It always started with the question: “Have you done this before?”  Then it was always followed by the look, part surprise, part skepticism, part disapproval, part fear.  This was the inevitable pattern whenever we met someone new and got talking about sailing plans.  As soon as our plan to take the boat offshore from Norfolk, VA to St Martin via Bermuda came up, I could see the wheels turning in their heads, thinking these naïve Canadians have no idea what they’re getting themselves into, and they’re dragging their poor kids along as well!  And to be fair I think they were partly right, but partly wrong as well.

 As Megan keeps reminding me, I haven’t been active on the blog now for a few weeks.  In my defence, initially the preparation for taking the boat south was taking all my focus, then we were offshore and getting safely to our destination was taking all my focus, now more recently I’ve needed some time to decompress and process everything that’s happened between there and here.  What happened that we expected?  What happened that was unexpected?  What did we do well?  What did we not do so well?  What would it have been like if we knew what we know now before we started?  And, of course, will we do it again?

 Let’s start with what went pretty much as expected…

Food

Shout out to Megan here because she did an absolutely amazing job of organizing the provisions, building meal plans suitable for all conditions, and then executing food prep both in the good and the sh*tty times.  This aspect of our passage was a resounding success and made every other part so much easier. 

VERDICT: Well done Harris Crew (mostly Megan)!

Sea Sickness

While neither Liam or I have ever been seasick (maybe we’re born lucky?), Megan has had at least one really bad experience and poor Aden is especially prone to getting sick when we’ve got a side to side rolling motion.  I was also pretty worried about breaking my streak given I’m a type 1 diabetic and consistent vomiting could be a really serious health risk.  As such, we prepared our med kit with several different motion sickness medications.  On the advice of one of our Offshore Emergency Medicine course instructors, Megan and I both decided to use a half Scopolomine patch as a preventative measure.  Since we used it as preventatively it’s hard to say whether we would have been sick without it, but either way we didn’t have any sea sickness at all.  The only side effect we saw was some dry mouth which encouraged us to stay hydrated anyway.  Aden was the only one on board who ended up getting sick (though technically only threw up twice), so we gave her a puke bucket to decorate and a Gravol to chew on early in the passage.  The Gravol made her feel as bad as the motion, but she found her happy spot on the aft deck in the wind where she felt much better.  While she was never 100%, as the days went by she got her sea legs and managed to live as comfortably as we could expect.

VERDICT: Well done for the adults, I think we’ll use the half patch again the next time we go offshore since the side effects were minimal relative to the potential consequences.  Mixed bag for Aden.  Gravol wasn’t the answer for her so we’ll have to do some more research and see if we can find some other medication suitable for kids.  When all else fails she’s tough and can hang out on the aft deck with her bucket.

 Sleep

I was expecting this to be one of the harder aspects for me since, as Megan mentions many times elsewhere in the blog,  I’m a person that needs a solid amount of sleep to feel good about life.  I was right.  We decided to do watches in pairs, with Megan and I sharing the night watches with Andrew and Heidi, and Dad and Liam doing taking an extra day shift to give the rest of us a little more time off when the sun was up.  Overall the schedule worked quite well given the personnel we had; however, both our girls were sleeping in the aft cabin with Megan and I, which quickly turned into nights with Megan sleeping in the salon sea berth and me sleeping cross-wise at the foot of our aft queen, while Aden and Grace sprawled out on the rest of our bed in whatever position the boat’s motion would allow (we should’ve had the aft lee-cloth up but didn’t).  Good times.  Overall, I think we did a good job of setting an optimal schedule to provide opportunity to sleep and then adjusting from 3 hour down to 2 hour night watches which was even better.  On the downside, actually getting that sleep was harder than I thought with the noise of the boat at sea, plus my obsession with keeping a very close eye on the weather and our route.

VERDICT:  Good work toughing it out Harris Crew!  As expected, the passage was freakin’ tiring, but our watch schedule worked pretty well.  The next time out we’ll spend a lot more time going over everything in the boat to minimize noise as much as possible.  We also set up the aft lee-cloth and may replace the lee-cloths in the v-berth as they were a little low and loose given the motion we saw.  I’d also listen to more pod-casts and music on night watch.  It gets pretty boring when it’s black out and there’s nothing going on…

 Navigation & Weather

When you’re sailing out of sight of land for a few hundred miles or more, having a good understanding of your route, location, and the weather forecast along your route is pretty darn important.  We spent a lot of time before leaving land making sure we had multiple methods of determining all three and testing them out to make sure we were comfortable actually using them.  We had access to our current location at all times and a new weather forecast (actually 4 different weather models) every 12 hours.  So twice a day we religiously studied the latest information and made adjustments to our planned route based on what we saw. 

 VERDICT:  Good job on the most important aspects Harris Crew, but you can still use more experience on the finer points.  On the positive side, using our planned process we picked a good weather window both for transiting to Bermuda and then from Bermuda to St Martin, staying just ahead of some very strong cold fronts and severe weather both times (if we had screwed it up and left 24 hours later either time we’d have been in for a very bad time).  We learned a lot about how to translate what we were seeing in the forecast to what we were experiencing on the water with a hard-earned lesson when we got rolled over by a moderate cold front a couple hundred miles from Bermuda.  While the front looked pretty benign from a wind standpoint on the forecast, it brought a night of thunder, lightning, and big swell from the wrong direction which we should have anticipated but didn’t.

 Communications

The ability to communicate with shore has come a long, long way from the old days.  Using our Iridium Go, we were able to text, email, and get the latest weather information from our laptops and cell phones the whole time we were sailing offshore.  Not to mention our tracking page was updated in almost real-time.  We were also able to track other vessels within 20-30 miles using both our radar and AIS transceiver and display their locations and  headings on our chart plotters.  All of this was expected, planned for, and worked without a hitch but one thing we did learn and get used to pretty quickly was using our VHF to hail freighters, usually at night, to not only ensure they were aware we were there but to also to make sure we agreed on how we were going to pass each other.  Megan proved to be our master freighter-whisperer and without fail got polite and professional agreement from the freighter bridge on how to proceed.  We found it amazing that almost all our freighter encounters happened in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, and almost always ended up with our courses intersecting within a mile or two.  Just a little too close for comfort with these ocean freighters that are 1000+ feet long and travelling at 15kts!

VERDICT:  Well done Harris Crew!  You almost look like you’ve done this before!

Crew Dynamic

Nothing like leaving the best for last!  We were very fortunate to have 3 adult crew (in addition to Megan and I) that not only were competent sailors, but were also family.  My brother, sister-in-law, and Dad all took the time to drive from Canada down to Norfolk, VA and step off land with us bound for the Caribbean.  This was a huge plus from our perspective because we knew what to expect as far as the strengths, weaknesses, and personalities so we could anticipate where things would run smoothly and where there might be, shall we say, some saltiness.  I can’t overstate how amazingly helpful it was for Megan and I to have other crew that we knew we could trust, that knew the kids and with whom the kids love to spend time, and that knew us as well as each other.  In fact, I don’t know how we would’ve done our first offshore passage without them!  And as an added bonus, since they’re all Harris’ we didn’t even have to come up with an alternate hashtag…

VERDICT:  Well done #HarrisCrew!  What’s everyone doing next June?

 Overall I feel like we accomplished something special.  The kind of thing you just can’t replicate no matter how hard you try.  The kind of thing we’ll look back on and remember as one of life’s highlights and say “Yeah, I can’t believe we did that, but I’m sure glad we did.”  Not because it was a long voyage (it wasn’t by ocean sailing standards) and not because the sailing was terribly challenging (again is wasn’t by ocean sailing standards), and not because we set any speed records (we certainly didn’t), and not because everything went completely smoothly (it didn’t either), but because it was our first ocean passage and we did it as a family.  We prepared as best we could, accepted what was left undone, realized there was a lot still unknown (for us anyway), and came out on the other side a little wiser and a lot saltier.  The people stayed healthy, the boat stayed healthy, and we got where we were going with a lot of experience had along the way.

Stay tuned for part 2 where I recap some surprises we encountered and other things that didn’t turn out quite as expected…