Well its been a hot minute since I published a blog post. Not much had been happening, we’ve been doing boat work and I’ve been going to physical therapy for my achilles tear. I have been asked by several friends if it is healed. No it is not healed. An achilles tear takes about a year to heal fully, if by then. But I talked my doctor into giving me the green light to sail south. I still have a lot of work to do on my own, but better to do it in the Bahamas and Caribbean than in Virginia. I have a lot work I can do on my own.
For a quick synopsis of what’s transpired since the last post here we go:
I did a lot of physical therapy to get my achilles in working order, there is still a lot of work to do and a lot of healing to do as well. We had new lithium batteries installed and upgraded our inverter. I polished most of the boat, Nancy finished building the dinghy chaps. I installed our scuba compressor in the starboard engine room and installed tank holders in our bow lockers. We got our new spinnaker and code zero sails out to inspect and pre-furl. I went up the mast to inspect the rig and change a lightbulb and found some chafing on our mainsail halyard, so back up the mast to replace it. We installed backing plates for our bob stay, replaced our dinghy hoist line and added a double purchase system for the dinghy davits. We installed new safety handles as well. We provisioned for several months because food in the Bahamas is ridiculously expensive.
You and your boat will never be 100% ready but at some point you just have to cast off the lines and head out!
–svdelos.com
Always a lot to do on sailboats. But you can never have everything done you want to complete before you leave. I still have a ton of projects on the list to complete.
Leaving Virginia
Hampton and Norfolk were good to us, quite different from West Chester, OH, but very neat coastal military towns. Lots of ships, jets, military folks, bases, seafood and boats.
First of all, getting ready to do a passage, even a small couple day one offshore takes some planning. You have to run jacklines, fuel and water up, I had to commission the watermaker, make sure all the safety gear is operational and boat is functioning properly. It took us a few days to get ready. Plus we hadn’t sailed once since July due to my achilles tear.
We left Hampton, VA on December for a two night passage to Cape Lookout, NC where we spent a couple of days. Cape Lookout is absolutely gorgeous. Our anchorage was surrounded by sand dunes. Strong winds prevented us from exploring land and we got another short window to hop to Wrightsville Beach, so we had to take it. We’re basically on a mission to get south. If we get a day here or there to explore, great, but we’re going to take every weather window we get to move south.
The first two nights at sea were about 40 degrees, but on open ocean with 15 – 20 knots of breeze it probably feels colder even in our helm enclosure. Sailing in the North Atlantic in winter wasn’t really what we had planned when we bought the sailboat. Thank goodness we have good foul weather gear.
Right now we are sitting out a storm in Wrightsville Beach, NC. 50 – 60 knot winds are expected tonight, so we took a transient dock at a marina after we couldn’t find a suitable storm anchorage with enough room for this heavy of a storm. For reference, 50 knots is 57 mph.
Wind Over Current
When you get a strong current and have wind that opposes it it can cause huge breaking seas. That’s why going around Cape Hatteras (also known as the graveyard of the Atlantic) can be such a big deal. The wind over current creates waves called ship breakers. They’re not talking about 42 foot vessels like ours, but huge container ships or tankers.
We made it around Hatteras with light winds, but had a 3.2 knot current against us. With the light winds and strong current we had to motor for about 12 hours. We don’t like to motor, diesel is expensive and we have sails after all.
Going around Cape Hatteras is no joke and can be terrible, we have heard bad stories from friends, luckily with good planning we had a very smooth passage.
Dolphins Everywhere
We have pretty good luck seeing dolphins. We saw a ton of them in the Chesapeake, but there the water is muddy and you can’t get a really great view of them. Plus for some reason there they don’t like to swim in your bow wake.
Offshore is a different story, I took this video rounding Hatteras and although the video is only a few minutes long, this went on for about 15 minutes. We were surrounded by 50 -100 dolphins. Experiences like these are why we set sail.
So What’s Next?
Our original plan was to sail directly to the Bahamas from Virginia. There’s an old saying about sailors and their plans. They are written in sand below the high water mark.
This year is an el Nino, so cold fronts are happening with much more frequency this year, not presenting a suitable weather window to go directly from Virginia to the Bahama. So going direct was probably not going to happen. Then our AIS went on the fritz, so we had to send it in for repair. So we decided to head down the coast and try to get the AIS device back in Florida somewhere.
Then we’ll do a crossing to the Bahamas from Florida. Crossing the gulfstream current can be treacherous, so we will need a good window to cross it.
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