It’s Thursday afternoon and we are nearly 200 miles into our trip. That sounds like a long way but when you consider that the entire trip, not counting adverse currents that will slow us down, is about 1,550 miles. we are barely into it.
Put it another way and we are less than 15% of the way to Antigua. To look at the chart, the distance we have covered is painfully small, considering how much lays ahead of us.
We left the Essex Yacht Club at 09:00 yesterday and made our way down the 6 miles to the river mouth and into Long Island Sound. It was a dreary morning, cloudy with a light mist.
As we passed out of The Sound and rounded Montauk light. The wind picked up from the ENE, putting us on a deep broad reach in 20-25kts. That point of sail is not very comfortable and after a few hours Matt was feeling pretty uncomfortable and ended up “feeding the fish” more than a few times.
It wasn’t until about 04:00 today that he was able to hold down something so that he could take a Stugeron, for the nausea, which seemed to work pretty well for him.
Here he is, lounging and reading a book.
A few hours ago we turned on the engine and it looks like we will be motoring until sometime tomorrow. The computer weather app suggests that we will end up motoring about 2.5 days out of the 10 so days or so that it should take us to make the run to Antigua. That’s about right as I have taken as little as 10 days and as much as 13 to do the southbound run.
Peter is on watch now and dressed for the chilly temps.
It will be quite chilly, until we reach the Gulf Stream, with 80 degree water. To keep the chill at bay, I cranked up the diesel heater. It worked well and kept the chill off. The water north of the GS is about 60 and the transition from cold to tropical is quite abrupt.
For the rest of the run we expect to have wind peaking in the high 20s to low 30s and also periods of no wind. Overall, I expect that we will likely motor some 75 hours, about what I would expect for this run. The good news is that we are hopeful that we will be able to head in mostly a straight line, nearly due south so not a lot of meandering around, I hope.
This is the first run where I have had Starlink when the service had been well worked out. On the run north last spring, it was all new and the usage plans were not well defined. For the run north, I signed up for a maritime plan at a cost of $250/month for not a lot of data and after that $2GB. I didn’t really understand the plan and ended up using up all my data and then some, racking up a $350 bill for the month. I now understand that I don’t have to change to a maritime plan and can just opt in for the $2GB on top of my normal $150/month mobile plan. We will see how that works out.
Yesterday when we were still fairly close to land, the normal plan was working fine but earlier this morning, when I was on my 04:00 to 08:00 watch, I wanted to “toggle” on the $2GB ocean option but could not identify how to do it on the mobile app. After about 2 hours of messing around, Matt suggested that I try going to the Starlink website on my browser and see if I could make the change there. While the internet was blocked, the Starlink website itself was not, and we were in business.
The unit is still slow to acquire satellites but is working much better than last spring. I understand that Starlink has modified the software so that the RV unit that I have, as opposed to the Maritime unit that uses twice the power, works better now on the ocean and “in motion”.
We will see how that goes for the rest of the trip but putting up this post is evidence that the unit is working. What I don’t know yet, is how far that $2/GB will go and what my bill this month will end up being. Details to come on that front.
It’s been pretty uneventful with the exception of it being quite rolly with large swells along with a number of mild squalls last night with heavy rain. I am expecting that the next day or so of motoring will end when the wind picks up later tomorrow, into the 20s.
So, one day into our run and not a lot to report. Let’s hope that continues.
At the very least, we left, finally…