Azores we just cannot leave you – time to update the picture gallery

Yesterday, we were on our way to Ireland, somehow… or in other words: for 11 hours, we sailed with a Northeasterly course to our destination Cork. The departure had been less structured than normal because we had had several doubts as to whether the weather Situation would be stable enough to engage in this last long distance trip.

Looking backwards, we could say that maybe we should have taken our doubts more seriously and just not have attempted to leave the Azores. Because, when we checked the weather at the start of our first night at sea, we saw that approaching low pressure systems where not only growing in size but also in number. Instead of one, we would not have gotten into trouble with at least two of them and a passage to Ireland would have sooner or later ended in sailing thorugh gale force winds. Not really what we are looking for nor what we have sailed in regularly through the past year. We would have had the Option to adjust our course towards the coast of Northern Spain (Coruna) but this didn’t really feel right. We want sail to Ireland – not to Spain (at least not yet – who knows, this might still become an Option if the weather is too bad to sail all the way to England/Ireland during the coming weeks). As a result, we pressed the +10 degrees button on our autopilot for about 18 times and the bow of Ojalá did a 180° turn. While for us, this decision took quite a while, the boat didn’t seem to have any trouble with this menoeuver, even less because there was hardly any wind and we were motoring.

So here we are, still on the Island of Terceira. One of the many cold fronts is passing over and every couple of minutes, considerable gusts go through the rigg. The perfect day to sit inside, watch a movie and finally update our picture Gallery. So this is what we have done. We now completed the “Caribbean selection” and also added, Bahamas, Bermuda and the crossing to the Azores. The “Azores” Gallery will only come once we have finally left These beautiful Islands. Unfortunately, it seems that this will still take at least another 5 days. Up to then, nothing much changes on the ocean – every 3 days a front with gale force winds passes through…. But then, at the same time, in German you say: “alles gute ist 3”. We have now had two attempts to leave: 1 time just doing all the Shopping and 1 time even leaving the Harbour. For the third time, things HAVE TO TURN OUT RIGHT!!!! We just do not know yet when that will be. In the meantime, have fun looking at the pictures!

The different facets of Cruising – between the beauty of nature and the reality of passage planning

Two days ago, we enjoyed hiking in the mountains and today we discuss back and forth about the weather on the next passage… the ups and downs of cruising life. For more details, keep reading.
As Maarten mentioned in the last blog, we went from Horta to the island of Sao Jorge. Our first impressions upon entering the harbour in the island’s capital Velas were correct: the island (total population: 8000 inhabitants) is another one of these gems: green, rough, full of flowers! We spent three wonderful days on the island: we jumped on the backseat of the car which was organized by our friends from Win2Win, visited a little cheese factory, hiked up and down steep cliffs and did some “buy-what-you-can-before-you-get-to-more-expensive-supermarkets”.

Velas Marina on Sao Jorge

cheese cheese cheese

Sao Jorge is also described as the “whale island”. Not because whaling would have been particularly strong here – in fact it didn’t seem to be. Rather, it is shaped like a big whale. From North to South, it stretches only a few miles. However, from NW to SE, the island is 54 miles long, and therefore, it looks like the back of a massive whale – only that this mammal’s back would look strangely uneven due to the chain of hills (extinct volcanoes) that form the islands “spine”. The volcanic origin of the hills is clearly visible until today: in the past, lava would flow fast down the sides of the volcanoes, leading to steep hills on the North and South coast. In addition, lava rocks would built up and form some sort of low lying platform just a few meters above sea level at the bottom of the steep hills. These “platforms” are called “Fajas” in Portuguese. The platforms are high enough not to be affected by the seawater; at the same time, the location just above sea level and at the bottom of massive cliffs forms a warm and humid micro climate which allows for the production of various sorts of fruits and vegetables, including species which one would rather expect in the tropics (bananas, coffee, etc).

a faja seen from above – a landplatform at the bottom of a steep slope

As a result of this favourable climate, the “fajas” have long been used for agricultural purposes. The only problem: access. In order to find ways down the steep volcanic slopes, it required engineering talent to build steep, winding roads, or – where the latter wasn’t possible, strong donkeys to find a way down even steeper paths. In the former case, the EU seems to be strongly involved in funding the maintenance these roads leading to small villages which seem to be mainly home to summer houses of Azorians living abroad today. In the latter case, the former donkey paths have been transformed into hiking paths with perfect sign posting – equally with EU money as we could see on the flyers distributed by the tourist information 
The EU’s funding couldn’t be invested better: the fajas are beautiful locations, be it for agricultural production, coastal restaurants, natural swimming pools among lava rocks, or hiking as can be seen from the pictures below.

salads grown in the faja…

…and bananas…

definitely the nicest way of “donor recognition” that I have seen in a while

The owner of this house lived in the faja for 90 years

even the laundry has a nice view

some more flowers

Faja d’Alem, this wire pulled with part of a motorcycle motor is the only way to get heavy things down to and up from the bottom

A highlight for us was the friendly reception we got during our hike into the faja d’Alem, only accessible through a very steep path. While we were wandering through the village (nowadays populated during summer weekends), people sitting in one of the houses waved to us and invited us to come in. A couple, both in their 70s, offered us homemade wine (similar to very young wine served in the “Heurigen” in Austria) and sweet bread. Unfortunately, communicated was very limited because they only spoke Azorean Portuguese, not really our field of expertise. Things got a tiny bit better when their daughter who seemed to understand my Spanish and herself spoke a type of Portuguese which we could somehow decipher joined the conversation. She even offered us to take some of the massive zucchinis the family had been growing in their garden.

After the second glass of red wine, we somehow managed to climb up the 400m high cliffs – not without considerable sweating and pulse rates resembling that of sitting in an overheated sauna… Unfortunately, communication hadn’t been good enough to explain to the friendly owners of the house that the second glass of wine might not be particularly helpful to continue our hike. Or at least, for the locals – no matter what weight and age they are – the consumption of wine ahead of a hike doesn’t seem to constitute a problem… After another three hours of hiking, another friendly local responded to my lifted up thumb, stopped his car along the road and and drove us back into the direction of Velas where we spent a relaxing evening on board.

The next day, we focused on the preparation of our upcoming trip to Ireland. Apart from cleaning the boat and getting some more washing done, we did some buy-what-you-can-before-you-get-to-more-expensive-supermarkets”. This means buying things that you think are cheaper (and/or better quality) where you are than where you will be next. Following the advice of our Irish friends from Selkie, we set off to buy larger portions of Portuguese (even Azorean) cheese and wine given that we do expect considerably higher price levels further North. Interestingly, the cheese production on the Azores, namely Sao Jorge, is said to date back to the immigration of immigrants from the “Low countries” (nowadays the Netherlands) who brought the recipes with them when they set off from war-torn mainland Europe to a new life in the Azores several centuries ago. No wonder that the cheese passed Maarten’s (very high) standards for good cheese.

Yesterday, we arrived to the city of Angra do Heroismo on the island of Terceira, a 50 miles trip from Velas in Sao Jorge. Angra is the historic capital of the Azores and during these days, it represents the home of a one-week festival organized to the honour of the Saint St. John (Sanjoanina) around the 24th June. In light of this, the harbour is known to be completely full with visiting cruisers and locals around those days. However, we were hopeful to get a space after the very kind harbour master in Sao Jorge called his colleague for us and received a positive answer via the phone. Our positive thinking came to an abrupt halt when we called the harbour master to ask for “our spot” after ten hours on the water and at 7:00pm. “We are full”, I heard through our VHF radio. Maybe it was my shocked tone or my persistence on the fact that in Sao Jorge, we had been told that there would be a spot. After a few minutes, he told us “come in to the reception pontoon and we will see what we do”. Again, our motto “alles komt goed” seemed to be true: the harbour master found us a spot. Ojalá got a beautiful spot in the middle of local small sailing and fishing craft, all between 4-7 meters long. Attaching a stern line has resulted slightly challenging because the side pontoon (no pillars in the back) doesn’t even reach the height of the cleat at the centre of our boat. But for now, the wind is coming from the front so we cannot complain.

Ojala’s sticking out of the line of boats like an elephant in a cat’s basket 😉

The Sanjoanina festival seems to unite everything that one can imagine for a traditional festival: parades of costumed and dancing people (old and young), sale of traditional food, handcraft, and cheap drinks, exhibitions, bike races, boating excursions, concerts and even bull fights/races. During the two days we have been here, we have only actively participated in a small part of all these activities. For others, we didn’t have to do anything. A couple of hours after we went to bed around midnight, life music on a stage about 200 meters from our spot in the marina filled the air all over the harbour . We might have enjoyed this free of charge entertainment in other circumstances; at this time of the day I opted for ear plugs…

view over Angra

the old city centre is UNESCO heritage

every single house is decorated for the big party

Long rows of chair standing ready along the sides of the streets for people to watch the dancing groups

a dancing group

big carriages join the music groups during the parades

for some reason Scottish Whiskey and dancers made it into the parade – let’s see if we still find some “originals” later on our trip

Yesterday was supposed to be the last preparatory day as we had planned to head off to Ireland tomorrow. But a last look at the weather charts in the afternoon (after we had done all the shopping) mixed up our plans. A chain of low pressure systems moving by seems to mass up the weather more than we still expected 24 hours earlier. We also heard from other boats which had planned to leave today that they were having second thoughts. After a long debate (yes, two people on one boat is enough to have two different opinions!), it seems that we might give tomorrow’s departure a pass. Fingers crossed, we are able to leave soon – we both do not really feel like repeating the 3 ½ weeks waiting odyssey we had in the Bahamas. Moreover, we know that a couple of boats who left last week in a period without much wind had to motor big parts of their trip to England. As for us, the 1000nm we motored from Bermuda to the Azores have been more than enough – we are clearly hoping for some nice sailing now! But then again, the weather is the most important factor to take into account for cruising and passage planning. When it changes we need to change our plans with it. And now it is up to us to keep believing in our own motto – alles komt goed…

More news when we have a new departure date.

Horta

Horta on the island of Faial is the place known to almost all sailors over the world as the stop on the way from the Americas to Europe. Therefore it also becomes THE meeting place. For us this seems indeed to be the case. We have met up with many of the crews on boats we had seen before in the Caribbean, the Bahamas and of course Bermuda. We ended up having drinks and socializing with many different people at many different boats. However what we didn’t expect is to meet up with sailors from our “home” sailing club: the YCC (Yachting Club CERN) from Geneva. We had already found out in Dominica that the members of this sailing club are extremely keen to travel, We weren’t however prepared for a group of 14 polish sailors coming to the Azores for a week. We really enjoyed the visit and the catching up with old sailing friends. I had sailed with a lot of them in the Caribbean a couple of years ago and remembering that trip and telling about our own trip was definitely a very welcome distraction from our struggle to get the boat fixed.

A small beer for refreshment

As we described in previous Blogs, we needed to fix our shrouds. We were hoping that we could get them fixed in Horta, It would be difficult to find a place with more sailboats then here. And most of the sailboats here have just crossed an ocean and therefore definitely need to fix at least something. We have also seen many boats that had problems with their rigging. Just two of the examples are: a broken forestay (still sailed 1755 miles) and a boat with wires breaking of 4 of their stays. However we quickly learned that in Horta (or even anywhere in the Azores) you cannot get a new stay swaged. So the proposed fix would mean fitting a new type of terminal to our stay which had a slightly different thickness and lengthening our stay with an additional toggle. Not a very clean solution we believed. So finally we got a new pair of lower stays shipped in from Germany. As I’m writing this we have just fitted the new stays with the help of Jaap and Elsa from Sark (thank you guys very much!), we will be testing them tomorrow when we sail (or motor with the sail up) to the next island: Sao Jorge.

Steading myself

Hoisting up the new stay

Fitting the new stays in the mast

Fitting the stay at the deck

While waiting for the stay to be delivered we had some time to explore the surroundings. We have taken a taxi up to the “Caldeira” of Faial from which we hiked 20 km to a derelict lighthouse. The hike takes you via 10 volcanoes (or volcano craters) with magnificent views which really makes the hike worthwhile. At the end of the hike you get to the latest expansion of Faial where a volcanic  eruption in 1957/1958 enlarged the island a little bit. The lighthouse (at the end of the hike) was extremely close to the volcanic eruption however, it is still standing and has been turned into a museum.

Anna in front of the caldeira

The volcano we hiked across

Walking next to an “aquaduct”

Flowers on the hike

The new land from the eruption in 1957

We have also taken a ferry to Pico (the closest neighboring island) and tried to climb the highest mountain of Portugal which is also named “Pico”. Justin (from an Irish boat we met in the Bahamas) joined us for the hike. We had a lovely taxi ride up to the start of the trail, during the taxi ride we could at one point see the top of Pico above the clouds. However, when we started the climb unfortunately rain started and did not stop anymore. We decided to turn around at a quarter of the way up. Of course the top showed itself again once we were back in Horta.

Beginning of the trail

After our 2 hour hike

Pico showing itself again

The last thing we absolutely needed to do was create a wall painting on walls of the marina in Horta. Sailors have been painting on the walls since Horta became a favorite stop on the way to Europe. It is supposed to help you get favorable conditions (Weather and otherwise) in the future. As our boat seems to be identified mainly by our 2 flags, we incorporated this in the design, Our favorite saying that everything will work out fine (alles komt goed) also needed a spot.

Ojala’s wall painting

On the 19th we sailed (indeed sailed without any noise of this thing called engine) with our new stays to Sao Jorge. A wonderful marina awaited us full with boats and people we have met many times before. We will explore the island by car and foot.

 

About the beauty of nature and friendly people in the Azores

Since our arrival in Flores more than a week ago, we have enjoyed mainly three things: natural beauty, extremely friendly locals, and an amazing community spirit among sailors.

As for the natural beauty and the friendly locals, Flores is a true gem! You feel it directly when you enter the harbour. It is nothing more than a tiny basin for around 50 boats which is located off massive cliffs on the south west coast of the island. The harbour is protected by big breakwaters towards the South and the West (the cliffs giving natural shelter in the North) and open to the east and northeast.

When we arrived, the harbour was quite full, and there was a queue of people wanting to check in with the harbour master.  You would think that this would cause the harbour master to be a bit grumpy about too much work, or at least be stressed. None of these things! He welcomed everyone with warm words, smiling all over the face, giving everyone a feeling of coming home; this smile lasted until he asked us how long we wanted to stay. We said “oh, we want to stay at least over the weekend to enjoy the island”. Then his face took on a serious expression and he said: “You will think about this twice in a minute…” and he showed us the weather forecast which predicted eastern winds from Monday night onwards. We knew that Flores harbour was exposed to winds and swell from the east and northeast but hadn’t been sure how bad the impact would be for boats moored in the harbour. So now we knew and had to adapt our plans: enjoying Flores as much as we could within one day and then head on to the more protected harbour of Horta on the island of Faial – 130 nm to the Southeast of Flores.

Luckily, our friends from White Witch who had already been touring around Flores for a couple of days, recommended us to hire a car to see as much as possible from this beautiful island. The first stop of our island tour didn’t lead us very far – only to the petrol station about 1.5km up the road. Our first priority was to fill our diesel tank again (this time with cleaner diesel) because we would still need to use our motor to complete the passage to Horta. The harbour of Flores being very small, you immediately start talking to your neighbours on the pontoon and it turned out that several boats were facing the challenge of getting to the petrol station and then back to the boats with full jerry cans. So our little rental car ended up carrying 17 jerry cans in its trunk (a total of about 280l) divided among four boats.

After a short stop in the local supermarket (the first fresh produce since Bermuda, only that this time prices were much more enjoyable!), we finally set off for some sightseeing. What we saw truly amazed us: rough and steep cliffs, green hills, lakes, black stone/lava beaches, crystal clear water, and thousands of flowers decorating the sides of the roads. Whenever we stopped with the car we saw boards indicating hiking paths into different directions. We could have spent a week hiking without ta problem. Due to the limited time, we only did a small hike of two hours, but it was more than enough to get an impression of the landscape of the island.

In short: Flores clearly merits its name (Flores= Flowers) and we can recommend it to anyone who likes nature and hiking!

Our hiking path along the cliffs of Flores

Maarten and Stephan from Batjar enjoying the view over the coastline

beautiful to see but less idyllic to anchor – we were happy to be in the harbour

The stone beach

La Lagoa Negra (Black lagoon) in the hills of Flores

the little neighbouring Island of Corvo appears below a rain cloud

Flowers grow along most of the roads on Flores and make every drive a pleasure

Chrystal clear water around the Island

On Sunday morning, we set off to Horta. The conditions for this trip were “ideal” for us – mostly no wind at all! We were clearly done with motoring, but at the same time, we didn’t want to take any risk with our mast. Upon departure, our plotter showed a long row of AIS signs all heading from Flores to Horta; the harbour master had done a good job kicking everyone out before the Eastern Wind would arrive 🙂

The highlight of this overnight trip was a tuna on our fishing rod! After three weeks of unsuccessful fishing, it took only 2 minutes of fishing and the tuna ended up on the hook. Compared to what fisherman pull on land here, it was small, but nonetheless provided us with a delicious dinner (grilled tuna steak) for two days!

So here we are now, in Horta.

The harbour has traditionally been called the “crossroads of the Atlantic” because everyone arriving here has sailed a considerable distance: coming from the Caribbean (about 2400nm), from Bermuda (1700nm), from mainland Spain/Portugal (800-900nm), from Ireland/UK (1200nm), from Canaries (700nm). Indeed, when I looked at the boats around Ojalá, it was easy to see that many of them had made a long voyage: people where repairing things, filling up many jerry cans of diesel or just relaxing after a long time on the ocean.

Punta de Capelinhos (Faial) in the morning light upon our arrival from Flores (NW Point)

The Southern coast of Faial

Horta and the marina

During the months of May and June, it is high season for the Azores. The harbour master and border control need to do extra hours. Within the 48 hours around our arrival in the Azores, the harbour of Horta saw 60 boats going in and out. In other words, the harbour is packed. When we arrived, we were the fourth boat moored alongside a concrete wall (the harbour’s breakwater to the East) and the channel in the harbour basin was reduced to a one way street – going in either forward or backward, no turning possible. After all the anchoring we have done during the past months, it is strange to look out of the windows and see people sitting just a meter away in the neighbours cockpit. We also haven’t had people walking over our deck to get on land since our departure from Northern Europe last year. Nonetheless, we greatly enjoy it here. The atmosphere is extremely relaxed and everyone talks to everyone. In this way, a trip to the showers can turn into a 45 minute undertaking because there is always a chance to run into someone whom you have met before and with whom you end up having a short talk.

our neighbours seen from the mast

view over the full harbour

The breakwater we are moored to right now isn’t just any breakwater. In fact, it is a collection of fine sailors’ art, some of it a decade old: traditionally, boats staying in Horta have left a painting on one of the harbour walls. Apparently, it brings bad luck to leave the harbour without having done so, and it will be one of our priorities to bring our painting on the wall before we leave from here; we are currently just gathering inspiration from other boats :-).

a few meters of breakwater

So far, our days here have been dominated by substantial maintenance of our motor after all the hours it had to run (partially with the strangely brown diesel).  It seemed to be just the right moment, because all the filters were black – understandable after 1050 miles of motoringL! Moreover, we have tried to get our broken shroud fixed. Initially, it seemed to be possible to repair it here but finally things turned out to be more complicated and we are now waiting for new parts to be sent in from Germany. We hope that our mast is complete again by the end of next week (around 19^th of June).

Fortunately, this is truly not an environment to get bored! We spend considerable time socializing with our Dutch friends, welcoming Volonté and cheering “good bye” to our friends from Batjar who were the first ones to start the trip back to the Netherlands today. But also outside the “Dutch fleet”, it is extremely easy to get in contact with fellow sailors. Yesterday, we enjoyed a delicious dinner onboard of our English neighbour who crossed the Atlantic all by himself and was happy to share with us some information over the west coast of England. A couple of days ago, we enjoyed a beer with the crew of an Irish boat with whom we had been in contact since our departure from the Bahamas, soaking up their information about the South and East coast of Ireland like a sponge. In short, it is a great community here and we are happy and also proud to be part of it!

All the information we are gathering now will probably be extremely useful during the coming months: after cruising the Azores a little bit more until the end of the month (provided our mast is fixed), we are planning to head on to the Irish Southern coast. From there we would like to move along the Irish east coast via the Irish Sea towards the west coast of England and then Scotland. Depending on the timing and the weather, we would make our way through the Caledonian Channel or the islands along the North coast of Scotland back into the North Sea and then head back to the Netherlands.

Nonetheless, as we have learnt, long-term planning is always difficult with sailing and for now, we will focus on the more immediate future: with most of the work being done, all that is left is to wait for our shrouds to arrive. Therefore, we will be able to use the time to do some more hiking on Faial (the island Horta is located on) and also the neighbouring island of Pico which is home to a volcano with the same name and at the same time Portugal’s highest mountain. More impressions to follow in our next blog!

The Pico – if our physical condition and weather allow for it, we will give it a try and climb it next week.

Video now working

Dear blog readers,

It was brought to our attention that the video couldn’t be played because it was private. This has now changed so happy viewing!

“Bermuda – Azores a short summary” and “Info for fellow sailors”

With this blog we will only post some pictures, a movie and a short summary of our crossing. You can find the movie under this link:

Looking at the weather in Bermuda (also actually in the Bahamas) you quickly find out that weather on the way back is quite different to the weather in the Caribbean. The weather during the crossing is highly dependent on low pressure systems, cold fronts and troughs moving through the area. Normally we wait for a weather window where you get good winds in the first couple of days after you leave. Leaving from Bermuda, our approach changed into “not having bad conditions” in the first days after leaving. This meant that although we could sail most of the first days, we did have light winds and the slow progress that comes with it.

The last view of Bermuda

Plotting our position on the charts

During our first days we also were very focused on cold fronts and depressions coming off the US east coast. We tried (and managed for about 90%) to outrun a cold-front which obliged us to sail mostly east. We were aware that this would eventually make us enter into a small low pressure system without any wind.
To pass through this low we needed to motor for about 2 days. After which we were rewarded with lovely southeastern winds to head north.

All the books talk about sailing as early as you can to about 40 degrees north to pick up favorable winds to head east. However as we tried to outrun this cold front it meant that when we were finally heading north a big Azores high pressure area had installed itself in our path. So after sailing for about 2 days with very favorable winds northwards the wind died once more and we were planning to motor another couple of days north. During these days we quickly realized that the Azores high was in fact so big that it was difficult to get sufficiently north of it to get 10 knots of wind. We would have had to go to around 41 degrees north to get this wind. As the Azores are around 39 north, this means a detour of around 240 miles (2*60*2).

Azores high without any wind

Sunset

Nice cloud formation on the way

Anyway even before we got to 39 north, a big bang during a night watch signaled the fact that we broke our starboard lower stay. It happened in a windless night, while we did have the mainsail up because we believed that we would get some light winds in the morning. The waves caused the boat to roll from one side to the other which in turn caused the sail and the battens to pop from one side to the other. This apparently caused enough stress in the terminal of the stay to make it break.
We altered course directly to a straight line to the Azores as we believed that we could no longer hoist the mainsail. We did obtain information from many sources to see if we could improve our temporarily fixed stay and if we could sail with this. The best fix we came up with was (a bit technical but maybe interesting for other sailors):
– Fitting a piece of anchor chain (only 3 links) into the slot in the mast
– Attaching a Dyneema line to this chain (Dyneema doesn’t stretch that much under tension)
– Attaching the line to the deck where the original stay was attached by using a shackle.
We ran the line 3 times back and forth between the chain and the shackle as we only had about a 6mm dyneema line and the stay was 10mm.
– We then tensioned the dyneema line by twisting the lines between shackle and chain by introducing a piece of wood and turning it.
– In addition to the fix we attached a normal line around the spreaders to the deck just in case our dyneema line would brake. This line we tensioned with a winch.
This fix allowed us to sail with a small main and/or with the Genua in light winds.

Trying to fix the mast on the ocean

The lines trying to hold the mast

The final solution to attaching a temporary stay to the mast

We were at this time in contact with the Dutch Coastguard just so that they knew what was going on. We were getting ready to spend quite some time for the remaining miles to the Azores (about 750 when the stay broke). We were also keeping a very watchful eye on the weather. And as always the weather choose to change just before we would make it to the Azores. A front would pass over us with southerly winds (which would be from the wrong bow with respect to our broken stay). The winds fore-casted were around 30 knots with more then that just north of our position. In addition with any front one needs to expect strong gusts in squalls. (afterwards we heard that 40 knots were measured were we would have been, even though the forecast had changed in the meantime and was only predicting 25-30 knots).

The Dutch Coastguard reacted when the weather forecast was certain enough and asked a tanker to provide diesel to us so that we could maintain a higher speed to stay in front of the heavy weather and arrive just in time.
We arranged for a meeting point with the tanker and transferred 8 barrels of 20 liters of diesel. We arranged the transfer of diesel in the following manner (again a bit technical).
– We came alongside of the tanker on its lee side while the tanker stopped.
– We stayed approximatively between 10 and 40 meters from its side. The swell did not allow for us to come much closer.
– A line was thrown from tanker to us
– A can of diesel was attached to the line and subsequently lowered.
– I pulled on the line to pull the can towards Ojala.
– After I got the can on board I untied the line, allowed the line to be pulled back to the tanker.
– All the time the transfer needed, both myself and on the side of the tanker we kept hold of one end of the line.
If anyone would ever need to do this, I would stress that it is not a wise idea to get too close to the tanker. The swell will almost certainly always be enough for your mast to hit the side of the tanker. I would also never attach the rope to the boat. As you might need to move away at any time. And finally you need to be extremely careful not to get the rope into your propeller.
The diesel we received has worked well, although I have to say that the color was extremely brown. Also before you use any fuel from a professional vessel, you need to make sure it’s diesel and not the fuel the vessel uses for propulsion (heavy oil).

The tanker providing diesel

The car tires to provided for our safety

The guys letting down the cans

Pulling in the cans

Two of the cans behind the wheel

With the additional diesel we quickly got to the Azores. We were about half a day in front of the heavy weather. We are very happy to have made it and thankful for all the help we received (all the talks on the SSB, all the information we received from other people having had similar problems, people saving some diesel for us, the tanker, the coastguard, etc etc).

first sight of Flores in the clouds

Flores a little bit closer

During the crossing we have seen loads of animals. We have sailed past turtles, we have many many dolphins around our boat and we even had a whale jumping behind our boat just to show he was there. We saw tons of plankton which you can see only during the night as they show up in a fluorescent manner. While all these are all extremely nice animals, we have seen loads of Jellyfish with in particular the Portuguese Man-of-War witch is especially nasty if you come into contact with one.
All in all it was an interesting and very educational crossing!

Portuguese Man-of-War

Dolphins playing with our bow

Turtle in the middle of the ocean

Some more information for other sailors:

During the crossing we used extensively our SSB which enabled us to talk to boats around us, In particular when material problems arise it can be a great help to have someone to talk to and exchange ideas. We also used the SSB for downloading emails, GRIB files and weather charts which proved to be indispensable during this crossing. The SSB was also extremely useful for talking to the tanker and reiterating on the meeting point.
Using an SSB to send and receive emails works extremely well during the night but during the day it can be difficult especially when the distance to any land station is big. Therefore on one occasion we needed to use our SAT phone to report our position to the coastguard.

The SAT phone proved to be useful as well, however its use is limited. We bought the SAT phone just to be used in case that all else fails. We found out that SAT phones do have some drawbacks that are not always understood by the people that have the phone number. Our SAT phone needs to be pointed at the satellite for it to work. This means that you cannot have it switched on all the time in a way that you’re always reachable. Therefore you need to arrange a time that someone calls you or you have to call. The SAT phone however does allow you to inform people of your situation even when communication via SSB is not possible (for example during the day or if your SSB set stopped functioning).

Even though we received a lot of weather information, the weather situation proved to be very unpredictable for anything more then 4 days away. The grib files we downloaded were extremely accurate in a short time scale. They however are not so useful when looking for small details like finding tiny bits of wind in the Azores high as these slight variations of “no wind” are extremely difficult to predict. The grib files also do not show fronts or troughs (except through wind direction changes), there the weather charts via weather fax or via email can be useful.

When we motored we used the engine on a very low speed (1500 RPM). This doubled the distance that we could cover with the limited amount of diesel we took (we did about 550 miles on 200 liters). This is particularly useful when there isn’t really enough wind to sail but when motorsailing the sails will provide some propulsion.

P.S. We have now arrived in Horta, we will post a blog about the wonderful island of Flores very soon

Azores, here we are!!!

We made it!! Although we can’ t really be proud of having motored around 1050 miles and only sailed 780, we are happy to have arrived in Flores. We made it in time before the bad weather and hope now that our friends from the Dutch fleet will manage well in wind, waves and rain!

Our friends from White Witch welcomed us in a perfect way: not only a bottle of prosecco but even warm croissants for us- what else can you ask for!

Now we are enjoying an Azorian dinner!!! Price level makes this even more enjoyable:)

We will post picture and a little movie asap.

Bermuda – Azores, day 17

Since our last blog, the miles have flown by. It is now 00:30 utc and we have another 75 miles to go into the harbour. We are doing 6 knots on motor only, the current helps. We did some motor sailing during the day but took the sail away for the night.

If we can more or less keep this speed, we should arrive in the afternoon, well ahead of the bad weather. More news once we have arrived

Position: 39N27 32W40 @ 00:40 UTC 05-06-2015

P.S. the dolphins are still with us. I hope they forgive us our carbon footprint for this trip… We are very much looking forward to be able to switch off the motor.

Bermuda – Azores, day 15-16

As we described in our last blog, we were in a bit of a pickle, Sailing was extremely slow as we didn’t want to hoist too much sail. Motoring was not really an option either as we had only a little bit left that we were trying to save as much as possible for a “just in case”. All this really didn’t matter, the trip back to the Azores would just take us a lot of time. You would just have to wait for the wind to come and slowly we would drift in the right direction (mostly)
One of our major activities during the day is getting weather forecasts, analyzing them, talking about them with other boats on the way and getting new forecasts all over again. A couple of days ago a low pressure system was announced in the forecasts to be coming our way. It then disappeared, only to resurface the following day. This back and forth was repeated a couple of times. Finally weather forecasts settled down and different sources now all seemed to agree that the low with associated high winds was on its way and would bring bad weather on Friday and Saturday of this week.
Normally such a thing is not really any issue. It’s maybe far from pleasant but boats are build to withstand such a thing without any problem. There is also always the possibility to avoid the worst of it by going further south or by speeding up to be just ahead of the weather.
Now we found ourselves in a bit of a difficult situation, first of all our boat is definitively designed to cope with such a thing but it was no longer in the same state as the designers intended. Heading further south also didn’t really work in this case as we didn’t have any wind or diesel to get there and we would be stuck without any possibility to get back up to the Azores. Then the final possibility of speeding up also proved difficult without wind or diesel.
So for a couple of days now we were counting miles to destination, guessing speed when we would get wind and trying to plan ahead as much as possible. We were by now also in contact with the Dutch Coastguard to let them know where we were.
The plan of action we finally came up with consisted of sailing whenever possible, if not possible, motor until we would have less then 50 liters left. This would allow us to still motor during 24 hours in the high winds, where we would be unable to sail because of our broken stay. We would also still need a bit of diesel to make it into the harbour.
It became clearer every day that we would probably not make it before the bad weather would arrive. However when I had send one of the position updates to the coastguard yesterday morning I received an email shortly after, where the coastguard asked a vessel to give us some diesel. We had talked with them about this possibility before but we had not yet formally asked them. They however try to ensure our safety as good as they can and they probably made the assessment that this was the safest option.
So we changed course and sailed north-east to meet the tanker, we emailed a great deal with them, we also exchanged SSB frequencies to allow us to talk directly to them.
This morning we finally approached them, the initial plan was to go along side on the leeward side of the tanker. The leeward side did have a lot less swell then the rest of the ocean but I was reluctant to moor next to a steel wall of 300 meter long by at least 15 meters high. This would have finally brought us into a real emergency situation… The alternative was found in them throwing one rope of about 200 meters to us then attaching a can full of diesel to it, They would lower the can, I could pull it towards Ojala, untie the rope, they would pull back the rope far enough to attach the next can. Quite quickly we had transferred 8 cans containing about 160 liters of diesel. We thanked them, turned around and were on our way once more to Flores. Filling the cans in to our tank proved to be a messy business, we still had about 2 meter waves which caused the boat to rock significantly from one side to the other. Additionally the cans where not really designed for the purpose of containing diesel. One of them used to contain (according to the label) 18 liters of liquid soap!. But we now have once more a full diesel tank. We can hopefully still make it before the weather turns bad. We’re able to motor a lot faster now as we don’t have to be economical anymore. The only other hope is that our motor keeps on purring along on the darkest diesel we have ever seen. At least this gives us something to do in Flores, change the diesel filter!

Position: 40N05 36W30 @ 18:00 UTC 03-06-2015

Bermuda – Azores, day 14

Today was a day of slow progress for most of the time. We tried to sail as much as possible, given that we are trying to save diesel for the last days of our trip at the end of the week, when we might face stronger winds which make sailing with our “injured” rig difficult. We want to keep the option to use the support of our motor then.
Sailing in light winds today went fine, the mast is straight. At the same time however, there is only so much speed you can make with a considerably smaller main than normal (2 reefs) in force two to three from the back. Winds are forecasted to be a mixture of nothing, light, and moderate for tomorrow and Wednesday and will only start picking up more on Thursday. Therefore, progress will probably continue to be slow and although we only have 390 miles left to go, it might take us all the way to Saturday to reach a harbour.
On a positive note, we finally saw the first whale today. I have to say, the whale didn’t really make a gentle appearance on the stage of the ocean: the first thing I heard was the sound as if something had exploded. When I turned to look behind where I had heard the sound, I saw something big disappearing in the water and around this spot, big white waves were making their way out in big circles – as if something had in fact exploded below the water surface. The next thing I saw was a big fountain of water being blown into the air. The fountain appeared a couple of times more, moving slowly towards the side, always keeping a distance of a couple of hundred meters from our boat. At one point, I saw a massive grey back just at the surface of the water. I am not sure what whale it was but it was BIG!! Unfortunately, I was too scared in the moment to take pictures, but well : the memory will last!
Our position at 4:00 UTC on 2 June 2015: 39N 13′, 39W26′. Miles (motor-)sailed so far: 1421 nm. Miles to go to Flores: 390nm.