Journal of November 5, 2019 (written on November 6th, 2019)

Day 2 began with the excitement and trepidation of the Gulf Stream. We’ve spoken with many sailors and they are of two minds 1) the Gulf Stream is fine and 2) the Gulf Stream can tear you a new one and needs to be treated with a great respect…we subscribe to the latter.  

As I mentioned in Day 1, we timed our departure largely based on the weather for the Gulf Stream crossing. As amazing as weather forecasting is, as is the access to downloads while at sea, you can still expect that when you are looking 4 or 5 days out there is a fairly high level of uncertainty still. However, 1-2 days out is pretty reliable. All this is to say that when we looked at the weather we choose the window that would hopefully not tear us a new one on the Gulf Stream and we focused less on the 4-5 day out predictions (though they were taken into account).

 With about 12 knots from the NE to start, against the SE current, we were prepared to run parallel for a bit if necessary to avoid crazy waves. However, once we were in the Gulf Stream the waves were pretty chill and the wind dropped almost immediately. We had to motor sail through in order to not hangout in that current all night. It was here that the ocean started to really take on the most amazing blue that we’ve ever seen. The girls and I headed to the bow (tethered in of course) and tried to let our toes get caught by the odd bow wave…the first time they did we all squealed! The water was so warm!! Yesterday we were all wearing touques and fleece jackets…awesome. And to make the moment even more memorable, a school (flock?) of flying fish took off out of the water just at our dripping toes and flew through the air what looked like a hundred feet in front of us before they dove but down. Aden thought they looked like dragonflies J

Everyone was feeling pretty good – Aden had half a Gravol and Liam and Grace had none (grown-up were still rocking our ½ patches) so we made cauliflower alfredo fetticine for dinner with green peas. It was pretty good. Cooking for 8 on the Force 10 is a bit challenging as I don’t want to over fill my pots and risk getting burned so there is always a compromise in the way the meal is cooked (for example normally I’d roast the cauliflower in an oven first to bring out that lovely buttery flavour). I’d say the food quality is about 70-80% of what I’d me making at home but that’s ok. It’s healthy and tasty and everyone ate.

So even though we subscribe to the “it can tear you a new one” philosophy we acknowledge we were very fortunate to emerge with no “new ones”….relief! Now with that milestone behind us we can look ahead to the next 4 days before Bermuda. New weather download shows a large system moving in late Friday and we really need to be that or things will be nasty.

The main surprise from our Gulf Stream experience was that just when we thought we were through we started to encounter eddy after eddy…even into Day 3 we were against a current of about 2 knots for several hours which proved SUPER frustrating but I’ll save that for the next blog post.

Much love,

M