TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

Hello all. Sorry for being late to post this, but this is where the sailing part of this trip started to really get serious. We’d gone well East of the fleet, thinking that when the weather settled down, we’d get Easterlies going South, and if not, at the very least we’d avoid having to have the wind forward of the beam for the trip, while others might well have to tack into Tortola. As it turned out, the weather had other ideas, and this was our first day of serious, full on, open ocean sailing. Wind picked up out of the NE with a base of 22.5 knots from 070 degs, and considerably higher gusts. We had big (16 ft+) following seas pretty much dead astern, and we starting to look down into troughs that were an old schoolhouse and a church steeple short of being valleys!

So what do you do when you’re 500 miles from nowhere, the sea’s up, and you haven’t seen another vessel in days? No? Surfing contest of course! In this case “SOG” or “Speed Over Ground” Surfing. For a time, it appeared that Cap’n Jim’s 13.2 would hold, but it was not to be, as Admiral Jaeger hooked up with one at 20:00 hours and buried the pedal for a 13.4, meeting the minimum .2 knot difference required by the world SOG surfing organization. That seemed to pretty much do it for the trip. Mind you, this is a 38,000 lb boat, under reefed main and stay’sl, dragging a diesel, a separate gen set, a watermaker, fuel, water and provisions for, like, 30 people (we’re just a tad overprovisioned), a full galley, woodwork galore, and two heads, dropping into a 16-20 foot swell, and goin’ for the record. The best runs of the day, we noticed, were in the puffs. Otto the Autopilot (and the rules of SOG Surfing do dictate that you at least START your run on autopilot. . . but I digress) . . . anyway, Otto is lazy about paddling to get on the wave, so a good 30 knot puff is what you need to get on the face. And lemme tell you, this was some good sailing. We expected easterlies down this track, but not in the 25-30 range. And unlike the run through the Gulf Stream, nobody cared about the in your bunk or on deck rule of thumb — because the weather was clear, and looking down from 18’ up into the troughs was just too much to miss.

This sort of thing is impossible to capture in photos, as the wave heights always flatten out in two dimensions, but I did at least attempt a couple of short video clips which, if things actually worked, I’ll try to post for ya’ when we get in.