After the 4th time of provisioning for the trip we eventually had a short weather window and left on the 23rd February, but had to motor for the first 30 hours (there was little wind) to get far enough south to miss the next lot of bad weather coming across the Canaries. Because we were now so late we didn’t have time to stop in the Cape Verde Islands which was disappointing. The first couple of days we both took anti-seasickness remedies, but after that we were both fine. We followed a watch system during the night of 4 hours on and 4 hours off, keeping ourselves awake at night with coffee and listening to podcasts on the Ipod. In the day we were occupied with cooking, washing up, a small amount of essential clothes washing when calm, sail changes, read, did puzzles, or just took turns to nap if we were tired.
The second evening of the trip we contacted Herb on the long range radio. Herb is a Canadian who has provided weather and routing information to Atlantic sailors for many years. We spoke to him nearly every day of the crossing and were very thankful for his assistance. He advised the best route to avoid the bad weather between the Canaries and Cape Verdes, then took us south to avoid the very light winds which this year were experienced on the normal trade winds route. The reception was quite bad so we got involved a few times with relaying other boats’ information to Herb when he couldn’t hear them.
The wind varied quite a bit although was never bad. We had a couple of days early on with the wind directly behind when we were able to fly twin headsails, but poling the 2nd one out on the main boom didn’t work very well, especially once the winds became relatively light. We had to change sail quite a lot as the furling genoa is too heavy for light winds, but the lightweight genoa is very old and not strong enough to carry in the slightly stronger winds. It did in fact tear where it was very worn and Anne had to make a repair halfway across the Atlantic. Our best day’s run was 140 miles and the worst day was just 73 miles.
The first few days we saw quite a few ships as we were close to the shipping lanes down the cost of Africa. Later, after we passed the Cape Verdes, a fishing boat called us up on the radio for a chat – he must have been bored having been at sea for a long time. Otherwise we went several days at a time without seeing anything at all.
We tried trolling a fishing line. The first time we lost the lure and hook, we think a big fish pulled it off. After that we tried with a stronger attachment, but we didn’t catch anything and subsequently gave up trying to fish.
We had found one or two flying fish on deck, but one night Anne was startled as she was hit on the back when she had gone down into the boat for coffee – a flying fish was at her feet! It was only about 4” long but had flown across the cockpit, under the sprayhood and down inside the boat.
Highlights were the pod of pilot whales a short distance off and the large pod of Atlantic dolphins that swam and played with the boat for about half an hour.
Most of the time the swell was quite small so the rolling of the boat wasn’t bad, but on one or two days a stronger wind and bigger swell made it just too difficult to cook and we had one of our “easy” meals – just heating something up in a saucepan. Towards the end of the crossing it was so hot that all we wanted was cold food – pasta or potato salad with cold meats, tinned fish or eggs.
After 27 days - a fairly slow trip – we finally sighted land and made landfall on 22 March 2010 at Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. By this time Jim had a beard – we had been careful with our water to make it last, so Jim didn’t shave at all on the trip. He thought it looked rather dashing, but nobody else agreed so a few days later it came off!
For more photos please click here and for video please click here
