Day 18: Thoughts from Dina: (while we wait for Jamie's next post...)

SO close!

The girls and I are currently in Toronto. We fly out tonight for the Azores - a direct flight! We are staying in an Air B and B right across from the marina where the boys will dock. Once they dock they will have to stay on the boat in quarantine until their tests come back negative. Even though they have all been fully vaccinated and have been at sea for well over 14 days; this is a procedure we may need to get used to when arriving on a new shore.

Jamie expects to arrive late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, so the timing is remarkable - though he may not feel that, just I. I in my clean smelling clothes, freshly washed hotel hair, and tightly packed bags (with a residual odour of Kamloops forest fire smoke). Everything in my life feels so carefully and tightly packed and organized; I've had the time - sort of. The girls and I packed up our house and filled an empty downstairs bedroom with our things, cleaned and prepared our house for a beautiful new family to live in for the year, packed up my school classroom, taking 8 boxes to my parents house for storage, finished my job for the school year, sold my car, ensured we had adequate medical travel insurance, reinsured our house, organized various banking details, bid my parents and brother and friends and wonderful neighbours farewell, and here I am now. In a cool, quiet hotel room in Toronto with two snoozing girls beside me, exhausted from the tumult of leaving our beautiful city and friends in the midst of a horribly scary fire storm, while we gad off to parts unknown.

We've all walked a very busy and at times uncertain journey to get to this point, yet our paths are about to blessedly converge with our favourite sailor. One who, Gaby describes as "getting his pirate look on" with the growth of a scruffy beard. So much feels so uncertain, yet we look ahead with excitement.

Day 17: Welcome to the Azores!

Thu Jul 01 2021

Well, we haven’t actually SEEN any of it yet, it the nearest island of the Archipelago, Flores Island, is about 30 miles off to port. One of our crew’s cell phones picked up a signal for a few minutes from the island. Tomorrow afternoon we should be within sight of Faial and Pico, but we’ll just be passing by on our way to Sao Miguel Island and the city of Ponta Delgada…
Update: as I’m typing this, a unified call of “Land Ho!!!” has just come from the crew out in the cockpit- and sure enough, just peering out of the clouds are the slopes of Flores! We’re all commenting on how exciting it is- even though it’s just some silhouettes barely visible through the heavy clouds on the horizon- that actually seeing land for the first time in well over two weeks actually is!

Day 16: Part 2 (read part 1 first...)

Wed Jun 30 2021

When night fell, it fell hard. Moonrise has been quite late in the night, with 100% coverage in thick dark clouds all around. Once the sun disappeared it became completely black out. The horizon was indistinguishable, so you couldn’t tell what was water and what was sky. The wind speed immediately began picking up quickly, and it started raining hard. The wind built to over 35 knots almost immediately, and all the sounds changed. Loud whistles through the rigging that I’ve never heard before, and the noise of the wind itself. The volume and intensity of the rush of water under the hull also increased. As the waves began to build bigger, the rush of foam as waves rolled past added to the sounds. Before my first shift was over, the chart plotter had registered peak gusts at 47.5 knots. Score: Star Weather Routing- 1 PredictWind- 0

The rain and the wind continued throughout the night. My second shift was a little brighter, as the half moon had risen somewhere up above the clouds. The waves had also gotten a lot bigger, you could see some of the bigger ones coming up behind us, because the cascading foam at the top of the wave would stir up the bioluminescence enough that you’d see a line of eerie green racing towards you through the darkness.

Throughout, Merdeka just calmly marched on through the waves. The bigger ones would pick us up and send us surfing down them at double the speed that we were otherwise travelling, but she held her course beautifully, being pushed a little aside by a wave, then the Hydrovane immediately brought us right back to where we should be. By first light, some of the waves were absolute (by my limited definition) monsters. A fairly rapid wind direction shift suddenly meant that instead of travelling with the waves, we were barrelling along sideways to them. After a couple threatened to push us a bit too far, we gybed to change direction. The wind shift then proceed to mix up the wave direction, so that for the rest of the morning we were sailing through a pitching, rolling confused sea washing machine.

By the end of the night watches, the wind was back down to about 20 knots, so the mainsail was unlashed and sent back up. The wind did build a bit from there, as we began our next huge undertaking: putting the Genoa back up in a rolling sea with a 25 knot wind at our backs. Eventually we got it done, and have been enjoying some very exciting sailing and surfing under some nice (finally!) sunny skies. Now it’s looking like we’ll hopefully get to sail the rest of the way into Ponto Delgada.

Day 16: The previous 24 hours were... Part 1

Wed Jun 30 2021

Exciting.
At this time yesterday, we were doing some pleasant sailing, though under very dark skies. We also had a lot of work to do, to prepare Merdeka, and ourselves, for what the night ahead had in store for us.

I have been getting a lot of my weather information out here from the PredictWind app, that is able to download information through an Iridium Go (a small satellite transceiver- the same way I am able to transmit these posts). The app shows the weather patterns around us, along with forecasts, and a suggested route for us to take; however, it is strictly a bunch of computer models using their own algorithms to come up with these forecasts and routes. Since this is my first offshore passage as Captain, Dina and I decided it would also be wise to employ the services of a weather router. A weather router is a real person based on land, with access to much better weather data than we can get out here, that takes that information and suggests a route to your destination. Enter: Trevor Richards of Star Weather Routing. I actually know Trevor in the real world, until he and his wife Liz retired this spring, they were owners and operators of Spring Cove Marina- where Merdeka has been moored the last couple years. Trevor has a vast amount of sailing experience, and has gone around the world on his own boat.

Throughout this trip, Trevor has been the one that has been giving me twice-daily updates on the weather to expect, and a suggested course to take to avoid some of the worst weather. For the most part, I’ve been following his advice fairly closely. So, onto yesterday. I had been downloading PredictWind forecasts twice a day, including yesterday. It showed we would be in for some stronger winds overnight last night, roughly 25 knots with gusts possibly as high as 35. That’s pretty breezy, but nothing to worry too much about. Trevor had some differing thoughts.
“We can’t steer you out of the way of this one, you need to prepare for a possible 50 knots tonight.”
Whaaaat??? As wind speed increases, the force on everything becomes exponential. The difference in force between a 10 knot breeze and 15 knots, is barely noticeable. The difference between 20 knots and 25 is a big jump. Above 35 knots, and every knot of additional wind speed starts to change everything. The effect on wave heights, with no bits of land to get in their way, is also huge. So, a discrepancy of 20 knots between PredictWind’s forecast and Trevor’s is MASSIVE. So, we decide to err on the side of caution, and follow Trevor’s advice- I’ve never sailed in 50 knots before, especially not in the wide open ocean.

Yesterday afternoon, we began our preparations. Taking advantage of a lull in the 20 knot wind, we completely brought down our big Genoa sail and brought it into the cabin. Even when not in use, it normally stays rolled up, ready for use, on the forestay. The result of having it accidentally unroll in a 50 knot wind would be catastrophic, so to eliminate that risk, it came down completely. The Bimini (sun shade cover in the cockpit) was also removed. Solar panels were lashed down. As the wind began to build in the late afternoon, the mainsail was reefed down to 1st, then 2nd, then 3rd reef points, before we finally dropped it altogether and lashed it down securely just before nightfall, so that we were being propelled solely by our small staysail. The four of us onboard have normally each been taking a 3-hour solo watch period each night. Last night, we doubled up: 2 on watch together for 3 hours, before swapping teams. 3 hours on, 3 off throughout the night.

(Continued in Part 2)

Day 15: All is Well

Tue Jun 29 2021

Nothing spectacular to report today- a group of Dolphins swung past for a quick visit, but I think they decided we were too slow to be interesting for long. Waves are building up a bit this evening, but we are now travelling downwind again- so, it’s a little rolly, but fairly flat overall, and much drier! Looking on the chart plotter, those islands ahead are starting to look much closer!