Happy New Year to you all!
We have now arrived in Barbados and have had a good trip from the Canaries. We have now clocked up overt 5, 0000 miles.
Internet connection is internet café only here so we have been a bit slow getting around to updating the Blog, so far we have just been enjoying being here and recovering from our trip.
We left Lanzarote on the 30th of November to start the crossing unfortunately Chris and I had a bit of a tummy bug and all on board seemed out of sorts. We decided to stop off at Santa Cruz, La Palma for a couple of days. After deciding the fresh water at Lanzarote was to blame we emptied our tanks and filled up with good water. We left La Palma on the 5th of December to resume the Atlantic crossing.
Our first strange encounter was a radio message from a support vessel helping a rowing boat crossing the Atlantic. We realised there were more than one in the area and for quite a few miles we were extra vigilant. Later that night we passed a very slow moving small boat, which we assumed was another of the rowers. We didn’t see another boat for three days.
After having sailed nearly three thousand miles to reach the Canary Islands with the winds either too slight or against us, we finally had winds in our favour. Since leaving the Canary Islands the winds were with us most of the way. We tried various downwind sail settings, goose winging, twin fore sails and spinnaker. Mostly we sailed goose-winged with the genoa sheeted out. The winds rarely blew above a force six and Octopus was very easy to handle. Apart from the sleep disruption, the trip was very easy. Octopus is a very dry boat; apart from when Ruth and Rob risked leaving their hatch open and we were pooped soaking their cabin (twice).
We had a practice man over board in the middle of the Atlantic when Chris dropped the cat litter tray over the side. I brought Octopus up to it in a very lumpy sea but the tray sunk when Chris tried to grab it with fishing net, luckily we had a spare.
I love the night watches, especially when I no longer have to put on so many layers of clothes and wet weather gear. About two or three days after leaving the Canaries the difference in the temperature was very noticeable and it was great to be free of all the layers being able to get out of bed and just slip into shorts and t-shirt. Getting up is always hard at two, or four in the morning and I always set my alarm to wake me up fifteen minutes early to allow for getting dressed, cleaning teeth etc., and a look at the log to see what has been happening during the last watch. Before long I only needed five minutes to get ready because there was no need to fasten up all the zips and clips which goes with wet weather gear and I could spend ten minutes chatting to Ruth who I took over from at each watch.
Once up at the helm on my own I soon woke up, the ideal night was when the warm wind was blowing and the stars were bright. When you are at sea the stars are so much brighter and so many more of them; the moon seems larger and you begin to notice other planets rising or setting while you are on watch. When the moon is high and bright it can be as light as dawn, the clouds stop hiding and the horizon can be seen miles away and the moon casts a big pool of glistening light on the sea. Another night might be without a moon or stars and you could be any where, perhaps floating in the sky, totally disorientated by the blackness apart from the odd white crest of a wave breaking. All sense of distance is lost and there is no way of telling where the sea ends and the sky begins. Lean out over the side of the boat and the phosphorescence sparkles like fairy dust.
The flying fish are fascinating to watch, they spring from the sea and glide for well over thirty seconds before disappearing back into the waves glinting silver in the moonlight. Sometimes there are other shining lives in the sea, maybe jelly fish or sea monsters eyes, but they shine back at you and give you a comforting feeling to know there is other life out in the ocean. I have been lucky enough to be on night watches when the dolphins have come and played around the boat. Then I like to go to the bow of the boat and watch them playing off the bow. One black night it was so dark I knew they were there as I could hear them, but I couldn’t see them. I moved forward away from the dim light of the instruments and could only just make them out by the phosphorescence glow around them and trailing in their wake.
We had lots of flying fish landing on board Octopus; Bosun enjoyed eating them in the morning once we collected them off the deck and gutted the larger ones. I was woken up by the first flying fish, flying though the hatch and landing in bed with me, they are very fishy smelling and jump around a lot so it’s not a pleasant experience. Rob had to do better and managed to be caught by them flying through his hatch three times in one week, once slapping him on the head. We also had a half-beak land on board, they are related to the flying fish but they have a very long lower jaw. We saw lots of dolphins on our trip, two whales very close to the boat and a shark. We managed to catch some Dorados but didn’t have as much luck with the fishing as I would have liked.
Our daily routine when we were sailing the Atlantic revolved around the watches. Our watch system rotated every four days, three hour watches during the day and two hour watches at night. Depending on what time you were on night watch depended on how lively you felt the next day, some days it seemed to take a long time to recover from a night watch, especially if you had been called up again that night for some reason. We all spent a lot of time reading and sleeping and I spent a lot of time cooking while Ruth spent a lot of her time washing-up.
We ate well on our trip; we had a freezer on board and plenty of tined and dried foods and we found that the fresh fruit and vegetables kept better then we had expected. When our inverter broke half way we had to empty the freezer in about five days, we ended up having our Christmas dinner on the 20th of December. I made the bread on my night watches and Chris baked it on his, so we had a good routine going. We had Christmas day at sea, each of the children had a box full of little gifts and games from us and my Mum had given them each a board game, so we have been playing games on board ever since.
We arrived at Barbados on the 28th of December. I took over the watch from Ruth that morning at four and asked her if she had seen anything and just at that moment the first lights of Barbados appeared on the horizon. Over the next hour more and more lights appeared and as the sun came up it was good to see land. We reported into the harbour authorities at Bridgetown just after the Queen Mary and then we motored back along the coast to Carlisle Bay. We anchored just off the beautiful sandy beach among other yachts from the UK, France, Canada and Holland. It wasn’t long before we all jumped into that very inviting warm water. Of course now we can’t keep the children out of the water.
They swim to the beach at least once a day and play in the water around Octopus most of the time. I like a swim in the early morning and when the children want to swim over to the beach I kayak over carrying all the buckets and spades etc. The only down side to our present anchorage is the loud music, it’s not every night but when it starts it goes on all night and into the morning. We are here for at least another week then we are off to Tobago. Ruth and Rob are then leaving us to go exploring and to look for another crewing position. We will miss them but it is nice to have time with just our family and it will give us more space for friends and family to visit.
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