Our West to East Atlantic Ocean Crossing

Atlantic Crossing Totals:
Man-O-War Cay, Abacos, Bahamas
To
Scilly Islands, UK
With extended stops in Bermuda and The Azores.
Departure: May 26, 2024
Arrival: August 9, 2024
Miles logged: 3747
Hours underway: 658.5 (27.4 days)
Sailing: 95.2%
Motoring or motor sailing: 4.8%
Best noon to noon 24-hour run: 168.6NM (7.0 knots average speed)
Slowest noon to noon 24-hour run: 56.5NM (2.4 knots average speed)

(Above statistics do not include 295.6 nautical miles of inter-island sailing in the Azores that cumulatively brought us 99 nautical miles closer to England.)

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Leg 1:

Man-O-War, Abacos, Bahamas

to

St. George’s, Bermuda

May 26, 2024 – May 31, 2024

Abacos to Bermuda stats:
Mileage logged: 758 NM
Engine hours: 0.8 hours
Sailing hours: 123 hours (5.1 days)
Average speed: 6.1 knots

Steady SE winds produced fast sailing on a comfortable starboard tack reach for every mile out to Bermuda. The sun was shining, and we couldn’t have asked for a better start.

Along the way, we saw two German warships from afar, one freighter at an even greater range, a few whales, tons of flying fish, (including a quite a few marooned on deck after failed night-flights), one shark (brownish), a small gray plastic beverage crate, and thousands of dolphins. We saw no other sailboats, no mega-yachts, no fishing boats, and no Soviet warships bound for Cuba. The horizon was almost always clear on all sides.

Despite sailing in the Bermuda Triangle for the entirety of this leg, nothing fishy happened. Our ideal weather window included no squally frontal passages and no thunderstorms. Lucky us. We never gybed, tacked, reefed, or turned on the engine. We were becalmed for four hours at one point, during which we dropped the sails and bobbed around waiting it out. When the wind filled back in, it came from a similar southerly direction, and we carried on as before. Then, one morning an island loomed out of the darkness ahead, and Bermuda Radio welcomed us into their Mid-Atlantic oasis.

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A seven day respite in Bermuda

Arriving into St. George’s Harbour was a visible reminder of why we decided to try this way of living; the anchorage was full of boats hailing from all around the world. In short order we made friends from France, Austria, Holland, and the U.S., and reconnected with many of those boats later in the Azores.

We had a week to spend exploring and were rewarded with all sorts of island delights, from youth sailing, to a Friday night dance competition, to a raffle drawing at the local mini yacht club (sadly, we did not win the paper towels). We rode the bus to Hamilton to check out the yacht-iest of yacht clubs and visualize where our friend Hattie would arrive when she finished her Annapolis to Hamilton race in a few weeks’ time. We took in the pink sand beaches on the south side of the island. (That bus will take you anywhere!) We enjoyed the friendliness and hospitality of the locals–Bermudians are among the most welcoming of people.

Alex found a local yoga teacher and spent several blissful mornings with her new friend Emily, getting her downward dog on. We ate maybe the best fish sandwich ever at Munchies. The key is the sauce and the raisin bread. We played posh a couple of evenings with a cocktail at the St. Regis, enjoying its stunning views of the Atlantic out the huge windows. We even went to church! All in all, a perfect visit, and while we were excited to get going for the rest of the big crossing, we could have stayed, happily. Thank you, Bermuda.

Read more about our stop in Bermuda in the

June/July 2025 issue of SAIL Magazine.

Link below:

Bermuda Bound – by Christopher Birch – SAIL Magazine June/July 2025

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Leg 2:

St. George’s, Bermuda

to

Flores, Azores, Portugal

June 7, 2024 – June 20, 2024

Bermuda – Azores Stats:

Mileage logged: 1783 NM
Engine hours: 2.0
Sailing hours: 317.5
Time underway: 319.5 Hours (13.3 days)
Average speed: 5.6 knots

There’s a reason we keep using more or less the same photo angle for the sailing shots in this post: because this is what it was like. Our sailing experience wasn’t changing. We were reaching fast on starboard tack for all of Leg 1 and almost all of Leg 2. Traffic remained light, and our horizon stayed clear. As we moved north and east, the flying fish thinned out, and Portuguese man-o-war slowly took their place on the sea surface–perhaps drawn to the Portuguese spoken in the Azores.

Fortunately, seasickness wasn’t an issue for us. We stood our watches–two hours on, two hours off. Alex cooked amazing meals, we logged twice a day both on paper and in our online tracker, we downloaded weather, we checked long-range AIS info online, we read lots of books, and we took lots of naps. It was blissful, but it wasn’t like riding on a cruise ship. Sailing a small boat offshore, even in the best of times, includes a lot of motion. Photos just can’t convey this part. They say if you want to make a wave small, take a picture of it. A quote from our log post adds color:

“I think the average person would be surprised how bouncy life is out here. The motion is constant and sometimes extreme. Injuries from galley burns and cabin falls are statistically our greatest concern. I got into our hot-bunk (comfortably situated amidships on the leeward side) on my last off-watch, and I’m literally flying up into the air and thudding back down into the bunk every six seconds. And I figure, ‘There’s no way I’m going to get any sleep.’ Then, the next thing I know, the alarm clock is going off, two hours have gone by, and I realize I had slept like a log while being tossed like a stick.

Victory!

Then Alex, seeing me wake, says, ‘You shat on the floor in the bathroom (head) AGAIN!’

I greet this news with sadness and humiliation, but not with surprise. I’m here to tell you people, I don’t shit on the floor in the bathroom on land–at least not yet–but there’s no telling what’s going to happen in there when you’re bouncing off the walls trying to do your business with your pants around your ankles and the toilet lid thumping you on the back. It’s like being one of those lottery ball zooming around spastically in the air tumbler at lottery headquarters as seen on TV. I’ve stumbled out of that little closet bleeding from the head more than once. Not easy.

So, still half asleep, I mumble my apologies and make my way back in there to the scene of the crime with Clorox spray and paper towels. Suddenly, our 36′ boat feels super long when I have to get all the way from the companionway where the Clorox spray bottle lives, up past the mast step where the toilet sits, with paper towels and a spray bottle clutched in one hand and only 2 legs and one remaining hand to help me inch the 12 feet forward between the two spots.

And this is all in good weather. Calm weather. A 2 out of 10 in terms of storminess. And yet, the only thing that stays in place is the coffee pot, thanks to the stove gimbal and pot grabber bars.  We need something like that in the men’s room.

People ask, “Why don’t you take along a third crew member so you can get more rest?”  Boy, I’m glad we didn’t. The last thing we need aboard is a third mouth to feed and what happens thereafter. Even if they are not seasick, and most people would be, it’s still not necessarily going to end well. It’s a really intimate life we live here in this little boat. We get plenty of rest, thank you very much, and we’ll keep the head count to a minimum.

Truth. ” – June 15, 12:00UTC, Day 9

Our sailing weather was fair the whole way. We never saw anything above 35 knots of wind at any point during our entire Atlantic crossing. It’s hard to think about the concept of enduring a hurricane offshore.

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We finally reached the Azores High a couple hundred miles before landfall, and the wind first went finicky, and then went completely calm. With not enough fuel to get us where we were going, we sat and waited. At this point, we were deep into a sailing zone mindset, and the wait wasn’t a bother. Instead, we found it relaxing and simply enjoyed the tranquility of it all.

It went on like this for a few days. Then the breeze returned, and we sailed the last few hundred miles into Flores quickly. I don’t think it rained once during this entire 13+ day leg, and we arrived with an incredibly thick coating of salt on deck.

This was our longest passage yet, and we celebrated anchor down with a bottle of champagne gifted to us by our Bermuda friends, Will and Emily, at 8AM local time.

We’d been sleeping two hours on and two hours off thru all the days and nights and miles. The experience of being at sea was disorienting, and we couldn’t really tell if we were tired or not while offshore. When we finally reached land, we stayed awake until sunset easily, then slept thru the night easily, and awoke the next day at a reasonable hour. We can only conclude that we were getting our needed rest during our weeks offshore. It’s amazing how the body can adapt.

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A six-week cruise in The Azores

We made landfall in the Azores on the island of Flores, then eventually moved on to Horta on Faial (see photo above), then over to São Jorge, and lastly on to São Miguel. In total, it added up to a six-week stay, and there were five other inhabited islands in the archipelago that we never got to visit.

People told us we would love these islands, and they were so right. We hope these photos help share the experience:

Read more about our time sailing the Azores in the

October 2025 issue of SAIL Magazine.

Link below:

Sailing The Azores – by Christopher Birch – SAIL Magazine October 2025

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Leg 3:

San Miguel, Azores, Portugal

to

Isles of Scilly, UK

July 31, 2024 – August 9, 2024

Azores, Portugal – Isles of Scilly, UK stats:

Mileage logged: 1206.2 NM
Engine hours: 28.5
Sailing hours: 186.5
Time underway: 215 Hours (9 days)
Average speed: 5.6 knots

This leg promised to deliver our most challenging sailing. First, we would have to fight our way out of the calms usually found in the Azores High without burning all our fuel. Then, we would need to contend with more volatile and irregular weather systems in the higher latitudes near England.

We waited a long time for the perfect weather window, but when that failed to materialize, we decided not to let “perfect” be the enemy of “good” and sailed off with a nagging feeling of uncertainty about the weather ahead. Fortunately, things worked out well. We made steady progress in the light air in the first few days. When we arrived into the wind belt, we found good sailing both reaching and running. The seawater changed from blue to black, and the air grew colder and wetter as we worked our way north and east. More time was spent below decks. We saw the strongest weather of the trip in the last two days as we approached the continent. Our course had us running dead downwind with the jib poled out in rain and fog, with the wind occasionally gusting above 30 knots. This is when we logged our fastest day of the trip, and the speed was exhilarating.

A few French fishing boats crossed close to us as we approached the continent, but most of the English Channel shipping traffic stayed to our south and east making for a less hectic traffic pattern than we had expected.

Bishop Rock Lighthouse loomed into view during our last morning at sea. A few hours later, we picked up a mooring in Hugh Town in the misty Isles of Scilly, where we cleared into the UK. And just like that, the Atlantic Ocean had been crossed.

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A few parting thoughts on the crossing:

Chris:

The other sailors we met in Bermuda, the Azores, and the Scillies are what I will remember the most from this crossing. It was rewarding to connect and share stories with these like-minded people doing the same thing with their summer that we were doing with ours. Every one of us sailed a long way to reach these places and that helped to create a tight bond.

Sailing our home to such a diverse range of places was even more thrilling than I had expected it could be. Every day brought so many new sights, and our boat always felt like the most ideal base to explore them from. When we arrived into the UK someone asked us if we made a bee-line straight to a hotel. We laughed; the thought had never occurred to us. Even if money were no obstacle, I don’t think we would have made such a choice. Both when we were underway and in port, I was never itching to get away from the boat.

Then there was the sailing. Days upon days offshore, living in a new time/space continuum. It was more peaceful and satisfying and less boring and stressful than I would have thought. The stressful part was the planning, preparation, and weather watching in days prior to the start of each leg. Once we got underway, the stress melted away and we were just sailing.

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Alex:

To be honest, there were days at sea when I had to remind myself what we were up to–oh yeah! we’re in the middle of the ocean, finally making good on our dream to cross the Atlantic. I’d be sitting in the cockpit, reading, totally absorbed only to look up and remember where I was (approximately). A strange and wonderful feeling.

I think that having lived aboard for two years prior to the crossing gave me a really great grounding. As Chris notes, we had no adverse weather, so I might be singing a completely different tune if that had been the case. As it was, I got used to the motion of the boat, and to how that motion limited, or didn’t limit, the things I was able to do in the galley, cleaning, general housekeeping, etc. Interestingly (to me), my tastebuds totally changed when we were underway – the idea of morning coffee was gross. I only wanted bubbly water with citrus, and most days the idea of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was positively thrilling.

I’d have to agree with Chris that the best part of it all, though, has been the people we began to meet. Both in Bermuda and the Azores, we had the chance to spend time with other sailors who’d put in many long miles–so many more than we have–and who had so many stories to share. Our first stop in Flores looms in this regard. We were rafted up with a whole bunch of other boats on the harbor walls for about a week, and each night a different collection of sailors made their way to the Club Navale at the top of the hill. With the cliffs, beach, harbor, and boats in the foreground, and the vast Atlantic just beyond, we whiled away the hours to sunset, drinking one-Euro-beers and eating peanuts with our new friends. It was perfection.

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Sundance:

I performed extraordinarily well. Not a single thing broke. I’m just as ready to turn around now and sail back as when we left the Bahamas. I handled everything the sea threw at me with grace and ease. My crew learns to respect and love me more with every passing year they get to spend with me. An average speed of 5.7 knots for our crossing wasn’t half bad, especially when you factor in all the hours we spent becalmed along the way. AIS showed us keeping up well with quite a few larger boats.

I sported a full main and a 110% jib most of the time. Occasionally, we had a single reef in the main but never shortened sail beyond that. The wind was never right for my asymmetrical spinnaker and that sail stayed in the bag for all legs of our crossing.

My comfortable and well-bolstered amidships bunks provided ideal spots for off-watch sleep to leeward. My water-maker, solar, hydro generator all worked flawlessly meaning we had the luxury of unlimited water and electricity at all times. We never ran my diesel engine to charge the batteries and my fuel tank is still nearly full. My Hydrovane steered us silently and effortlessly 95% of the way. Starlink kept us in touch with weather forecasts, a human weather router, the PredictWind computer algorithm weather router, long-range AIS, family, email, Red Sox scores, etc. With a bit more food, we could have kept going offshore indefinitely. It was profoundly satisfying to achieve this level of self-reliance.

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We’ll be cruising the south coast of Cornwall and England for the next few weeks. On August 29, the boat gets hauled out of the water in Lymington, England, where she will sit on the hard for the winter. Instead of subjecting ourselves to the wet, raw, dark days of winter in England, we plan to keep ourselves busy with a few projects and some travel off the boat elsewhere. Come spring, we’ll make our way back to England, relaunch the boat, and sail off for a Scandinavian summer in 2025. An English starting point should position us well for these plans.

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