Greetings from the Azores,
Jeanie and I have been in Horta for a week and a half now,
and it has only been these last couple days we feel like we have recovered from
the trip. The biggest problem was
conditioning ourselves to sleep more than four hours at a time. We found it annoying that we couldn’t sleep
through the night, and were taking extensive naps in the mornings and
afternoons. But now the naps are less,
and we are sleeping better at night. It
is a shame we will have to go to sea again, and throw another monkey wrench
into the biological clock.
We regret not calling, but the telephone connection is so
bad, no conversation can be carried on.
Only the most necessary information can be communicated. Apparently, the phone link is by cable from
here to Lisbon, and then somehow it makes its way across the Atlantic. When Jeanie called her parents, it literally
required lots of yelling on both ends to make oneself heard. The overseas telephone is in the post
office, rather than at a telegraph or cable company office, so it is probably a
government, rather than a private service.
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| Horta, in the Azores |
Our passage of 21 days was comparable to other sailors
leaving Bermuda at the same time we did.
Recently, boats have been arriving in 14-16 days. It’s a question of first, having wind, and
then deciding how hard to push. In our
case, we did not have good winds at all.
In fact, the wind was in front of us all the way, except for a few days
at the start. Then it was not blowing
hard enough to keep the sails full on a broad reach, given the five-foot
westerly swell.
We left Bermuda, on July 1st, in a light
southwest breeze, which veered to west, and died after three days. Then we had 2-1/2 days of calms (winds less
than 3-5 knots, from the west, with an incessant swell, rather than flat calm,
but no use for sailing). At this point,
we were almost one week out, and had just made 5 degrees of easting. Since we had 36 degrees of easting to make,
this was most discouraging.
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| Horta, in the Azores |
At this time, the weather pattern was looking odd. The Azore’s high was centered up at 41
degrees North, and a high-pressure ridge extended down through the Carolinas
and Bermuda. On Saturday, July 7th,
this system broke apart, with the high breaking through the ridge to establish
its own circulation. Since it was
centered north of us, we got SE wind.
For the next several days, the forecast was for this high to drift south
and east. So we kept waiting for the
wind to move into the south, and free us up a bit. But, on each succeeding day, the weather report showed the high
to be drifting east – as fast as we were sailing. The forecast kept predicting southerly movement; the high kept
moving east. We kept beating into the
wind…. But we made good progress during
this time, reaching the halfway point on or about July 12th.
The next day, Friday the 13th, we were in the
midst of a gale. The wind and seas were
freshening all day. The weather report
was only for 20-30 knot winds. Then on
the afternoon forecast, there was suddenly a gale centered 200 miles northwest
of us. In the next hour, the sun went
away, the wind continued to get stronger, and the seas larger. We hove the boat to, under mizzen (later,
reefed mizzen), and storm jib, rigged on the inner forestay. The gale (35-45 knots of wind, probably)
lasted till midnight. The rain started
coming in squalls, and they got stronger and stronger. Finally, about 11:00 p.m., after one
particularly vicious squall, everything stopped. Nothing tapered off – it just stopped. No wind, no rain – but clouds and waves persisted. One would have thought we were in the eye of
a hurricane. We rolled around the rest
of the night. By morning, the sun came
out, a favorable breeze sprang up, and - in two hours - we were becalmed again,
as the breeze died to 3 knots from the west.
During the gale, quite a few waves would smash into the side
of the hull, and send a wall of water up over the cabin top. We discovered that water rushing along the
roof of the salon would come squirting in the companionway hatch, and the vent
hatch in the salon. While we got damp
in the salon, all the berths stayed dry, so we really were not that
uncomfortable.
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| Horta, in the Azores |
Having hoped for a fair breeze on the backside of the gale,
I was disappointed when it proved to be too weak to sail. My consternation grew the next day when the
wind was still too weak to sail, but added to the problems was a very short
(two boat lengths) easterly swell.
The weather reports gave no indication of what might be generating this
new feature. And we were getting fog in
the mornings. I suppose it should not
have been surprising the next day, after a particularly dense fog on the 4-to-8
watch in the morning, the wind filled in from the northeast. Up went the sails; three hours later, down
came the mainsail. After lunch, we
changed to a smaller jib, amidst rain that, for all intents and purposes,
looked like a New England northeaster.
Our course was unfavorable against the head winds. We were pounding into the heavy seas, so we
hove to again.
By the next morning, the rain had stopped, the sky was still
overcast, and the wind was still northeast.
So we started sailing southeast.
I assumed there must be a low off to the southeast, hopefully moving
northeast faster than us. This was
based on the fact that we sailed into this thing, but I didn’t think we sailed
through it. Anyway, I hoped the wind
would soon shift into the north.
In the end, the clearing came out of the west-northwest, and
the wind continued northeast, but again, lost its oomph. I was not particularly happy with our
situation. We were 200 miles from our
destination, and 35 miles south of it, while the wind and seas were from the
northeast. Tropic Moon does not go to
windward well. It looked like getting
to the Azores was going to be like pulling teeth.
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| Horta, in the Azores |
The powers that be must have taken pity. The wind shifted some. We found ourselves going east instead of
southeast. So now we were 100 miles
away, and still 30 miles south. Each
mile we went east, the more north-northwest the wind was going to have to
shift, if we were to make the island.
But shift it did that last day.
At 4:00 a.m. boat time, on Sunday, July 22nd, the islands
were visible – right in front of us – 15-20 miles away. The winds had delivered us right where we
wanted to go.
The harbor here at Horta is not very good. The bottom is rocky, so anchoring is a
chancy proposition. We are on a mooring
at the moment, which is better, but I would not trust the mooring in a
blow. So we have decided we will move
on, and not winter here. We will
probably leave in the next week or so for Gibraltar or, perhaps, southern
Portugal. Wherever we stop, we should
be able to receive mail, as there should be no pressure from the weather to
move on.
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