November 2022

It’s Friday morning and we are far enough south that we should pick up the easterly trade winds sometime today, hopefully around mid day.

The trade winds are consistently from the east and this time of year they will begin getting stronger and peak in December and January.  These winds can be quite strong as mentioned in prior posts but it’s a bit unclear as to how much they will impact our ability to make it to Antigua.

Fortunately, we are in the front part of the fleet with the bulk of boats behind us.  That’s good but we aren’t as far east as we’d like so the angle of the wind and our course will put the apparent wind forward of the beam which can make for challenging sailing when the wind and seas are up.  Exactly how far forward the wind will be will have a lot to do with how easy, or not, our run is the rest of the way to Antigua.

By the time we get to Antigua, hopefully sometime around mid-day on Monday, the wind will not be too strong and won’t be blowing south of east.   However, for those boats that are 60-100 miles north of us, the winds Tuesday might be so strong that they will opt to bail into St Martin to waif for more reasonable conditions later in the week.

As much as I want to get to Antigua, if things get nasty, I too will opt to take a break and then continue on to Antigua a few days later.

The problem with all of this is that even a few days out it’s hard to predict exactly what conditions will be like and the difference between 25kts and 30kts is bigger than you’d think and even that small difference could make the trip quite unpleasant.

Additionally, while we have been blessed with very few squalls, we expect to hit more of them as we move south.  Squalls come with more wind so that 30kts could be 40kts and if there are enough of them, they could also cause the seas to build up higher.  As it is, we are expecting seas in the 10’ range that will be coming at us from the side of the boat.  That’s not a terrible angle but will be interesting, for sure.

Thinking forward to arrival events in Antigua, it continues to be tough to plan with so many uncertainties.  With this in mind, I have been in touch with some of our key contacts in Antigua and we also plan on sending out a note to all skippers to ask if they have a feel for their arrival and about travel plans. Armed with this information, we should be able to begin scheduling at least a few events over the next few weeks.

I’ll admit that it’s a bit frustrating as I try to know the unknowable and somehow organize events with so little certainty.

For the moment all I can really do is to plan to keep Pandora moving in the right direction and do my best to end up in Antigua with no stops along the way.

One thing for sure is that this is all interesting, perhaps a bit too much so.

Details to come, is about all I can say with certainty.

Early in our trip we encountered pretty strong winds, upwards of nearly 30kts sustained and Pandora handled it well.  Conditions were wet and we were getting tossed around but with two reefs in the main she handled it well.  In spite of water flying everywhere, we felt that the boat wasn’t laboring and we were moving at quite a clip of upwards to 8kts and sometimes more.

Most cruisers do not like to sail in aggressive conditions but sometimes it’s necessarily to get from here to there and it looks like we have some coming our way before we get to Antigua.

It’s Thursday and we are motorsailing along in light winds but making good time.  We could probably sail, if a bit slower than we’d like, but we decided to keep pushing to catch up with the building trade winds that are supposed to fill in sometime tomorrow south of us.

As in most trips, the wind zones are divided into three segments with the middle one, where we are now, a high pressure area with little to no wind.  Above that area and the first area we encountered as we headed out from Hampton, the winds are dominated by cold fronts coming off of the US east coast.   The area below the high, sometimes called the Bermuda hi, is dominated by fairly consistent easterly trade winds.

These trade winds can be influenced by the size of the highs exiting the coast every few days and whether that hi is pushed north of south as the cold fronts push east.

This time of the year, as we get closer to December, the trades strengthen bringing with them what is often described as Christmas Winds, that make for very salty sailing.

As we get closer to Antigua, over the weekend, these trade winds, from the east, are expected to build until they are in the upper 20s and low 30s with waves on the beam of 10’ or more.    However, those conditions will not fully arrive until late Monday and into Tuesday when things get the snottiest.

With this in mind, we are pushing along motorsailing with the hope of getting to the trades and to Antigua by Monday morning before things become nasty.

This is speculative as Monday, when the conditions are supposed to deteriorate, is still a ways off and things could change.

I am not sure it’s fair to say but I am not expecting that things would be worse, and hopefully better than that.

Anyway, we are making haste to join the trades by sometime tomorrow and burning some fuel with the hope of coming out ahead.

Over the next few days we will learn if big winds are heading our way, or not.

At least is smooth motorsailing for now.  I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

After days of near perfect, if wet, sailing in brisk winds, we are now settling in for a few days of motoring close hauled in 10kts or less.

We knew that we’d have this “transition zone” with very light winds to contend with but it looks like it’s going to be a larger zone than we had anticipated.

As of last evening at 1700 we cranked up the engine and here we are, at nearly noon the next day, still motorsailing along.  Based on the most current weather files, it looks like we will be doing just that until perhaps late Friday or early Saturday.

At that point, we hope to be able to sail again as the trade winds fill in from the east.  They are expected to be brisk and will build as we head farther south so it is quite possible that we will end up in winds in the upper 20s on a close reach which will make for fast if wet and bumpy sailing.

If things play out according to the “plan of the moment,” then we should arrive somewhere between Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.

That’s good as conditions several hundred miles north of Antigua will begin to deteriorate for the boats that left after us or are slower.

At this point we are slowly creeping up through the fleet so that now most of the boats are behind us.  Well, at least a lot of them.   Most of those ahead of us left earlier in the day or the day before.

Part of our growing lead has to do with the speed of Pandora but some of it stems from my willingness to turn on the engine in marginal conditions to keep moving.  Others are not able to do so as they just don’t carry enough fuel and nobody wants to run out.

With regards to running out of fuel, never say never, but I have 180 gallons on board and probably burn around .65 to .70 GPH which gives me a range under power of more than a week of running.

Sadly, our early speeding along has turned into clawing our way in light winds so I am afraid that a record passage, for Pandora at least, isn’t all that likely.

However, after all the hand wringing about getting to Antigua by Thanksgiving is no longer a huge risk, ten days at sea is still a pretty big deal.

Now I have to sort though my desire to head home after arrival against the need to be supportive of the fleet and not bolt the moment I arrive.

Nope, not likely to be our fastest trip but faster than some other boats and that’s something.

It’s Tuesday mid morning and we have not used the engine since  0400 early on Sunday morning.   As the wind has been pretty strong in the upper teens and low 20s, the wind generator has done a pretty good job of keeping the batteries up.  While the load from the fridge uses more than the wind and solar together produce, I am getting substantially more power from the solar than prior to the upgrade and after nearly three days, the batteries are still at 93%.

Prior to upgrading the solar and adding the wind generator, I would have been fighting a loosing battle with power and would have had to run the engine for at least an hour in the morning and at night just to try and keep up.

It was my hope that the wind generator would have at least provided enough power to keep all the instruments going.  It is doing that and more.

And, as an added benefit, the cabin is a lot cooler than when I run the engine.

Solid wind and a reasonably favorable angle has allowed us to make great time and our distance covered with in the last 24 hours is upwards of 200 miles, a remarkable showing for most any cruising yacht.  We had left the harbor about 3 hours behind most of the other boat that left when we did and over the last few days we have passed many of them

Conditions have been pretty sporty with Pandora on a close reach with apparent wind over 20kts much of the time.  This means that we are taking water on deck almost constantly.

Ever since I purchased Pandora I have been chasing annoying leaks and while most all have been corrected, there is still a pretty meaningful leak around the deck joint for the mast.  This isn’t a problem on a port tack as the dribble ends up on the floor.  Fortunately we will spend much of the run on a starboard tack so I will be fighting salt water getting on our bunk.
I had a new mast boot installed right before heading out and I don’t know why there is still a leak.  I hope to better understand this but won’t be able to address until things settle down a bit.

The good news is that other leaks, coming from some of the big deck hatches, are resolved, at least as of now, which is good news.

The GRIBS, weather forecast, call for good sailing in brisk conditions, for at least the next day or so and then we will be motoring for a day or two, perhaps longer, before picking up the trades as we head due south to Antigua.

Unfortunately, they are expected to be quite strong and now may have a slight southerly direction which may make for some close wind sailing and wet conditions.  This is a departure from more a more reasonable forecast only a few days ago.  Hopefully, this trend will reverse before we get to that point later in the week.

So, here we are, bouncing along in pretty stiff winds and seas but at least we are making good progress.

Additionally, the improvements that were made to the reefing system, new lines and some other upgrades, are making all that a bit smoother.

Wet and sporty aside, covering 200 miles in a day is not too shabby.

Dare I say it?  Could this be our fastest run yet?  I am hesitant to declare victory though lest I jinx it.

Early in the trip, we were very focused on getting across the Gulf Stream and ran the engine for hours to be sure that we got far enough south and east to be ahead of a strong front.

We did well but caught the end of that front which gave us high 20s with gusts to the low 30s on a very deep reach overnight.  Yes, we were going pretty fast, sometimes breaking 10kts briefly but it was pretty bumpy.  We put away the jib and sailed under a double reefed main.

As of now, 10:00 Sunday, we have been sailing for nearly 30 hours without the engine.

To that point, this is the first run that I have done since having the new lithium batteries, new and larger solar panels and a wind generator installed and It’s great to see that things are working out.

After running for all that time with no engine to recharge the batteries, they are still charged to 88%.   The new solar did some of that but a big boost was from the wind generator that mostly kept up with the instruments overnight.  Having said that, we were mostly off the wind so the apparent wind was not all that high so it could not keep up with the refrigeration as well.

I do expect that by this afternoon most of the power will be back in the batteries as it’s a fairly sunny day.

having the batteries well supported by wind as well as solar is a huge difference from having to run the engine twice a day to keep the batteries up with the load of running the instruments 24 hours a day.

I’ll be keeping track of how the system works in the “real world” and will try to summarize things down the road.  One thing for sure is that solar and wind work well together but the biggest output for the dollar is surely solar at about $1/watt.

I’ll stop there for now except to say that the trip is going well and we are hoping, expecting perhaps, that the rest of the trip will bring reasonable conditions.

Dare I say that we might actually do the run in 9-10 days?  That would be great.

While we are still in the early days of this passage, it is beginning to look like this is shaping up to be a great run.

I hope so.