It's now almost the end of the rainy season, even so everyday there are frequent heavy rain showers. Although that makes it a good time to catch up on design work and writing it's not the weather for a dream holiday in the Bajan sun - that won't be until mid January.

 

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People used to say that an ocean crossing was 90% boredom and 10% terror.

 

That's not true any more!

 

Back in the "good old days" - say 45+ years ago, when I made my first transatlantic crossings - there were no good autopilots, so handsteering for the whole passage was the norm (I have made three transAtlantics when we hand steered all the way). Whereas this time we hand steered in and out of port and then for maybe only an hour in a total of 3000 miles.

 

There was no GPS, so we had to navigate with a sextant. These days there is no need to even write up the log, as a chart plotter tracks the course already sailed and gives the time to the destination waypoint. We had four phones on board as back-up chart plotters to our main BandG unit.

 

There was no weather routing, so we had to take whatever the weather threw at us, and had no idea in which direction to sail to avoid bad weather. On this crossing we used Predictwind via the Iridium Go satellite system. A great improvement on the weather faxes, and, later, grib files downloaded via SSB, that I have used in the past. (And as a bonus, people on shore could check our position daily, and we could make phone calls home)

 

Of course back in the 1970s we were much less reliant on electricity, in part because there was no free power from solar or wind. That implied very limited refrigeration, if any. So it was tinned food and no fresh fruit or veg after the first few days at sea. Whereas we still have steaks in the freezer that were bought in Lanzarote.

 

Sail handling was hard and frequent because there were no reliable headsail furling systems - indeed even self tailing winches, rope clutches and ball bearing blocks were still in the future. This time we had single line reefing on the mainsail, ball bearing luff cars and a (usually goosewinged) roller genoa - and no other sails.

 

So it was a case of "Shall we gybe today or wait until next week?" The answer of course is that we would choose the gybe that offered the least shadowing of our solar panels. I wished we had a spinnaker for we'd have hoisted it and then lowered the mainsail, because, on a catamaran, you can then sail 20deg each side of course without touching the sheets. Whereas goosewinging meant frequent gybes. Furthermore, "pulling" a boat along is more directionally stable than "pushing" it. I decided I would never again sail a boat without either downwind or light weather sails - not even for a day! never mind for 3000 miles.

 

Partly as a result of these sail handling improvements boats can now safely be bigger, so they can carry more food, water and fuel - allowing one to motor through calm areas. A slight aside - in my report on the first leg I said we arrived in Mindelo with maybe 10L of fuel left. We have two nominal 100L tanks. When we came to refuel we put 105L in one tank and 110L in the other - so we were certainly running on fumes when we entered the Cape Verdes! (Hoses add surprising extra capacity)

 

Ironically modern technology means there is no need to carry books, music cassettes/CDs/DVDs, cameras and rolls of film as we did in the past (the Hiscocks were not the only ones to have an onboard darkroom). Today it's all stored on one's phone. Along with all the charts, tide tables and pilots for the whole world. (Having said that, digital charts still go out date and - worse - some old ones do not show the correct Lat/Long even if the details of the coastline are perfect)

 

Our AIS receiver meant we "saw" ships coming long before they appeared on the horizon, so keeping a look out from the cockpit was less important than in the past. Of course it helped to have all round vision from the saloon, which meant that for most watches there was no real need to go on deck at all, which was great news, especially in the vicious rain squalls we met towards the end of the crossing (don't worry, we also had an AIS plotter in the saloon)

 

Although we had caught two fish on the first leg we didn't try fishing on the second. Pelagic fish tend to be large. It was hard enough to reel one in when motoring at 5 knots, it would be impossible when surfing at 7-10. And with only 3 on board we couldn't eat all of a 10kg fish before we got bored with fish for breakfasts, lunches and evening meals.

 

Yes, we had flying fish land on the forward net most nights, but they were never large enough for a sensible meal (why only small ones flew high enough to reach the net and not the bigger ones remains a mystery)

 

So the upshot of all that is that now you can say a tradewind Atlantic crossing is 99% boring and maybe 1% anxious moments. Particularly so this year, when La Nina had the effect of reducing the strength of the trade winds. Indeed most days I could have sailed my dinghy across the Atlantic (probably not at night though!)

 

So what about the 1% time spent on those "anxious moments"?

 

Probably the biggest concern was that the autopilot went "goofy" about once a week and would suddenly zoom off course and once even tried to make a complete circle. First we recalibrated and rebooted everything (tricky when at sea and not in a marina) and then in desperation threw away the instructions and set up everything manually. That seemed to stop the worst of the gyrations and Tom decided the off-course errors were due to missing NMEA signals (no, I don't know what that means either).

 

A few days out from the Cape Verdes we saw we had caught something green on a propeller. "Plastic bag" we thought. But when Erick grabbed it with the boat hook we realised it was part of a discarded fishing net and, despite his best efforts to free it, was totally jammed (The propellors on a Lagoon 380 are behind the rudders, not in front as is normal, and sail drive legs meant no on-shaft line cutters).

 

If it stayed stuck that would cause major problems when we arrived, as manouvering with one offset engine is near impossible, especially with no rudder behind the prop to deflect the thrust. But fortunately, during one of the autopilot gyrations a few nights later, the boat made a big sternboard and in the morning we saw the net had disappeared.

 

Erick flew his drone a couple of times on the first leg when we were motoring. Once he got too involved with filming a dying manta ray and he lost contact with the drone as we had motored too far away. So we had to go back for it, fortunately he landed it sucessfully but with only 30 seconds of battery power left.

 

Obviously it's hot when sailing in the tropics, so we tended to sleep with all hatches open. Erick had a forward cabin and one night a flying fish flew through the open hatch and hit him in the face! Scales and feathers went everywhere. Erick failed to see the funny side.

 

The first 2000 miles of our trip were in very light winds. But the trade winds slowly increased over the last 1000 miles and we had regular squalls. One was strong enough to make us drop the mainsail - even so, I saw over 15 knots boat speed under just the genoa. We all got very wet at times in torrential rain, but once again Erick got the worst of it, as he had to gybe the boat in a real cloud burst.

 

So as you can see - it was all pretty eventful!