Atlantic

The Atlantic, first ocean!

The Atlantic crossing story, abbreviated version. Originally written about 2 or three days after arriving St Lucia in 1998.

The Weather is - well I'm not sure I have words that can describe how much better it is than what I am used to, well here's an example one fine day in the middle of the night it was blowing force 7, possibly force 8 at times and I was wearing oilies - and wait for it a T-shirt underneath. The crossing was uneventful, we tore about 6 inches of spinnaker lost one glass and broke a mug. The only other source of tired was looking out to sea. We saw 1 lot of dolphins 2 ships, about five yachts and Dorado (fish) - and damn fine they tasted to, Sam also harvested the automatic fish (flying), the only other things we saw were waves water sky and the boat - I spy wasn't much fun. Instead of I spy we played Just a minute which proved raucous to say the least, Simon was very good at the technical stuff like repetition, I tended towards the more tenuous bits of deviation. We took 23 days to do the crossing, we were first Ferro-cement boat, which we are justly proud of, some among are more pessimistic rivals point out that we were also last ferro boat.

If you get this quickly then email me back I will check to see before we leave here in early Jan. Sam's Mum and Sister are coming out as is Penny, for Christmas. They are land lubbers mostly and will probably find reasons for me to be on land and spending money which is a drawback.

The logged distance was 2840 I think, there is some confusion as the log forgot a couple of times and also after 999.9 it reverts to 0 Nautical miles that is.

This email is long cos I'm writing it on Sam's coal fired lap top, a sterling piece of Victorian engineering also down loads weather maps from AM radio which is nice when it works (not often).

I think I should explain automatic fish at this point, they jump out of the water usually in the middle of the night and fly up to about 100 yards, quite impressively dodging waves etc. presumably to escape other fish with horrible nasty pointy teeth. This is a wonderful defense mechanism, provided of course some malicious ocean hippie hasn't filled that particular bit of ocean with 37 foot of ferro cement sail yacht. In the event that this happens they find them selves lying on the deck looking very surprised, then come morning the skipper picks 'em up and fries them for breakfast.

I haven't had the opportunity to do much swimming as yet we only got the chance to swim once on the way across, the rest of the crew had to force me to get out of the water, they wanted to start the engine, I was there for the week.

Speaking of engines we only motored 21 hours, not bad out of over 3 weeks, Sam's Wind generator and solar panel were enough to run lights and instruments.

St Lucia. is really gorgeous, its a mountainous volcanic island complete covered in rain forest, so far I haven't been bitten by any mossies, being in about helps they don't like salt, basically I'm not coming back!