Preparing to Cross the Atlantic Ocean under sail

After two years sailing the East Coast of North America, we’re heading across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe this summer. Our route will take us from The Bahamas to the south of England via Bermuda and The Azores. We sail off this Sunday the 26th.

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Q & A

Q: How many sailors are aboard for this trip?

A: Two, Chris & Alex.

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Q: How long will this trip take you?

A: Let’s look at the three legs independently:

Leg #1: Bahamas to Bermuda: About 750NM, about 8 days sailing give or take a lot.

Leg #2: Bermuda to Flores, The Azores: About 1700NM, about 17 days give or take a lot.

Leg # 3: Horta, The Azores to Falmouth, England: About 1200NM, about 12 days give or take.

(Starting to see how the math works here? 4 knots of average speed = 96 miles in 24 hours. Sailing across the ocean at walking speed – yup.)

In total, about 30 – 40 days of sailing. Plus we plan to stay in both Bermuda and The Azores for a while to rest, re-provision, make any needed repairs, be tourists, and wait for a good weather window for the next leg. While in The Azores, we hope to visit several islands and fill in the break in the above schedule between Flores and Horta. Two months total for the crossing sounds about right.

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Q: Will we be able to keep track of your progress from shore?

A: Yes. We will post log updates on our online boat tracker page every 12 hours at 00:00 and 12:00 UTC. That page will also show where we are geographically in real time and show the weather conditions we’re experiencing.

https://eaglesevensailing.com/where-in-the-world-is-sundance/

Our track will probably not be a straight line from where we start and where we’re headed. Instead, we are likely to zig and zag this way and that in an effort to find the most favorable wind (and favorable wind angles) for sailing. It’s also entirely possible that we will stop altogether out there because we have too much wind, or not enough wind, or we need to fix something, or we’ve decided to pause and let weather ahead of us move thru. Bottom line: If our tracker shows an odd course or no movement at all, this should not be cause for alarm.

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Q: Will you be able to get weather forecasts while out in the ocean?

A: Yes. We will be able to look at weather reports using both the Starlink and the Iridium Go! satellite systems. We are also working with a human weather router onshore who will email us updated forecasts and routing suggestions on a regular schedule. If both satellite systems remain in good working order we will occasionally be able to check other email and have a cursory look at other corners of the internet as needed–like Red Sox scores–but our data allotment is limited out there at sea and weather details will be our priority.

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Q: Will you be able to call for help if you have an emergency?

A: We have a lot of equipment, training and experience that will hopefully allow us to resolve most problems ourselves. If we are in need of outside help, and our satellite systems are still working, we can use them to call for rescue with a simple phone call. Or we could call nearby stations with our VHF radio. If there are no nearby stations and we have lost our satellite systems, we can still call for rescue using our EPIRBS. These are stand alone units that summon help to our position with the push of a button. We have one in our ditch bag so we can call for help from our life raft, if needed. We also have an EPIRB built into each of our life jackets so we can even call for help should we happen to fall overboard. (We also have tethers that clip between our life jackets and the boat to help make sure we don’t fall overboard.)

If we are near-coastal, rescue would likely come from the US Coast Guard, or a similar agency from a foreign country. If we are mid-ocean, rescue would likely come from a commercial ship in the area. 90% of the world’s commercial ships participate in the AMVER program. If called upon, these ships are required to rescue fellow mariners in distress. In return for their service, member ships get a break on their insurance premiums. We expect that one such ship will never be farther from 6 hours from us as we work our way across the ocean.

If we were to be rescued, and our boat was still floating, we would most likely be expected to open valves to sink her on our way out so that she wouldn’t be a floating hazard to others. Such a rescue would obviously be a last resort and only called for in the most dire situations.

***IMPORTANT*** We are the only ones who should call for our rescue. None of you, our readers, friends, family, should ever, under any circumstances, report to the Coast Guard that we are in any sort of distress or even remotely in need of possible rescue. If our tracker stops working, or if we go quiet while out there, that does not mean we need rescue. We could easily lose communications but still be in fine shape and easily capable of reaching port safely. We do not want to put rescue professionals in harm’s way looking for us when we are not in distress. Please let us take responsibility for a call for help.

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Q: Do you worry about running out of food and water?

A: We have no freezer aboard and eventually we will run out of perishable foods. When that happens we will fall back on non-perishable foods. Like cookies! We could fish along the way too, but historically that has not been one of our strengths. We have plenty of food aboard.

For water, we have a water-maker that will desalinate seawater and provide us with an unlimited supply of freshwater for drinking, dish washing, and bathing. We’ll be sure to keep our two water tanks at least half full in case that water-maker machine breaks down. With half our tankage of water we’ll be just fine on this trip if drinking is the only thing we do with it. We also have a rain water collection system that we could put to work in rainy weather. And I think there is some water in those cans of vegetables we have aboard too.

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Q: I suspect that lights, navigation equipment, Starlink internet service, and water-making requires a lot of battery power. How do you manage that?

A: Yes, a lot of power is required to run all the gear we have aboard. We produce that power and keep our batteries charged with 700 watts of solar power and by towing a hydro-generator that spins a propeller in our wake to produce power when we are sailing. If both charging systems are in good working order, we have plenty of power.

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Q: If there is no wind, can you just motor across the ocean?

A: No. Not even close. Even with our additional 20 gallons of diesel on deck in our ugly yellow bonus fuel tanks, we only carry enough fuel to motor for about 250 miles. We’ll need some wind to get across.

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Q: Do you stop to sleep?

A: Yup. We take the sails down, make a cup of herbal tea, put on our pajamas, kiss goodnight, and go to sleep just like regular people. Just kidding! In truth, we just keep going 24-hours-a-day. The motion onboard is actually more comfortable when we are moving than if we were to just stop and lay ahull to the weather. We also need to keep a lookout for traffic if we’re moving or not. And why turn a 2 month trip into a 4 month trip? So we keep going 24-hours-a-day and take turns sleeping. Two hours on, two hours off; hot-bunking in a single sleeping bag optimally positioned down below when off-watch. This is a somewhat unorthodox watch schedule. Most double-handed crews will stand longer watches and enjoy longer off-watches to match. In our case, we rotate frequently because Chris is obsessed with sweeping eyes on deck and horizon frequently. (Boo, says Alex, why can’t we just sleep for 3 or 4 hours at a time like normal sailors? Crew drama!) We sleep a lot during the day too.

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Q: Do your hands get tired from steering the boat all day and night?

A: No. We never steer the boat by hand. The wind vane steers most of the time by maintaining a constant wind angle. The rest of the time the autopilot steers by maintaining a constant compass course. When we stand watch, we mostly just keep a lookout for ship traffic and adjust sails for wind changes. Plenty of time for reading, looking at weather online, posting a log update, making coffee, etc.

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Q: Are you worried about hurricanes?

A: Yes. We are also worried about late winter storms in the North Atlantic. Our timing is designed to fit us neatly between these twin risks so as to minimize the exposure to both. This year’s hurricane season has been forecasted to be extremely active. Sounds bad, right? Well, when you look into it more closely you learn that the prognosis is more nuanced. An active season is bad, but it’s important to ask, “bad for whom?” The answer usually is land-dwellers. This year’s hurricane season is forecasted to be rich with “Low-Riders” which are storms that stay at low latitudes and plow into the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and Florida. This is bad for the people that live in those places. In contrast, during a “mild” hurricane year, the storms tend to instead track “harmlessly out to sea.” Well, for those of us out to sea, it’s not so harmless. A good year to cross the Atlantic from West to east is when the hurricanes track low and west and that’s what we have forecasted for this summer. A strong and stable Bermuda/Azore high pressure area is what keeps these hurricanes south.  This strong and stable high should also produce helpful tail winds for us in the middle and longest section of our route between Bermuda and The Azores.  Our course will likely push north of the rhumb line during this leg to take advantage of these predicted westerly winds. Unfortunately, forecasted weather patterns are not 100% reliable. We will constantly be keeping an eye out for tropical storm development. We’re confident that should a bad storm head our way, we will have plenty of advance warning and will hopefully be able to alter course and keep ourselves out of harms way.

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Q: ?

A: Shoot us a note by email and we will be happy to try and answer.

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This just in from, WRI, our weather router:

A broad ridge of HIGH PRESSURE extending across Florida and the Bahamas will remain broad with slight strengthening on the 26th into the 27th, before the ridge broadens thereafter through the 30th. Slightly stronger ridging is expected to build SE’ward across the NE’rn Gulf of Mexico to the Florida Panhandle by the morning of the 31st, with the stronger ridging becoming oriented across the remainder of the Florida Peninsula and Bahamas as a vast HIGH becomes centered and stationed along much of the East Coast.

A broad area of LOW PRESSURE will develop along the E’rn Carolinas by the early morning of the 26th and is expected to weaken into a trough as it lifts NE’ward and extends to the NW of Bermuda by the morning of the 27th, before dissipating thereafter.

A COLD FRONT extending from Nova Scotia, SW’ward across the Delmarva will see the front weaken as it shifts E’ward through the morning of the 26th before it weakens and dissipates through the morning of the 27th. A WARM FRONT extending across the N’rn Appalachians on the morning of the 27th will lift NE’ward across New York State and New England through that evening, while an associated COLD FRONT shifts to the East Coast through the morning of the 28th when it will extend from interior New England, SW’ward across the E’rn Carolinas to S’rn Georgia. The front will weaken as it shifts offshore through the morning of the 30th.

A broad area of LOW PRESSURE will develop across the Delmarva on the morning of the 29th and lift NE’ward across S’rn New England by the early morning of the 30th as it strengthens into a GALE. This GALE will continue to shift NE’ward and become centered in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence by the early morning of the 31st while an associated COLD FRONT extends SW’ward to the N’rn Bahamas and S’rn Florida by that time.

Conclusions: We looked into your departure from Marsh Harbour and the good news is it is valid to get underway as soon as tomorrow. The TROPICAL concerns we had previously discussed are not expected to be a concern, and routing on a RL route will offer you the shortest, most direct option to Bermuda. This route will still give you decent sailing angles and there will be periods of favorable sailing over the course of the next several days with this departure. There will likely be a couple of periods of motoring, however, as the ridge is, by and large, expected to remain quite broad over the course of this next week, meaning, you would need to delay for at least several more days, if not longer before a window allowing minimal motoring would open. Winds will tend to increase closer to Bermuda as the result of a COLD FRONT that will be shifting E’ward, closer to that time.

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We’ve left Marsh Harbor and are now anchored behind Man-O-War Cay. We’ll be sailing east soon. Our plan is to wait out the calms tomorrow and sail off on Sunday morning. The dinghy is stowed and the next land we stand on will be Bermuda, God willing.

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