  We never saw gusts over 40.  The next morning, checking in at the prearranged hour of 10am, we discovered that we were now 40 miles ahead of Tides.  We agreed to continue sailing with reduced sails in the hopes that they would catch up.  At some point however, our courses diverged as Tides continued on a more southerly heading and Zia continued more along the rhumb line.  When the wind died on our seventh night we were 100 miles apart.  We both fired up the engines and hoped to close the gap.  We puttered along at 3.5 knots and altered our course twenty degrees to the south.  By the time we checked in again the next morning, we were still 100 miles apart.  At that point we both decided to just head for Martinique rather than worry about catching up to each other.  We continued to plot each other's course and position at our regular 1000, 1400, and 2000 SSB radio conversations.  Zia was fortunate to stay in the stronger breeze but wound up arriving a mere seven hours in front of Following Tides.

     We also tried to listen in and communicate with some of our friends who were participating in the ARC.  The SSB can be challenging, however, with many factors influencing the "propagation" and therefore your ability to hear and be heard by other stations on various frequencies.  The other complication that affected our social calendar was the time changes.  Cassie kept us on track, following the strict time zone lines depicted on the map of the world in Juliana's room.  We were to fall back an hour every 15 degrees of longitude that we traveled.  In order not to throw off the night watches, we changed our clocks in the middle of the day.  We kept on "boat time" for our radio schedule with Following Tides, but had passed along GMT times to our other friends, which were no longer valid once we changed time zones.   By the end of the trip, three time zones later, we were all challenged to remember, and keep up with, the "schedule."  Gregg kept telling us we needed an activity board to keep track of it all.

     So, weather and communications handled, the next biggest agenda item was food.  That was easy!  We were stuffed to the gills with stores, and kept catching more along the way!  So, I guess this is a "dual topic" encompassing fishing and food.  Well, Zia did both in style with dorado, wahoo and tuna on the hook and an even greater variety of main course items on the menu.  I took primary responsibility for the cuisine but tasked myself with just one big meal a day.  I tried to make enough leftovers each time to cover lunches.  Everyone seemed to adapt to the ever-changing meal schedule without too much trouble.  I tried to let them know what was on the agenda as soon as I figured it out.  Cassie made us a couple of meals, including pesto and leftover tacos.  We caught a number of Mahi Mahi which quickly appeared on the menu in various forms. 

                                 

We were so excited when we caught our first Wahoo!  We had such fond memories of the fish-kebobs we made the last time we caught one in the Bahamas.  This time it was a jerk seasoning on the grill with oven roasted potatoes and garlic, and some sort of vegetable from our diminishing stores of fresh items. 

                                 

Now might be an appropriate time to say that neither I, nor any other crew member, lost any weight on this trip!  (Remind me to suck it in next time!)

     Actually, I should have put school on the list above the food and fishing.  Our little students were amazing!  We knocked off two lessons a day on most days, although it took a lot more effort than implied with that statement.  Cassie and Juliana worked extremely hard and diligently to achieve the goal of completing 20 lessons on the passage.  By the last couple of days of the trip, they were at work at the salon table by 7:30 in the morning.  They discovered how much nicer the day could be when you get your jobs done early on!

     We took the day off for our Halfway Celebration!  We started off the day by celebrating crossing the actual halfway point, which we had calculated to be at 43° longitude.  Spending a frantic half hour cutting up one of the girls old school books into confetti size pieces, we had plenty to throw over the side as we crossed the line about mid-morning. 

Our much anticipated celebration came after our night of slow motoring.  As the wind slowly filled in from the north, we found ourselves on a beautiful semi-upwind sail with our screacher out and the apparent wind 60 degrees off the starboard bow.  We were gliding along at 7 to 9 knots in no seas, soaking up the sun and just loving life. 

     Downwind sailing has it's challenges, and one of the hardest to overcome is the jerking motion and the noise of the boat and the sails as it is being pushed along by the wind and the irregular waves.  Everything seems to progress in slow, agonizing motion as the boom is flung from one side of the boat to the other by a wave, stopped short only by the jarring break of the preventer, a line tied to the end of the boom to keep it from crashing across the beam in a sudden shift of wind or course.  Our night of motoring was actually a nice change from these circumstances too, but creeping along at such a slow speed is definitely not our style and we were ready to celebrate our halfway point as well as getting moving again.

     At various points along the way, we did have a couple of minor boat issues that fortunately did not blossom into full scale emergencies.  The first happened just after lunch.  We had already been through the one nasty night of squalls, and were sailing in light conditions.  Joe looked up and noticed that the tack of the mainsail, where it connects to the boom at the base of the mast, was flapping loose. We all run up to determine what could have happened and realize that the fitting that the tack is attached to has sheared right off. We quickly realize that the very same fitting is connected to the bolt that holds the boom to the mast. With the top of the bolt sheared off, there is nothing preventing the bolt from dropping out the bottom and sending the boom crashing down onto our cabin-top. Trying to keep the panic out of our movements, we quickly get a line around the whole contraption. We then get about twenty more lines around it, reconnecting the tack and making reasonably sure that the bolt was no longer at risk of falling out. Whew. The repair held up fine through the rest of the trip.

                                   

                                   

     Our next breakdown was a day or two later, after dinner. Again, sitting around chatting, I realize the boat had slowed down quite a bit. I go outside and punch "10 up" on the autopilot, then look forward to see what my changes did to our spinnaker which we had been flying all afternoon. Imagine my confusion when I look toward the bow, my eyes scanning from port to starboard, and nowhere, I mean nowhere, do I see our beautiful purple and blue spinnaker. It had vanished.  I sound the alert “Hey guys. Our spinnaker is gone.” It didn't take long to find it, of course, streaming beautifully through the water right between the two hulls.  The poor thing had ripped in two about a third of the way from the top.  It was still secured by three lines which we were able to untie and retrieve.  Since the same sail had been repaired before and we did not plan to try to fix it again, we let it go and watched it sink into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. We did miss that sail for the rest of the trip, but luckily, boat and people all came out of it uninjured.

     Our final drama came as we were sailing into St. Anne’s at one o’clock in the morning. Joe and Gregg were catching a few hours sleep before we arrived to anchor. We were a couple of miles out. I was a little nervous because our charts of the island aren’t very good so I was double checking everything to make sure I wasn’t getting too close to land or any shoals.  I had just gybed the main over as we rounded the point. I’m having a blast, enjoying the last hour of our Atlantic crossing with the gorgeous light of a full moon, sailing our way into the anchorage. About ten minutes later, I hear this horrible rattling along our hulls. I have no idea what it is and run down and yell at Joe “Joe, what’s that noise?” Joe wakes up with a start, and takes a few seconds to orient himself and hear what I have heard. He immediately realizes that we must have picked up a fish trap. Oh, yeah. I guess we have to worry about stuff like that now that we aren’t in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, we were under sail and had not caught a line in the prop. We tried to clear it before anchoring but it was jammed around our sail drive and in our rudder pretty good so we crept into the anchorage under one engine, dropped the hook, and then Joe dove in to clear the nasty mess of fishing lines and plastic bottles. There wasn’t even a trap full of lobsters at the end of the line!

     Despite the lighter than expected winds, the annoying clamor and feel of the boat sailing dead downwind, and the couple of mishaps along the way, it was a fantastic passage.  Gregg was an excellent addition to the crew, always willing and eager to help with the chores, be they sailing or meal related.  It was wonderful to have the extra watch-stander enabling Joe and I to get nearly eight hours of uninterrupted sleep every night.  Of course, one doesn't always sleep so soundly inside a washing machine, but we did on some nights! 

     In the end, however, we were all thrilled to arrive in Martinique.  Sleeping at anchor was bliss.  Eating our meals off the boat, walking around town doing some Christmas shopping  and swimming and playing on the beach all felt exhilarating after twelve and a half days in the middle of the ocean!
   

 

 

 

 
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