Stretching Our Sea Legs

We’re Finally Here!

Well, 5 months after first putting Luthien in the water, 3 years since our first sailing lesson, and 6 years since we watched our first sailing video on youtube, we have finally arrived. And I mean that in the grand scope of the word.

As I write this (Monday, March 3rd), we’re anchored in Marsh Harbour, Abaco, Bahamas. It’s 72F/22C and mostly sunny today, although getting very windy toward the end of the day.

This is Actually Hope Town, Just Around the Corner from Marsh Harbor
(Marsh Harbor itself, isn’t much to look at)

We’re just coming off of a great week of our daughter Sophie and Terri’s parents Ann and Dave visiting. That will be a whole other blog.

For this blog, I thought I’d talk about getting here.

Overnighters Get You Places

We did several overnighters to get here.

Terri and I are starting to get (relatively) comfortable with sailing / motoring, overnight. As I mentioned in last blog, we actually did 3 days / 2 nights at sea on the way down from Jacksonville to West Palm beach. And we did another overnighter from West Palm Beach into Marsh Harbor.

So WHY do overnighters? It’s stressful and tiring, right? WELL –

Doing overnighters is great because it saves a lot of time NOT finding anchorages and/or marinas, actually anchoring or docking, motoring up and down inlets and rivers, etc etc. You just point to where you want to go and head straight there. Tacking or gybing as needed, of course, if you are under sail.

It saves you money because you’re not paying for nightly fees at marinas and burning diesel motoring up and down rivers.

Overnighting also gives you a lot more flexibility to sail instead of motoring. So e.g. you would normally be obliged to leave in the morning motor during daylight hours because you needed to get into a particular anchorage before sunset. Instead, leave in the late afternoon or evening and now you can sail because you have all night and will get to your destination sometime during daylight the next day – might be 7 am, might be noon, doesn’t matter.

Hurry Up and Wait

We’d originally planned to clear out of Jacksonville on Wed Feb 12. However, there was one of the dreaded “polar vortexes” coming down the east coast again. And while we were far enough south that we weren’t going to get near-freezing temps like we did in the Carolinas, it was likely that the vortex was going to whip up the seas and make for an uncomfortable sail down the coast of Florida.

SO, we cleared out of Jacksonville in a hurry on Tues, a day early, and did another “Bridges of Jacksonville”, but in reverse. We had planned on doing a one-night overnighter, then staying the night at a marina in Cape Canaveral, then do a second overnighter into West Palm Beach.

On the second day, after one night at sea, it came time to turn into Canaveral for the night. Terri and I kind of looked at each other, shrugged, and had a terse but high information conversation, as old marrieds do. Terri – “You feeling OK?”. Todd – “Yup. You?”. Terri – “Yup. Keep going then?”. Todd – “Yup”. So we did NOT turn into Canaveral and just kept going for a second night into West Palm.

Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center
We sailed right on by Cape Canaveral

So that saved us from the polar vortex, but did not help us get to Bahamas any sooner, as we had to wait for favorable conditions to (dun dun dun) CROSS THE GULF STREAM.

Crossing the Gulf Stream

As a Canadian kid growing up in landlocked Alberta, we were mostly taught that the Gulf Stream brings warm water up to the Canadian maritime provinces and is responsible for the abundant fishing off Canada’s Atlantic coast. (Before the Atlantic fishery collapsed in the 90s due to overfishing – silly humans).

What they didn’t tell us was, the Gulf Stream has an average of 3.5 knots of current, headed pretty much straight north / northeast along the east coast of the US. Which is kind of crazy when you consider the average small sailboat probably motors or sails at 6 or 7 knots.

(Fun random fact – the Gulf Stream carries a larger volume of water than all of the world’s rivers combined!)

Furthermore, if the winds in the area you want to cross have any northerly component (ie coming from any of the north, northwest, northeast), the southbound winds clash with the northbound Gulf Stream, which results in huge waves. So one needs to wait for the right wind conditions – at least two days of NOT northerly winds – in order to cross.

So we rushed down from Jacksonville to West Palm Beach to stage ourselves for a Gulf Stream crossing, only to have to wait 9 days for a favorable weather window. We arrived in West Palm beach the morning of Fri Feb 14 and didn’t have a good wind day until Sun Feb 23.

Once we did cross, seas were decent and the crossing was relatively uneventful. Sailing conventional wisdom is to just point your boat due east but be aware that the gulf stream is going to push you northward and you will arrive 10s of miles north of where you otherwise would have arrived had there been no gulf stream.

Luthien Actual Course Across the Gulf Stream
We were pointed due east the whole time!

Navigating at Night

Once we crossed the Gulf Stream during the day, we proceeded to cross the Little Bahama Bank overnight as well.

Navigating in the pitch black of night might initially sound a little scary, but modern marine electronics have made it relatively safe and low(er) stress.

Pretty much all vessels nowadays have electronic chart plotters, which is basically the same as the GPS nav you have in your car or on your phone, with some extras. You use this to avoid land, shallow water, and other vessels. Luthien’s chart plotter is an older model, but it still works fine for us.

AIS (“Automatic Identification System”) is a system that all commercial vessels are * required * to have, and many mid-size and larger private vessels also voluntarily have, including Luthien. AIS allows other ships in the area to constantly tell you where they are, and you in kind can tell them where you are. The other ships show up on your chart plotter as green triangles, and have text beside their triangles with their heading and speed.

However, not all vessels, particularly the smaller private vessels, have AIS. Fortunately, Luthien also has radar, which allows us to see smaller boats in the dark that might not have AIS.

Luthien Chartplotter Configured for Night Navigation
This Is How We See in the Dark

Check out this above photo I took of Luthien’s chart plotter. This was taken while sailing through the Little Bahama Bank at probably 2 – 3 am. We’ve got our chart plotter configured split screen. In the left pane, is the chart view, and the right pane is radar.

In the left pane, the white numbers all over the chart are depths. The photo is pretty blurry, but we’re in about 20 ft of water here. You can see we’ve got a small rocky island off to our right. In the very top left is a green triangle representing an AIS target – a cargo vessel called the “Carib Warrior”. We’re not concerned about this guy because he’s both 1) headed in the same direction we are, and 2) is pulling away from us. He’s doing 8 knots and we’re dawdling along at a leisurely 5 knots.

On radar, in the right pane, the concentric white rings are distances of 1 mile, so we can see about 4 miles out in this view. (Luthien’s radar can actually do up to 12 miles, but we tend to find the 4 and 2 mile views more useful.) The rocky outcroppings from the small island in the chart view, also show up as red blobs about 1 mile away at approximately our 2 o’clock on radar. Carib Warrior is also visible as a red band 3 ½ miles out at our 11 o’clock.

I can’t see ANY of those things in the dark with my naked human eyes. But I’m relatively comfortable sailing at night using Luthien’s electronic eyes.

The Human Factor

We’ve figured out that, for us, the hard part of overnighters is not, only getting two or three or four hours sleep at a time. The hard part is having long watches – ie 3 hours or 4 hours per person, alone in the dark. We’ve figured out that if we just do 2 hour watches, this makes things a lot easier on the sailors.

The person who is off watch sleeps on the couch in the cockpit or in the salon. Those spots are both quieter and more comfortable than down in the cabins when we are underway. The off-watch person can be awakened quickly in case they are needed, without the on-watch person leaving the helm.

Anyways, doing 1 night overnighters is now relatively easy, and we can even do a 2 nighter in a pinch. Hopefully we’ll improve on that as we get more sailing experience. Some of these couples we watch on youtube, have crossed the pacific – typically 21 – 25 days – with just the two of them, which seems like a pretty lofty goal. Probably we’ll take on some friends and family as crew if and when it gets to that.