End of Day 16 Beaufort NC USA towards Guernsey

This Blog entry is an edited version of the message we intended to send back whilst we were on the passage.  Unfortunately, the laptop we use to work with the modem connected to the HF/SSB radio failed this afternoon so we had no way of sending it at the time it was written.

2359hrs (O, GMT -2) Sat 13 Jun 2020

Dear All,

Dawn on Day 16 of the passage.  Bashing to windward harder than ever

The last 24 hours have been all about sailing close hauled in some fairly stiff winds and big seas.  From midnight and into the early morning we had very short steep seas, 20-25knot winds and 2½ -3 metres of swell.  In the middle of the period it got tougher, with 30 knots of wind over the deck and a 4-metre swell, still with short steep seas on top of the swell.  We had to slow BV down to make things more comfortable because she was getting hit hard by the waves breaking on the short seas.  From 1600hrs it all started to ease and the wind dropped down to a blissful 15-18 knots so then it was a case of balancing speed against comfort with the still confused but smaller sea (2½ -3 metre swell).

The pictures don’t really capture how much BV is moving about so here’s a short film to try to give a feel of what 20-25knot winds across the deck are like.  When it was 30 knots across the deck there was too much spray and movement to take pictures or film without everything getting soaked

We stayed hard on the wind because it meant that we crossed the waves and swell at an acute angle.  It would have been faster and generally probably more comfortable to have born away and tracked east but we were concerned about the short and steep seas.  The peaks were close together and the wave fronts were therefore steep so we were both concerned that if we put BV beam on to them there was a danger that if the keel lost grip on the front of a wave we might heel excessively as we ‘fell’ down the front of a wave.  We went for the slower but safer close-hauled track.

From 1600hrs both the wind and the seas started to ease….

Doing any sort of work, or even sleeping off watch, was more difficult than normal because of the boat movement but, throughout, BV just marched along making steady progress into wind.  We are pretty sure that in a lighter weight boat we would not have been able to sail the course that we did.  And the reason for putting up with that course was that it gets us a lot closer to the sea area with the right winds to carry us into the English Channel.  But we still have a few weather issues to overcome.

… we were still hard on the wind close hauled but it was much more comfortable.  And the sun came out too

Our study of the weather charts shows a high pressure between us and the good winds that we want to get into.  There’s also some sort of high wind depression forming out to the northwest of us in about a week’s time but we really don’t have any detail on that yet and, sadly, our primary means of getting that detail has just failed.

‘Il est mort!’ – a burnt out chip in the power circuit has killed the laptop and any chance of our getting emails and detailed weather files for the rest of the passage

The laptop that we use with a Pactor modem to control our SSB radio has just failed completely.  A chip on the circuit board has burnt out so, despite my best efforts, there is no chance of resurrecting it.  Sadly, that means the end of our daily messages home to family and, most importantly, we no longer have a means of getting the weather charts to plan the detail of our route home.  We were also getting periodic emails through from Chris Parker giving us the long-range weather outlook and suggested routings to make the best of that.  We won’t be able to receive those detailed emails from him either.

Clearly that’s not good news for us.  Yes, we will carry a duplicate laptop in the future [lesson learnt!] but for now we will have to make do with what we have.  We’ll try to get a picture on the weather patterns and suggested routing by talking directly to Chris Parker on the SSB radio and we’ll look at potentially getting short text messages from him on our InReach tracker.  Also, from about 500nm out we hope to start picking up Navtext messages which will include the shipping forecast for the approaches to the UK. 

You could argue that people have crossed oceans before with far less weather information than we are going to have over the next 8-10 days of the passage. But having got used to having access to the GRiB files and other weather products, it’s going to feel very uncomfortable with so little detailed information available to us both to refine our routing plan and to know what winds to expect (should we be planning for calms, headwinds, gales or just good downwind sailing?).

BV’s ‘garden’ is starting to sprout; perhaps we should have started them off a little earlier in the passage to get best benefit

On a more positive note, Nicky spent her morning watch today battling the conditions and making a hearty tomato, ham and bean soup.  It went down very well at lunchtime with some of my sour dough bread.  Better still, there are at least 2 more meals-worth in boxes in the fridge.  And the vegetable patch is coming on.  The sprouts are still rather small – clearly not great fans of the outside air temperature and/or all the bouncing up and down – but certainly doing better than our previous attempts at sprouts.  We may yet get the makings of a rather small salad out of them before we reach Guernsey.  Best of all, having had very poor HF/SSB comms with the SSCA transatlantic yacht tracking team early this evening, just 40mins later we had excellent comms with Chris Parker and had a very useful conversation with him.  Just before the computer died we had requested that he send us an updated weather outlook this evening and instead managed to achieve that by voice comms on a very clear frequency.  He said that we should continue east at good speed with the aim of reaching 20-15W by Thursday 18 Jun, preferably 15W though that’s a rather large ask.  There’s a deep low pressure system building that will route south of Greenland and on towards Ireland on Thursday and Friday next week.  He thinks that we need to be well east to minimise our exposure to gale and near gale force winds.  If we can’t get far enough east we may even have to lose latitude, which is not a nice thought having worked so hard to get north.  Whilst that in itself may not be good news, the fact that we had such clear comms with Chris and managed to get such unequivocal direction from him is excellent, particularly as we had been intending to head north through the high pressure area and would have ended up directly in the line of the low he’s working to have us avoid.

So, in summary, a pretty unpleasant day’s sailing with a very disappointing breakage, but the weather’s moderating and we have updated weather information despite the computer failure so all is not lost yet!

Love to all,

Reg and Nicky

Passage statistics:

Position at midday 13 Jun: N46 05 W036 03

Position at midnight 13 Jun: N46 10 W034 41

Midday to midday distance through water: 161 nautical miles (average 6.7 knots).

Midday to midday GPS distance towards destination: 136 nautical miles

Midnight to midnight distance through water: 155 nautical miles (average 6.5 knots)

Midnight to midnight GPS distance towards destination: 129 nautical miles

Total miles covered through water:  2543 nautical miles

Approximate distance to go (GPS route to Guernsey): 1355 nautical miles

End of Day 16 Beaufort, North Carolina, USA towards Guernsey