Mon Jun 28 2021
Today was a welcome day of relatively drama-free sailing. The wind has finally started to turn to come more from the west- that means we haven’t had to “bash our brains out” all day beating into the wind and waves. We are now on a “beam reach”, which means the wind is coming over the side of the boat, instead of from in front of us. Hopefully tomorrow it will swing around even further, and come from behind us to push us along on our final few days in to the Azores.
Every evening at 6pm, the four of us gather in the cockpit for “Captain’s Hour”. Throughout the night watches, and with varying personal schedules through the day, usually at least one of us is napping, cooking cleaning, trimming sails, etc. Captain’s Hour is the one time during the day that the four of us can sit and socialize for a few minutes. Tonight’s C.H. Was a special one. As many of you know, a few short weeks ago, those of us in the Kamloops Fire Rescue family lost a brother and a friend, in Captain Brian Lannon. He went missing while SCUBA diving in Kelowna, and was recovered several weeks later. Brian was my Captain for several years at Firehall #2, we spent a lot of time talking about SCUBA diving and sailing, and he even came out on our old boat for a brief trip through BC’s Gulf Islands. Brian Lannon also talked boats with Brian McIquham and helped him start construction on a steel boat BriMac was planning. Lannon was originally a welder by trade, so he used his skills to get BriMac started.
I’ve been thinking about Brian while we’ve been out here, along with his wife Jen back in Kamloops. So, tonight for Captain’s Hour, BriMac and I shared a drink of rum with Brian Lannon’s memory, and raised a toast to living out dreams- and to treating every day for what it is: a gift to be lived to its utmost, no matter what that may be that day.
Sun Jun 27 2021
On the old tall ships, anytime they needed to change the sails, reef them smaller, or make them bigger again; it meant that the crew had to climb up into the rigging and balance themselves out on the yard arms, sometimes hundreds of feet above the water. They called this “going aloft”. They had to do this by day or by night, in all types of weather (especially in storms), pulling the sails up by hand. On modern boats, all those sail controls can be done from deck level, usually within the safety of the cockpit— unless something breaks.
At about 5am this morning, Brian was on the last of the night watches, first light was just beginning. The wind had eased off, so he let out some line to get the Genoa back to full size… and then it began sliding down completely. He managed to get it partly furled up again, so that it would not come down completely. There is a welded steel ring that connects the top of the sail to the halyard (rope) that pulls it up and keeps it up. The ring had snapped, so there was actually nothing holding the sail up. I didn’t want us wrestling with that big sail in this morning’s 20 knot wind, so I decided to attempt a mast climb in order to retrieve the end of the halyard and try to reconnect it to the top of the sail. I’ve done this a few times before on this boat, but never while underway at sea. We “hove to” (this is a method of basically putting the boat in neutral to stop it sailing, but with the sails still up for some stability) to smooth things out, and I got ready to go up. The plan was for Dan to manage a backup safety line that was tied off to my harness, while I climbed a second line. I was also wearing my inflatable PFD just in case I somehow ended up in the water, and I used it’s safety tether to keep myself secured to the mast. By the time I got past the first set of spreaders (about 1/3 the way up the mast) , things were getting… interesting.
The wind had picked up to almost 25 knots, and the waves suddenly got a lot bigger too. The rolling that is an annoyance at deck level, became a serious issue the higher on the mast that I went. The rolling motion gets amplified, and there were a few times I had to hold on for dear life in order to not get pendulumed out away from the mast, and then come crashing back in. I was now high enough that I could see the broken parts, but nowhere near high enough to reach them. It wasn’t easy to admit defeat, but the risk was getting too high. Back down I came, to the relief of the crew and myself. Just as I was climbing back into the cabin to put my mast climbing gear away and start formulating Plan B, the boat dove into a wave, and the ensuing slap of cold seawater targeted me specifically, sending a huge shot of water down on top of me and into the boat.
Once I had cleaned up the mess from that event, and put on some dry clothes, we began working on Plan B (that probably should have been Plan A all along). We turned downwind so we could use the mainsail as a windblock to keep the breeze off the Genoa, unfurled it, and pulled it down to deck level. We then used a spare halyard to raise the furler and sail back up again, before finally turning back on course.
Even Plan B was a little more complicated than how I have described it, but definitely much safer. It took half the day to get everything accomplished, but here we are, now back on course at a reasonable speed. It’s almost 3pm local time,… time to start thinking about something to have for breakfast…
Oh, and we are now finally at a point on this journey, where the nearest land to us is no longer the tip of Newfoundland,… the closest land is now Flores Island, the westernmost island of the Azores Archipelago— so, we’re getting there slowly but surely!!
Sat Jun 26 2021
We’ve had good steady wind for the last couple days now. It’s still coming from ahead of us, which means we’re continuing to splash through the waves, heeled over onto our starboard side. Occasionally the bow dips right under, and everything forward of the mast temporarily disappears under a rush of water, spray, and foam, before the water goes pouring off on the low side of the boat. This is when the sea finds a boat’s weak spots. We had been dealing with a slightly leaking forward hatch, that we seem to have fixed now, but Merdeka has another quirk of design that won’t be quite so simple to deal with. The anchor normally sits out on the bow of the boat (I stowed it below for this passage), it’s chain runs through the windlass, and then down into the lower part of the boat through a tube called a hawse. The chain locker is inside the boat, down low in the bow, underneath the forward V-berth (bed). Every time the bow of the boat plunges down through a wave, some water is able to get into the chain locker. As I mentioned, we’ve been heeled over onto our starboard side for a couple of days now- unbeknownst to me, water had been building up somewhere in the bow on the starboard side in a place where it wasn’t draining back into the main bilge. Earlier today we “hove-to” so I could fix something on one of the sails, and this made the boat heel over onto her port side… suddenly the whole floor in the v-berth was a pool of water, as the trapped water sloshed out of its secret hiding places onto the floor. No, we are in no danger of sinking because of this… but what a mess!!!
All in all, “beating to windward” is an exciting, but much more physically demanding point of sail. With the boat leaned over, everything becomes more challenging. Even just sitting engages your core muscles as you hold yourself upright. Moving around the boat from one handhold to the next, cooking, eating, cleaning, fixing, using the toilet, and even sleeping are more time consuming and challenging than when the boat is flatter.
Anyhow, we know we have a couple more days of this, and then the wind is forecast to come back around from behind us and blow us the rest of the way in to the Azores. While this passage we are on is not an exceptionally long one- compared to some of the other routes out there across our watery planet- it is still a marathon. We still have a long way to go, but every day our destination gets closer. It’s too early to start thinking about the journey’s end, in fact fixating on the “miles to go” counter would be akin to staring at the clock hoping to reach the end of a long workday. It’s time for that “second wind” to kick in, and to get back to marvelling at how privileged we are to get be out here; taking in sights and experiences that very few on this earth get to take part in— all too soon we will have reached our destination and back to “normal” living. (Though I definitely AM very much looking forward to seeing my family next week- for the first time in over a month!)
Fri Jun 25 2021
A little British lingo there,… so, last night we had a massive feast for our 1/2 way dinner: steak, shrimp, broccoli and roast potatoes washed down with some sparkling wine that was a birthday gift from a friend back in Maryland. Just before nightfall, we decided we had enough wind to get the sails back up. An hour after that, we were heeled way over, ploughing into the waves, pointed as far up into the headwind as we could go.
We sailed all night, trying to go east, but with the wind blowing directly out of the east. We attempted to tack, in order to try and get a little more to the north, but a weird cross current had us enroute back towards Newfoundland. So, southeast became pretty much our only option for the night.
By this morning, the wind had backed and was now coming more out of the north. We eased the sails a little and changed our heading— Now for most of the day so far we’ve been more or less aimed directly at the Azores. We’re still pounding into the wind and waves, we’ve taken a few bursts of spray that managed to drench the entire boat. We’ve reefed down the mainsail and the Genoa, but we’ve still managed to hit over 9 knots of boatspeed a couple times. It’s quite exhilarating sailing- though I’m not sure Dina agrees- we’re leaned way over, it’s wet, and the wind is loud. For anyone not familiar with sailing, the idea of “apparent wind” might be unfamiliar. To oversimplify it: if we have a 20 knot wind, and we are sailing the same direction as the wind at 9knots, then it feels like a gentle breeze blowing over the boat at 11 knots… if we turn around and sail in the opposite direction, against the wind, and manage the same boat speed- suddenly our gentle breeze becomes a noisy and somewhat intimidating 29 knots. As I type this, we have an 18 knot wind blowing at us at about a 50 degree angle to our boat, and that makes it feel like a 21 knot wind. We’re sailing at a speedy 7.5 knots, and have even gotten to over 9 knots a few times. Speedy, and wet. But at least we’re sailing, and even in the right direction!
Thu Jun 24 2021
Well, there’s no point in turning back now— it’s officially further away to our start point, than it is to our destination. We crossed that imaginary line this morning, as I write this we have just over 1260 nautical miles laid down in our wake behind us, with 1163 nautical miles in a straight line between us and Ponta Delgada. We’ve been motoring through a calm since last night. The breeze does seem like it’s slowly starting to build, if the forecast holds, we should be sailing again by late tonight, hopefully the rest of the way in to the Azores.
At about 3pm, we stopped the boat, shut down the engine, and then Dan, Brian and I jumped in for a swim. David stayed on board to get some pictures, and as a safety spotter. We had to choose our “swimming hole” wisely, as there are Portuguese Man-O-War jellyfish everywhere out here, none of us needs a sting from one of those. The water was absolutely beautiful, so refreshing, and the most gorgeous blue colour that really can’t be described properly. It is a little surreal to look down into that deep blue, and to know that the bottom is over 5 kilometres away beneath us. I checked over the prop and the water intakes, we climbed back aboard and showered off, and now we are again powering our way through the gently rolling swell. I have been saving some filet mignon steaks in the freezer for tonight’s “1/2 way celebration”, so it’s time to get on with prepping dinner!
Wed Jun 23 2021
The forecast is telling us we may be running out of wind soon. That’s one of the reasons we turned northwards a few days ago- to try and get up above a band of high pressure with no wind in it. Today, we have absolutely perfect conditions. A few more knots of breeze would be OK, but for the first time we have all of Merdeka’s canvas flying- a poled out Genoa, staysail, and mainsail trying to catch every bit of wind going by us. The waves are down today, it’s blue skies and sunshine. As I type this, BriMac (Brian McIquham) is out in the cockpit playing Dina’s acoustic guitar that we have onboard. He’s playing Tragically Hip songs, in accompaniment with Gord and the boys coming out of the boat’s stereo. We’re introducing the best of Canada to our two American crew mates. Tomorrow is likely to bring less wind, but for today it’s perfect.
Offshore sailing often boils down to resource management. If we didn’t bring it with us, can’t make it, or it isn’t already out here, then we can’t have it. “It” could be wind, diesel, electricity, food and water, or even,… coffee. Everything has to be closely monitored and used wisely, running out of something critical out here is no joke. I have to constantly balance the need to keep moving, with what our wind forecast holds and the amount of diesel remaining onboard. Merdeka has big tanks, but still nowhere near enough to just fire up the engine and power to the Azores. Patience is important, but at the same time, we can’t bob around out here indefinitely either. Of course, having fresh water onboard is also critical, and while we have plenty, no one wastes a drop of it for anything. We do have equipment on board to extract fresh water from sea water, but it requires a lot of electricity. Right now, the solar panels are generating all the power we need to run the lights, refrigeration, navigation electronics and the autopilot. Running the water maker would mean running the generator- and that uses diesel,… the same diesel that we may need to run the engine if we face a long windless stretch. Resource management.
To me, that’s all part of the stress, but also the joy and incredible gratification of being out here. There are few places left in the world where being 100% self-sufficient is not only required, but is the only option available. That’s a pretty awesome feeling.
Tue Jun 22 2021
Though I’m calling it day 8, 16:30 today marked exactly 7 full days since we pulled out of Cobb’s Marina in Norfolk, Virginia. We’ve covered roughly 1000 nautical miles, with about 1400 more to go.
Yesterday, we began trying to head a bit more to the north, to try and stay out of a band of zero-wind, arriving over the next few days. In the late afternoon, we decided to return to our previous heading to tack advantage of a change in wind direction. Gybing, or turning our boat so the wind is coming from the opposite side, is a big process on a big boat. There are the sails, many many lines, and a large aluminum pole, that all have to be moved across, in order to be able to change direction. The wind had been getting inconsistent towards the end of the day, and the Genoa (the sail towards the bow of the boat) had been partially collapsing, and then refilling with a loud bang and a crash. This would also violently shake the long aluminum pole holding the sail out away from the mast. When we went to move everything over before gybing, it was noticed that part of the track that holds the pole to the mast had broken away. Then a line broke. Then a block that the lines run in almost lost it’s wheel when a bolt worked its way out.
All of this left us with the ability to fly only one sail overnight,… combined with a drastically reduced amount of wind, led to a miserable night. Inside the boat it was hot, humid, and stuffy- with a film of salt starting to cover many surfaces. Though the wind was gone, the waves remained. We rolled back and forth, side to side. Every creak clank, and crash woke me, as objects slid back and forth inside their lockers. We drifted along, covering about 10 miles in a 5 hour period under our one sail. Finally, at about 5am, the lift breeze disappeared so much, that we started up the engine. As we motored, I began repairing some of yesterday’s breakages- some of it a little “jury-rigged”, as parts stores are kind of difficult to access right now…
A couple hours after that, the wind began to build steadily, spinning off the remnants of a tropical storm that is advancing up the coast of North America. It’s currently a few hundred miles behind us on the coast of New England. Anyhow,long story shorter, today we’ve had plenty of wind, and we’ve covered a lot of ground by sail.