Not all who wander are lost…a couple sailing the world.

– You said wind twice.

– I like wind.

Usually I do. Evenstar is a tough, heavy boat and she does well with a stiff breeze.  And that we’ve had today and then some.

Remember the discussion on “Fetch” we had back during hurricane Sandy?  Wind + open water = waves.  Well when you’re a couple of hundred miles out in the middle of the ocean there is a lot of fetch!  The result is winds that are strong but accompanied by some waves and roll.

Let me stress – it’s not dangerous, it’s just not pleasant.  The boat does a lot of rolling and bouncing as we claw our way South.  It’s kind of like living on a Tilt-a-Whirl carnival ride…for 36 hours instead of two minutes.  So you have to think about doing things like cooking and making calls of nature on that Tilt-a-Whirl too.  Right now we’re not worrying about heading East, as we will are predicted to have next to no wind later in the week.

But today it’s rock and roll in 20+ knots of breeze with waves around 10-12 feet, watching out for some squalls that bring rain and winds up to the mid 30’s.  No one is getting sick but we’ve not gotten as much sleep as we like.  On the plus side it’s warm now and staying that way.  Shortly after sunset we got a kick up to 30+ for a while while we worked through a couple of squalls.  We’ve opted to add some Southwest to our heading; we need to head East but everyone needs some sleep tonight and the ride is much better.

Nothing to worry about; tomorrow the wind unfortunately is supposed to die down in the afternoon.  For now, we adjust the sails and move on!

We’re now a little past a line drawn from Cape Hatteras to Bermuda.  Bermuda is actually closer at about 110 nautical miles, versus 130 NM from Hatteras.

Today some of us broke out the shorts and T-Shirts for the first time; it’s gotten quite pleasant.   Clear blue skies with only a couple of clouds combined with some nice breeze from the Northeast – right on our beam.  We’ve been sailing fast and covering some good water.

This morning was the second time we tried some fishing too.  Yesterday for a couple of hours in the Gulf Stream, I set a line behind us.  Today…we knocked off fishing because we had enough for the fridge and I was sick of jumping up and down to haul the things in.  We started with two small fish that I believe were Yellow Jacks.  They weren’t big enough to haul any line off the reel and we noticed they were there when they were getting skipped along the surface behind the boat.  We let them go; one book I have suggests they are “prized” for eating but I wasn’t sure so in they went.  After this we took three successive Mahi Mahi (aka Dorado or Dolphin).  These we know are spectacular eating.  One was about two feet long, another was more like three feet. We let one tiny one go.

Mahi are fun fish to catch; they are such incredibly beautiful fish and they jump out of the water when striking and fighting – I saw both of the larger fish take my lure at the surface.  It makes you a little sad to kill them, for their brilliant colors start fading as soon as you have them on the deck.  Of course they are excellent to eat so I can get over this…

As we head into sunset,the wind has picked up a bit now to around 20 knots, which is enough to make us do some heeling and stir up some waves. We’re now sailing under reefed main sail and the staysail; we furled up the jib to settle things down a bit.  Evenstar LOVES this sort of wind and we’ve been plowing through the waves on a good pace.

Three days in, everyone seems to be enjoying this – it’s a bit different than anything we’ve done and you have to stay on your toes.  But it is incredibly beautiful out here; more than you would expect in such a stark place.  The deep cobalt blue of the ocean, the clear air and sky, it really can be breathtaking.

Until tomorrow…
—–
At 11/11/2012 21:43 (utc) our position was 33°07.00’N 070°53.70’W

We entered the Gulf Stream around 0830 this morning. If the wind holds we should be out of it by the end of the day.

To date winds have been lighter than anticipated, though the seas state still has some pretty good sized (8-12′) rollers every now and then.  Last night we ended up motoring for much of the night but at 0600 this morning we started sailing again.

Watch last night was smooth, with Will grabbing the 2000-2300 (aka 8:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m), Kathy taking 1100-0300 and me standing 0300-0700.  The last was cold; hopefully that will be the last one.  On entering the Gulf Stream, we learn the water has now climbed to almost eighty degrees, quite a change from the 50 degree water when we were leaving the Chesapeake.

It may be time to start removing layers soon, as I’m getting warm sitting here typing this up!  Of course I’ve got about 5 layers up top and long-johns under my jeans.  I’m hoping to never wear these things again once it starts really getting warm, but we’ve not headed all that far South as of yet; we are still North of Cape Hatteras, though we are over 125 miles East of the Cape.

Lots of sleeping going on now as we start to try and settle into the routine of living on board under passage.  I don’t think anyone got a full night with the cold, the boat’s motion, the engine and, of course, watch standing.

We’ve been in communication with other rally boats – one of the more interesting aspects of doing the passage this time is that there are boats in sight most of the time.  On some of the other long trips we’ve noted that you really don’t see a lot of boats.  But since we are intentionally traveling with a pack, seeing other boats is assuring, knowing that there are boats within an hour away in case something does go wrong.

After we leave he Gulf Stream tonight we start heading more South.  We need to head East anyway to make the BVI’s, and we’re covering a lot of that now.  But our major course change is coming up – the one that points us right at our destination!

Until tomorrow…
—–
At 11/10/2012 19:38 (utc) our position was 35°41.74’N 072°45.41’W

Well, we’re off.  Currently we are “motor slogging” towards the Gulf Stream with light winds almost behind us.   Hopefully the wind will pick up a bit over night.  Motor sailing is about my least favorite way to travel, especially down wind because the wind serves to ensure that your engine exhaust stays right with you.

We were off a bit later than we hoped this morning, finally getting under way around 10:45 or so.  Last night when doing final engine checks after changing the oil and fuel filters I noticed that the raw water pump was leaking water.  We couldn’t set off with a problem like this so I dug down into the spares and did a late night pump replacement.  It took a few hours and kept us up later and also left me with a few irritating boat bites to deal with.

This morning was sunny and breezy and we said our goodbyes to my parents as we pulled out of the slip and went to full the tanks with diesel.  After the fuel dock pit stop it was off to the Caribbean!

Initially we had great wind and current and we went flying out of the harbor under sail.  An hour or two later the wind started to drop and became variable while the chop and the roll from previous wind was still around.  The net of this is that you end up sailing slowly while the sails keep drooping, filling, slamming and banging things around as you roll.  We few the spinnaker for a bit but it wasn’t enough when the wind dropped to 6-7 knots.

So this evening we are motor sailing.  Around us some of the other rally boats seem to be doing the same thing though a couple of sailing…slowly, and not quite in the right direction.  We might try that too, the sea motion is better and we wouldn’t be using any fuel.

Let’s hope for a little more breeze tomorrow!

More waiting…

Sandy, keeping it real and bottoming out the barometer.

After riding out Hurricane Sandy and sitting around for a few days, we are now once again waiting for the weather to be just right.

This time of course it is for the Big Trip, our passage from North America to the Caribbean.

Apparently it is November there in the British Virgin Islands, just like it is here in Hampton, VA.  Of course it is approximately TWICE the temperature in the BVI’s, it was in the 30’s this morning.  We don’t actually own a whole lot of of winter clothes anymore!

We aren’t waiting and traveling alone.  This year we are joining the Salty Dawg Rally, which is a group of around sixty boats that are all headed in the same direction at the same time.  There is another rally out there too, the Caribbean 1500, which left Hampton a yesterday morning headed for the BVI’s as well.  Hopefully they, and the ten boats from the Salty Dawgs under way already,  will get out there fast and not get pasted by the Nor’easter that is making it’s way up the East Coast this week.  Wednesday might be…uncomfortable…for those at sea.  It’s why we are here still.

Did I mention we finally got far enough South for pelicans?

After a Hurricane like Sandy the seas are a bit roiled and unhappy.  A storm system that large messes up a LOT of ocean.  Coming down from our hurricane hole up the Piankitank River to Hampton you couldn’t really tell a monster storm had come through, but offshore would be a different question entirely.

The original departure date for the Rally was yesterday, November 4th, but with the coming of Sandy we all knew this wasn’t likely to happen.  People like us lost days of preparation time and many people were stuck far from the rally point.  After some initial confusion when we got to Hampton it became very clear that even if we decided to leave on the original date we’d be taking a risk of some serious weather on route, and it was almost certain we’d hit some rough stuff.   As it turns out the boats that left early have passed a few rough moments with some squalls with up to 50 knots of breeze.  Frankly, I’d rather be freezing my butt of here in Hampton.

The way it is looking now we will be leaving this Friday morning.  There is this nor’easter than is supposed to clear through on Wednesday with some seriously unpleasant wind and waves.  After settling for a day or so, Friday should start out with some breeze in a good direction and we will be off.

Blogging while remote. Blogger does have some capabilities to blog say, from your iPhone, or from anything that sends an e-mail in. While I find the idea of blogging by iPhone to be quite awful (like I don’t already have punctuation, spelling, grammar and proof reading issues if I invite Autocorrect to my blog) I can see the application to blogging by e-mail.

With an e-mail I can blog from anywhere I have the internet, right? Well…if you have enough internet to send an e-mail you might as well go ahead and just use the web editor – it’s easier and it all looks right when you are done.

Unless…you are in a situation where your internet connection is so foul, so slow, so archaic that the 1989 version of you would jump up and down and say “Yee-ha, look at that crazy mad download speed.”

What I am talking about of course is sending e-mail via the Single Sideband Radio, or SSB. In my case I am using a ham mail service, but there is Marine SSB e-mail available for a fee as well. Digital communication by Short Wave Radio may be one of the Pinnacles of Nerdvana for many an Amateur Radio Operator…but it is very practical.

For example, the link on the blog to “Where is Evenstar” is updated via SSB radio. Certainly I could pony up for a Spot Tracker and get a subscription for the service to accomplish the same thing. But with the radio I can accomplish the same thing for free, so why pay?

Yes there are limits. If you haven’t guessed it is REALLY slow. You can’t be surfing the web and watching Youtube videos on this thing. But short text e-mails are pretty easy. There is also a limit through Airmail (the Ham e-mail service) of about 100K for each message. So I won’t be e-mailing anyone any lolcats from the high seas.

But what it will let me do is update the blog when I am out of range of land, and beyond all cell phones. Since we do not have a Satphone on board the SSB is how we can stay in touch. So THIS blog post is to test it all out and see how it works, to make sure it works, before I really get out of sight of land.

Waiting for our generator fix, we’re stuck here in Oxford.  Literally, we are hard aground…though only twice a day for a few hours.  And it’s more like “squishy aground” since while the slip we are in has a controlling depth of about seven feet (we need about eight feet of water) it is soft mud under us that we settle into.  But when the tide goes out we see a lot more of the bottom of our boat than we’re used to.

In the mean time we are looking for ways to amuse ourselves in a town that in high summer would amuse for a weekend.  End of season it’s beyond quiet.  We’ve been here for a week.

There are several restaurants here.  But only the two really expensive ones ($$$ – three dollar signs and up on Yelp!) are still open regularly.  There’s no place open on a weeknight where you’d want to go wearing jeans with the whole family for a casual dinner.  Sure, in the summer time there are a couple of likely spots but now they are “Closed for the season – See you in April!” or operating on weekend only hours.  There’s a store…sort of…where you can pick up milk, eggs, snacks and booze – but not fresh vegetables, meat or anything with a shelf life less than a term in Congress.  There’s library a little larger than Evenstar’s main cabin, a local museum, a used bookstore we’ve not managed to catch open yet, and small but nice park with a gorgeous view.  It actually is very pretty here with lots of well kept yards and quaint, beautiful houses and we can totally see the appeal.  For a while.

But man is it quiet.  We don’t mind quiet, actually we seek it out most of the time.  Generally though it’s on our own terms – at anchor in some peaceful, scenic cove for a few days of time out.  But you can get off the boat, go on shore and walk around, and find things to amuse anyway.  What rankles a bit here is not the location (though we don’t love being in marinas) but the waiting, the sense that our destiny is out of our control while we wait for parts to be ordered and mechanics to come sort out the generator.  While we’re working on our own project lists, being someplace where you can’t walk out and get a screw the right size or a tool you need means it’s not quite so productive either.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad and I don’t want to sound whiny (OK, I admit I do sound a bit whiny…doesn’t mean I want to!).  We have found ways to adapt.  About seven miles away by dinghy up the Tred Avon River is the town of Easton.  Easton has a hardware store, a West Marine, grocery stores and (gasp) restaurants where you can feed a family of four for under $100.  A couple of days ago Kathy and I took the dinghy over there to do some shopping to restock our dwindling supplies.  We didn’t take the kids because the dinghy can’t get up on a plane and go fast with all four of us on it, and our average speed drops from 14 knots to about 5.5 knots, turning it from a 1/2 hour trip to an hour and a quarter.  So Kathy and I took off to pre-scout the town, do some shopping and run a few errands.

With Friday being a rainy washout in the morning we did some extra school.  Will took off sailing in the afternoon while the rest of us puttered around the boat and I finally got the power re-run to the Single Sideband radio.  In the evening one of the casual waterfront restaurants, Schooner’s, was actually open for the weekend and we’d been looking forward to a night without cooking and cleaning so off we went.  It’s a nice place for a casual drink and burger though I’d avoid the desserts as they’re a bit over priced.

Saturday was the planned Great Expotition to Easton, in which your protagonists look forward to getting off the boat, walking around, eating in restaurants and picking up some much needed project supplies.  As a family we would like to recommend The BBQ Joint as being both an excellent place to eat BBQ for lunch, but also one of the better casual stops for dessert as well.  Yes, we went there for lunch and went back for dessert on the way back to the boat.  At lunchtime we were stuffed silly with excellent barbecue and had no room at all to eat another bite.  But after walking out to West Marine, down to the other side of town to the hardware store and on to another set of retail plazas looking for a dessert and coffee break we could not resist the lure of the Apple Brown Betty, Pan Fried Chocolate Chip Cookie (with vanilla ice cream & caramel) or the “Hillbilly Pie” of the day which happened to be a first rate Tollhouse Cook Pie cooked in a cast iron pan.  After searching all over town for something that appealed more (too cool for ice cream now!) we ended up back where we had lunch.

Yes, it was a long dinghy ride.  We walked around half the day with damp tushes from the splashing crossing the most open parts of the water and we were all a bit salty.  And in the end we didn’t even DO anything exciting – no bowling (no one felt like it after walking around all day), no movies at the bargain matinee (nothing looked good), just some walking around, sightseeing, picking up a few things wee needed, and some really good family time.