Dreary Day in the North Atlantic

We are currently Motoring. It’s sucks. Wind is to light for sails to stay full. The slapping of the sails are irritating and bad for the sails. We spent some time in the last 2 days tacking back and forth and generally moving the boat northeast to catch some wind. We are keeping north of the great circle rhumb line. Think of a straight line between Bermuda and the Azores on a flat map and then imagine the curve of the earth and draw another line. That curved line is the great circle rhumb and is the shortest path to our goal. This would not be an issue on a coastal sail but when you cross 2,000 miles of the earth’s surface you need to think about it. We are far north of this line because there are better winds predicted. It always becomes a balance between too much and too little. We are constantly looking for the Goldilocks Zone. The crew is going about things in a pretty routine way. We are running a 3 watch schedule with my Dad and me as RED watch, Tom as WHITE and Pierre as BLUE (french blue of course). 4 on and 4 off during the day and 3 on and 3 off during the night. Hours shorten up in bad weather. This is working out quite well with the potential of 6+ hours off at a time. Reality is usually less with cooking, trying to fish and small repairs taking up some time. Tom is in the midst of teaching Celestial Navigation lessons to Pierre. Their most recent fixes have been within a mile of the true (GPS) locations. Damn good! Max is reading ‘Tom River’, which is about the town of his youth and I am doing whatever it is that captains do. Life is happy and pleasant aboard. So, we are 1200 miles from Bermuda and have a mere 600 miles to go. Nobody aboard has asked “Are we there yet?”. Always a good sign. Its the journey not the destination…. —- This e-mail was delivered via satellite phone using OCENS’s OCENS.Mail software. Please be kind and keep your replies short.


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