Position: 36 48N, 56 53W
Distance covered from Bermuda: 486 miles
current speed: 6.2 knots (sailing)
4 days in and all is going well. We motored for most of the second day as the winds were light and unfavorable. We used the power to heat our water, make more water and charge the batteries. Since then we have been sailing the whole time trying to make it to 38N before the end of Saturday as the winds are forecast to shutdown below that latitude. We should be able to make that and the forecast winds after that are light out of the South for several days. Hopefully we will still be able to make progress East during that time under sail. By Wednesday of next week the winds are supposed to fill in from the southwest for several days which will hopefully allow us to get to the Azores around Tuesday or Wednesday.
I have not been able to sleep below with all the creaking and other noises so I have situated myself in the cockpit for most nights. This has meant that I have got little sleep. Debbie has been a trooper putting up with my crankiness during this time. I am jealous that she at least sleeps a little better than I do down below. Another blog to follow in a few days, communication permitting.
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Position: 34 34N, 61 36W
Distance covered from Bermuda: 200 miles
current speed: 5.9 knots (motoring)
We left Bermuda at 10:30AM on Monday and headed for the Azores. The first night, winds were good and we sailed through the day and night. The wind vane is still causing us issues downwind so we will wait to see if it performs better on a different point of sail. We have therefore been using our autopilot more and so we had to motor for a few hours yesterday to recharge the batteries. Last night the winds clocked around to the North and dropped to under 6 knots. We know that there is wind further north between 36 and 38 so we are motoring north to find it. Once we get there we should have winds for the rest of the week at least.
The boat is doing well and we are looking forward to getting into more consistent winds.
We are already talking about what we want to eat and drink when we arrive and also what percentage of the distance we have covered. Too much time on our hands 🙂 Another blog to follow in a few days, communication permitting.
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Well, it didn’t work out quite as we’d hoped! We woke up early on Sunday, May 12th to prepare Sol Purpose for the crossing to the Azores. That done, we headed over to the Customs Dock to clear out of the country. All the formalities were taken care of, and we headed back to the boat to start our journey. I jumped back on board and caught my foot on a chainplate. I knew that it hurt but we had to get away from the dock, so I headed back to the cockpit. Moray realized that there was a lot of blood, and we discovered that I had a huge cut under my big toe. Moray called Talaria and we headed over to raft up against her. Mel is medically trained, so she took great care of my toe, cleaning it, putting steristrips, liquid bandage, gauze, sticky bandage. (Two weeks later, my toe looks good. It’s healing up nicely, although it’s a little numb. Lesson learned – SHOES!)
Emergency taken care of, we headed on out of St. George’s Harbour and started on our journey. The weather was perfect and we were excited. It soon became apparent that the wind vane was not doing its job. We couldn’t hold a course with it. This was a huge blow, because we were relying on using it as much as possible to limit our need to use our autopilot, which is an electricity hog. Not deterred though, we turned on the autopilot, as our duo-gen hydro generator was doing an amazing job of keeping up with the electricity needs.
As the day progressed, disillusionment with the autopilot started to kick in as it was making an excessive juddering noise when correcting for the following seas. We didn’t know what the issue was and how much, if any, damage was being done. We continued on, but at about 1am, we realized that the hydro-generator was no longer producing electricity. At this point, we had to make the heartbreaking decision to turn around. If we were to continue on, we would probably have had to hand steer for two weeks, we would have had to run the motor to generate electricity (we only carry 8 days of fuel). On the other hand, we were only one day out, and we could turn back and work on the repairs.
Of course, the perfect weather for heading east does not work so well for heading west! It was a very long hard slog back to Bermuda, and we arrived after dark. There was already a boat clearing through Customs, so we had to wait until they were done, but the Customs officials were amazing. As we hadn’t been gone for long, they pulled out our previous paperwork, and cleared us back in in about 10 minutes. Then, of course, my least favourite thing, anchoring in the dark. Convict Bay was pretty full, so we headed over to Powder Hole. It’s deeper there, but there was a lot of space to move around and we finally got settled and got some much needed sleep.
Several days after we arrived back in Bermuda the ARC boats headed for the Azores. This included our friends on Talaria. It was a mess of 28 boats vying for a place on the start line inside the harbour. We waved them of and watched their progress for a while on AIS.
Talaria middle of the pack
They are now approximately 4 days outside of Horta in the Azores after eleven ays.
Now it was time to start working on the repairs. We think the problem with the generator has fixed itself – maybe overheating – so we will just give it some breaks during the day!
After a lot of time of the phone and online with Garmin, we think we have a solution for the autopilot. It seems to be much happier now, with less juddering, so fingers crossed for that.
The main issue was the wind vane. If we could get that fixed, the other two issues wouldn’t be quite so important. After corresponding with the manufacturer, it turned out that we needed to make some adjustments which are usually done in the factory, but appear to have been overlooked. Annoying, but possible. We made the adjustments and picked a calm day to head out to test it. We decided to sail for a while to test the vane, and then head back to Castle Harbour, where we had stayed the week before. The wind vane worked much better, although we knew we would have to make at least one more adjustment, but we were happy and dropped anchor in Castle Harbour to relax and enjoy the lovely day. We had plenty of power, so decided to watch a couple of episodes of This is Us before heading to bed. Moray went out to do his usual final check on the boat, and yelled down to me that the dinghy was gone. With hindsight, we believe that the dinghy had hit the windvane, which punctured one of the tubes. That tube filled with water and the weight snapped our tether. Of course, it is now midnight, and we are in a harbour, surrounded by reefs! We pulled up anchor and looked around inside the harbour with our searchlight in the direction we knew the dinghy would have gone based on the tide. We couldn’t find it, so next (terrible for my stress levels!) we headed out through the reef, following the track we had stored on our chartplotter when we came in, and started motoring up and down the coast past the cut where we thought it would have exited the harbour. Eventually, we spotted it! We had to keep motoring around until it came far enough out to sea that we could retrieve it without putting Sol Purpose on the reefs, but by 3am, we and the dinghy were back in Castle Harbour, safely anchored and secured. As one of the two tubes had been punctured, the dinghy was hanging upright in the water and the outboard had been underwater for over 5 hours by the time we got back to the anchorage
The next morning we headed back to St. Georges Harbour, pulled the dinghy up on to the deck, where Moray worked on patching the 2 inch gash in the tube. Next he worked on cleaning and repairing the outboard. It took a couple of attempts, but he did a fantastic job, and both are now fully functional again!
OK, no more disasters, please! I think we have had our fair share for this trip!
On a much happier note, the extra time here has given us an opportunity to meet a great group of people – the Ocean Cruising Club. We had seen their Facebook page when we arrived in Bermuda and joined the page as it had quite a few boats that were crossing to the Azores around the time we were. Although we had not repaired our dinghy at the time, the OCC boats in St. Georges harbour had agreed to do a dinghy raft up and Eve, on Auntie agreed to pick us up in her dinghy so we could met some of the other crews. We had a great evening with them on the dinghies and then on Hen Island just south of ou anchorage.
The requirement to join the actual club itself is to have made an ocean passage of at least 1,000 miles. We haven’t done that yet, so we have joined as Associate members, and when we arrive in the Azores, we will become full members. We have had a lot of fun with them over the last couple of weeks, and there will be a group of us making the crossing together, which is great.
On Friday we went ashore to watch the dunking of the town gossip and nag. This is a reenactment of what happened in Bermuda when men felt that their women got out of line back in the day. It was fun to watch and I assured Moray that he need not get any ideas 🙂
So, now it’s time to try this again! Tomorrow morning (Monday 27th), we will be setting off for the Azores. And this time, we are going to get there! Stay tuned for small blog updates every other day that we can get a connection on the way.
While we loved Bermuda, we didn’t expect to be back so soon 😳. We had some electrical and steering issues. As we were only one day out, it seemed more sense to come back to Bermuda and fix the issues properly and in safety, than struggle on for another two weeks. We are working on those right now. I’ll send another update when I have more information.
After a good night’s sleep, we spent a lazy morning in the cockpit working out where we wanted to go and what we wanted to see. Our first excursion was into Hamilton, the capital of Bermuda. We needed to get set up with internet and the only place to buy a SIM card at the weekend is in Hamilton. So we headed to the visitor centre, bought bus tokens and took the bus into Hamilton. The trip itself was an experience! The buses are great – clean and comfortable, but the roads were not built for such big vehicles. The drivers don’t seem to mind, however, and drive just as fast as the smaller cars – can be quite hair-raising! The route was very pretty, as we travelled all along the coastline.
Now quite often in our travels, we have arrived somewhere to find that the big event had happened the day before. Not this time! The Bermuda stage of the World Triathlon circuit was taking place, and it was a big deal. The local runner, Flora, had won last year, but unfortunately was injured, but the event was still very popular. The grandstands to watch the event were free, so we had a great view. We cheered on the Brit – Jonathan Brownlee – who didn’t win but put in a great performance. How those guys do that is beyond me. Ingrid Huldal, I am in awe!
after a 1.5 km swim, 40 km bike ride and a 10 km run these guys still looked ready to go!!!
When we arrived back in St. George’s, we headed to the Dinghy Club. There we met Brenda, the bartender, who gave us some tips on the best places to eat and suggested someone to talk to about places to scuba dive. After trying our first “Dark n Stormy” in its birthplace, we headed over to Wahoo’s for dinner. I had the traditional fish sandwich on raisin bread, while Moray tried the “Bermuda Triangle”. We tried to guess what that would be, with my suggestion being an empty plate! It turned out to be a trio of fish, pan-fried rockfish, breaded mahi-mahi and grilled wahoo. Everything was delicious.
Our next excursion was a walk around St. George’s. We first visited Somers Garden, which is a beautiful little garden with lots of different trees.
typical street in St. George
most of the houses had these clinker-roofs used to capture rain water and stored them in tanks under the houses.
cute local coffee vendor
monument commemorating the settlement of the islands in 1609
Convoict Bay where we anchored, Sol Purpose in the background
one of the wrecks in Convict Bay. Most were underwater
these letter boxes reminded us of the UK
Town Cut where boats enter St. Georges harbour.
We then walked up the hill to take a look at the forts. Bermuda was important in protecting British vessels from pirates etc, so there are a lot of forts. They can’t have been much fun to live in, but they served a purpose. Most are just open to walk around, but St. Catherine’s Fort has been restored and is now a museum.
Gates Fort guns
the 9″ muzzle loader gun at Alexandria Battery
the 6″ breech loading guns
entrance to Fort St. Catherine
the dry moat surrounding the fort
an anti aircraft gun that was never stationed at the fort but is here until a proper site can be prepared for it.
the armory
grapeshot cannon guarding the moat drawbridge
built and expanded several times since its first iteration in 1614
It was very interesting, though I must admit, while Moray loved reading all the information about the cannons, I was more taken by the fact that Charlton Heston starred in a performance of Macbeth here! We also met with Patrick here (suggested by Brenda at the Dinghy Club) who told us about Castle Harbour. We could take Sol Purpose there and anchor, and maybe scuba dive from there.
Next stop on our walking tour was Tobacco Bay. This is advertised as the best snorkeling spot on the island, with safe waters, a little café, and a nice beach. It is also one of the stops for the cruise ships, so was packed when we got there. While it was pretty, I doubt there was much fish life, given the number of people in the water, but we sat for a while, had a nice lunch and then continued on our walk. We completed the circuit back down into St. George’s, ending at the Unfinished Church. The history seems to be that a new church was needed so building was begun, but during the building, the congregation split, a fire at another church (St. Peters) caused funds to be diverted for repairs and a second church was built and completed. This one was never finished, and in 1926 was hit by a strong hurricane and damaged further. It now has some structural issues, so you can’t go in, but it is impressive to see.
Idyllic Achilles Bay
Idyllic Dreu’s Bay
this farm filled with cows and goats totally reminded us of Rum Cay in the Bahamas
coast walk approaching Fort St. Catherine
Tobbaco Bay
officially the worst pool table in the world… but what a view!
entrance to the unfinished church
St. Peters church
St. Peters church graveyard
Our next sightseeing was on Wednesday. We bought a full day travel pass, which would allow us to jump on and off any bus or ferry. Our first stop was the Crystal Caves. These caves were discovered when two boys playing cricket lost their ball in a hole. The boys went home, got ropes and kerosene lamps and lowered themselves into the hole. There they found amazing stalagmites and stalactites, along with a beautiful underwater lake. Apparently they spent a few hours swimming before finding their way out again. From the one minute we spent down there in the dark, all I can see is that they are braver than I am!
steps led down to a platform which was installed in the 50s, complete with dinghy
underwater stalagmites showing that the caves were once free of water
view from the end of the pontoons
impressive tree outside caves
Across the street from the caves is the Swizzle Inn, which claims to be the home of the Rum Swizzle, another signature drink of Bermuda. They are delicious – maybe a little too delicious 🙂
Swizzle Inn, stagger out
local fish sandwich
$10 to the first person who can see our boat card 🙂
We had lunch there before hopping back on the bus and over to Wadson’s Farm. This is a 40-acre organic farm, which provides a lot of the local produce on the island. They will also deliver to St. George’s on Fridays, so we looked around, chatted for a while, placed our order (including unrefrigerated eggs in case any boaters out there are looking for these) and then headed back to the bus.
Next stop was Dockyards. This is the new home of the cruise ships and there are usually two here at any one time. This was also the home of the Americas Cup in 2017. Everything here seems to be geared to the cruise ship passengers – water sports, bars, restaurants and shopping. We stopped for a drink at the Frog and Onion before getting a ferry back to Hamilton.
2 of the skyline wreckers at the Dockyards
Wednesday nights are Harbour Nights in Hamilton. Front Street is closed to traffic, and street vendors set up booths selling food, jewelry and all manner of trinkets.
We walked around for a little while and then got a roadside table at the Dog House. We had a great view of everything that was going on, and lots of people stopped to talk to us. I don’t think that’s because we are anything special – much more likely because we had a tower of beer! It started lots of conversations, especially when we added a plate of 50 wings!
our first of 2 towers of beer!
For us, the main attraction was the Gombey dancing. I’ll let the video describe that to you. The video is a little long but the drum solos at the end are great.
Thursday’s weather was lovely, so we pulled up the anchor and headed round to Castle Harbour. There is a cut through the coral here, which was very well charted so it was a relatively simple ride in.
There are a couple of mooring balls there, so we picked up one of those and then jumped in the water. We had a lovely afternoon of swimming and snorkeling. The highlight for me was when Moray found a cannon under the water!
Friday morning, we dropped the mooring ball and headed back into St. George’s Harbour. The waves had picked up a little so it was a bit of a bumpy ride back into the anchorage but once through the cut it was fine. The forecast was for some windy weather over the weekend so we wanted to make sure the anchor was well set, but once done, we headed back to shore. I did the laundry, while Moray went to meet the delivery from Wadson’s farm.
Saturday and Sunday was very windy, so we spent most of our time on board. The one time we ventured out, we just went over to visit Mike, Mel, Ben and Matt on Talaria. They had arrived Saturday morning, after a 5 day run from Portsmouth. It was Cinco De Mayo, so Mike and Mel treated us all to tacos! Wonderful!
Our only other excursion has been to the Blue Hole. We headed out, armed with cameras, swimsuits and a flashlight and spent a couple of hours checking out all the trails, most of which end with a cave. Unlike the Crystal Caves, these are free to visit, but that means they are unlit. I wasn’t too keen on going in, but Moray persuaded me and I have to confess they were beautiful.
several caves were fed with sea water as the park was coastal
all the caves were unlit and so hard to navigate or photograph
the coastline at Tom Moore’s Jungle
nice stalagtite formations
After doing that, we headed back to the Blue Hole itself, which is a sea-fed lake. It is clear and full of fish, and surrounded by low cliffs. It is one of the spots in Bermuda where it is safe to cliff-jump, which Moray loves. Moray headed round to the 15 foot jump, and I tried to video him jumping. I’m not the best videographer, but I think you get the idea!
I had no interest in jumping but swimming was lovely. We had been there a little while when a tour group came and their guide pointed out all the places where it was safe to jump, including one 10ft cliff. I don’t know what came over me, but suddenly I found myself at the top, preparing to jump! I doubt I will ever do it again, but now I can say I have cliff-jumped!
After drying off, we headed back to the Swizzle Inn for more of those delicious drinks and food! We got talking to a couple who had flown in for a week’s vacation from Boston, and after a while another couple who had arrived that day on a cruise ship asked if they could join us. We had a great time chatting with them, so all decided to carry on the day at Harbour Nights. One of these days, we will figure out that we are not in our twenties anymore!
One of the couples, Evgenia and Ruslan, came to St. Georges the next day, and we brought them out to Sol Purpose for a while. We had planned to head over to Castle Island but the forecast the next day was for 7-8 foot waves on the nose on the way back so we just spent time on the boat. Then we all went for a walk around the town, before finishing the day at Wahoo’s.
It is now Saturday, and we have found our weather window to head for the Azores. Chris Parker who we signed up for weather forecasting agrees as does several other sources of information (Fast Seas, Predict Wind, Passage Weather). Therefore today will be will be laundry and grocery shopping day, stowing things away on the boat so we are ready to head out on Sunday morning after refueling.
We will try to continue short blogs every 2 days to keep everyone updated of our progress. Again, don’t worry if you don’t see these blogs as communication will get trickier the further we get away from the US. We will file another float plan with our friend Edwin who knows what to do in case we have issues.
The day was finally here! We got up early on Sunday April 21st to get all the last minute stowage done before departure. This involved making sure nothing could fly around and cause damage, as well as some things we have learned to do through bitter experience in the past. For example, when we are heeled to starboard, water can flow into our forward head sink. To avoid that, we now close the thru-hull to that sink when we are underway.
At about 8:30am, we said our goodbyes to Bob and Clare, Lisa and Gary, Dave, Beth and Lilly, before leaving New Bern and heading off down the Neuse river. After a few hours we turned into the ICW and headed to Jarrats Fuel Dock to top off the tanks before continuing on through Morehead City and out to Cape Hatteras. While the timing was great for getting the current to help us down the ICW, it was not ideal for getting out through the inlet and we faced some huge waves. First casualty was the dinghy. We had strapped it down on to the foredeck, and when one particularly big wave hit, one of the straps broke. So before even getting out very far, Moray was wearing his lifejacket and harness, trying to lash down the dinghy before it went overboard! Soon everything was secure and we plowed forward until we were clear of the inlet and the waves were a reasonable size.
We were soon to find that this was not the only casualty of the waves – I had carefully stowed everything away, but left a multipack of toilet paper on the shelf in the forward head, thinking that as they were soft, no damage would be done if they fell. I was wrong 😦 . The pack of rolls fell and landed on the tap. The pack had just enough weight to tilt the tap open. The whole 70 gallon tank of water was empty before we discovered what was happening. But to compound the problem, remember we had closed the sink drain off. That meant that there was nowhere for the water to go, other than the bathroom floor. There was water everywhere, which the bilge pump was doing its best to remove! Oh well, it was clean water so no harm done to the boat, though some of the toilet rolls didn’t make it! And thank goodness for the watermaker!
Once the mess was all cleaned up, we turned on the watermaker, set the genoa, switched off the motor and settled in for the trip. Over the past few years we have installed various items to help with ocean crossings. The first was a DuoGen generator. We have sometimes been a little disappointed with the performance of the wind part, but we cannot say the same of the hydro part. It produces more electricity than we need, so running the watermaker was no problem at all. The windvane that Moray installed over the winter is going to take some getting used to though. It sometimes works great, but at others, the windvane doesn’t seem able to hold a course. I’m sure it is a combination of needing to tweak it, and learning how to get the best out of it. I hope so, anyway!
Monday saw casualty number 3. I was in the galley making a cup of coffee. While in New Bern, I had made a galley strap so that I could be a bit more secure in there and I was trying to clip it in place when we heeled over.
I didn’t have a hand to grab onto anything and fell backwards into the doorway of the aft head, hitting my left side on the door frame and banging my head. No major damage was done, either to me or the boat, though I had some pretty impressive bruises! I can confirm, however, that once the strap is clipped in properly, it works great!
Around 7pm on Monday, the wind died so we decided to start the motor to keep our speed up. The other benefit was that it would give us some hot water for showers the next day.
On Tuesday morning, Moray was to send the first of our promised blog updates so that friends and family could track our progress. It turns out that the SSB does not like to transmit when the motor is running, so it seemed like a good time to turn it off and go back to sailing. We put up the Code 0 and were instantly speeding along at 6 knots! This is when we discovered that the windvane cannot always handle our situation, so we switched over to the autopilot which worked beautifully. So with the boat sailing herself, we were able to take showers! Such a treat! So the trip settled in to the usual routine of watches, sleeping, reading, sleeping ….
Interesting event of the day was that when Moray flushed the toilet in the dark, using the seawater flush, he got quite a shock when the bowl turned green. It was phosphorescence in the bowl 🙂
The next couple of days continued much the same, though we did put out the genoa rather than the Code 0. We had a visitor as we always seem to do on longer crossings. A small bird used our boa as a rest stop on their journey. They stayed with us for about 2 hours before flying off.
On Thursday, when we got the updated weather forecast, we saw that the winds were going to die and then on Saturday, storms could roll in. We decided to sail as long as the winds let us, but keeping an eye on our progress to ensure that we could get in on Friday, before dark. At 8pm we made the decision to motor the rest of the way.
On Friday morning, Moray threw out a fishing line to see if anything would bite, but no luck.
We both took showers so that we would be presentable for the Customs Officers! I was sitting in the cockpit while Moray finished his shower. Suddenly, I was screaming to Moray to get above deck! A humpback whale breached about half a mile in front of the boat! It was the most incredible sight. Unfortunately Moray didn’t see the whole thing but he did see the spout and the whale’s back arching as he dived back down. Amazing!
When we were about 30 miles from Bermuda, Moray radioed in and was given instructions on what to do on closer approach. As we were getting ready to approach St. George’s, a huge cruise ship, the Norwegian Escape, came out of Hamilton, but was out well before we needed to enter. Following the Bermuda Radio instructions, we came into St. George’s Harbour and tied off at the Customs dock. The Officer greeted us and asked a few questions. It turns out that the information we had been given about Moray’s pole-spears was incorrect and they are illegal here in Bermuda. It wasn’t a problem. We handed them in to the Customs Officer, who gave us a receipt. We will just pick them up when we clear out of the country. Entry fees paid, customs declarations made, passports stamped and we were done. We left the Customs Dock and headed over to the anchorage in Convicts Bay. It took a couple of attempts to set the anchor, but soon we were done. We dropped the dinghy in the water, cleared everything that was stowed on the bed, and then sat down in the cockpit to enjoy our first Bermudian sunset.
All in all, it was a great trip. There are things we need to sort out with the boat, but for the most part, everything worked great. We are glad to spend a few days relaxing in Bermuda, seeing what this beautiful island has to offer before heading off on the next leg of our trip.
We will post another blog before we leave in about a week so stay tuned. We promise lots of pictures next time 🙂
Sol Purpose 