Heading South: Day 1

November 11th

No rest for the weary.

So the gale from Saturday finally ended…and by ended I mean left behind cold clear skies (well not as cold as home – sorry about the snow suckas!) and a 25-30 knot breeze. We had a cluster of a time getting the dinghy off the deck in that breeze but managed about 6 hours on shore for the first time in as many days.

Today (Monday) we started the day with aspirations to see Bermuda Radio and explore more of the island by bus. There was a little chatter about weather and Heidi looked at Windy on her phone and mentioned that if we don’t leave tomorrow we won’t leave for a week. We mostly dismissed it feeling that since it’s all we thought about for the last 2 weeks (it felt like) between looking for a weather window and then outrunning that gale, we just needed a GD minute to not thing about the weather….

 Then we looked at the weather.

 Dammit.

Greg and I decided that we would not be leaving tomorrow. We would be leaving today.

 *Sigh*

So major mental shift in the day, fortunately we had coffee already, and we kicked into high gear with a target of leaving before dark. There was another big low coming and it looked like it was going fairly far south as well (until it got broken up in the Trade Winds). So leaving as soon as possible would give us the best chance of being ahead of it.

-       Food

-       Water

-       Fuel

-       Inner forestay

-       Dinghy

-       Customs

Now we were ok in the food department – I did run into town quick to grab some more bread and apples and eggs. We needed to top up our tanks with both water and diesel which we would do last and this time we were going to rig up the inner forestay and stay sail before we left in case we ran into more weather again. Also oh ya, that dinghy we spent an our getting down off the deck in 30knots? Time to get that b*tch back up again. Super. And of course after all of that, run over to customs and check-out. But we did have one other important job to do…laundry. More specifically: Andrew and Heidi’s laundry.

Among the chaos of that front we sailed through (ugh…do NOT want to repeat that any time soon)…massive amounts of seawater entered their cabin (v-berth) and soaked their clothes and linens and mattresses. At the time Greg and I didn’t realize how bad it was but when we arrived in Bermuda we assessed everything and it was terrible…so wet and now stinky.

They were a bit frustrated to have no clean (or dry) clothes and rightly so.  We had planned to get to the laundry place before leaving but now that we had the updated weather from Predict Wind we had to change that plan. So with Grace helping they knocked out all of their laundry by hand while we got the boat ready to go. With the sun and the stiff breeze they were able to get all of their stuff washed and dried in a few hours and I was able to air / dry out the linens and mattresses as well. I put new clean linens on their beds and everything was good to go…oh ya…and this time…

THE AIR VENT IN THE V-BERTH WAS CLOSED.

That’s right, the massive amounts of sea water that came gushing in had a big open door with a fancy welcome mat. Stupid, frigging air vent was open and we took so many massive bow waves it was like a funnel. I know I’ve said many times that we keep discovering things about this boat but this was so so stupid.

Anyway…with the air vent closed and the boat ready we pulled up the anchor, headed to the fuel dock and then were out the channel pointed south by about 4:30pm. The seas were very very confused after that gale but we knew we were doing the best we could to avoid another big low. And we were cranking…8, 9, 10 knots surfing down big waves into the early evening. In the first few hours we debriefed on the watch schedule from the first leg and made a few changes. Basically Greg and I had a bit too many night hours and Greg in particular really suffered (that boy needs a lot of sleep). We added another watch for Bill and Liam from 4-6am and we made our night shifts with Andrew and Heidi alternating every 2 hours. Hopefully this will help the long night feel a little….less long.

So Day 1 ended with us taking a deep breath and feeling like, even though it was a crazy stressful day and a reluctant decision, we did our best to miss that front. We will see.

 Much love,

M