North Atlantic Crossing - WE'RE LEAVING - Sailing Florence Ep.159

After six months of sailing through the balmy Caribbean islands, it is time to go. It's time to point Florence east for the first time on this seven-year circumnavigation. It's time to recross the North Atlantic Ocean, our fifth major ocean crossing. We know it is not going to be easy. We are no longer in the trade winds. We will face headwinds, strong winds and calms in our bid to complete this ocean odyssey and return home to England. Between us and England lie over 4,000 miles of open ocean sailing. Thankfully there are two safe havens where we can break our passage along the way, in Bermuda and then the Azores, before the final leg home to the British Isles. We are Amy and Matt and this is Florence, our home and safe haven upon the ocean. Together we have sailed over 46,000 miles around the globe on a seven-year voyage of discovery and now it's time to sail back to where this journey began. We're currently at the southern end of the Exumas in the Bahamas which is obviously a beautiful place to be but it is now fast approaching hurricane season. It's currently mid-May but this is theoretically also the best time to sail from here in the Bahamas to Bermuda because the jet stream at this time of year has theoretically moved north and with it the bad systems that bring strong winds and big waves have theoretically also moved north with it. However the theory and reality with the weather models often don't match up and we've actually been waiting here in the Bahamas for three weeks now for a suitable weather window to sail to Bermuda. Now we've actually got ready to leave, got Florence completely prepared to leave twice now and then cancelled our plans at the last minute on the day we were about to leave and that's because the weather models aren't really very reliable seven days out especially in this part of the world and they have been massively changing. So we were looking to set off with a nice downwind forecast that would take us all the way to Bermuda and then just before we left the forecast changed and said we were going to have 20 plus knots on the nose for two days before we arrived and that's not great although Florence could cope with that. It's not very good for wear and tear on Florence, it's not very good for wear and tear on us and it wouldn't be very much fun. So we've now got a forecast which looks okay to go. I mean if we were right at the start of the season we probably would choose not to take this forecast. We think we could wait for something better but as Amy said hurricane season is fast approaching so although this forecast isn't ideal we're going to take it because although it's not ideal it's not ideal because it looks like we could run out of wind. It doesn't look like we could run into strong headwinds or anything dangerous so we're going to have a bit of breeze at the start of the passage and then in the middle of the passage it looks like the wind's going to go to nothing and so we're going to have some very drifty conditions but then hopefully it will fill back in and we'll have a good sail from there on to Bermuda but of course that is out at the end of the weather model's prediction and they are notoriously unreliable out that far. So we've been getting Florence ready to go again. We actually keep her mostly ready to sail across an ocean at all times but before we leave there are a few things that we need to do. First of all we need to jump over the side. It's been over two years since we last hauled out in Seychelles back in the Indian Ocean and our anti-foul is wearing out. In fact in places we have none left. In hindsight we should have hauled out in the southern Caribbean and replaced it but we didn't so now we have to jump in and scrub off all the seaweed every few weeks and especially before an offshore passage. If we didn't do this it would slow us down by up to 20%. Next we need to fill up with fresh water. We carry 500 litres on board which lasts us for over a month. On average we use five litres of fresh water per person per day when at sea. Thankfully here in Georgetown there's a free drinking water tap on the dinghy dock but it still takes several trips to ferry all the water out to Florence. Whilst all that is going on we've dug out all of our warm clothes and sleeping bags to give them an airing. We last used them when leaving Namibia at the start of our South Atlantic Ocean crossing. As we are now sailing north out of the tropics we expect the temperatures to drop especially when sailing at night. Last but not least we top up with fresh provisions. This bit is painful as although you can buy almost anything you want here the prices are eye-wateringly high. Thankfully we still have plenty of long life provisions left from our time in the French Caribbean islands where food was relatively cheap so we can get away with only buying a few fresh items here in the Bahamas. With the last minute items done it's time to go. It is always an anxious time waiting for a weather window and making the decision of when to set off but once the decision is made and we hoist the sails we get a huge sense of relief. We are going now we just have to face whatever the weather sends our way. No more should we go or should we stay just deal with it day by day. It's a beautiful day to set off, sailing out through the reefs under full sail in calm waters. Are you ready? Yeah a bit of a wave. Okay we'll be okay now. Sailing upwind on a monohull means getting used to life on the lean. Although we have a gimballed stove with fiddles to hold the pots and pans on, cooking at this angle is extremely challenging and actually dangerous. So I made some meals before we left that we can either heat up or have cold if the conditions are against lighting the stove. Trying to cook in these conditions is also highly likely to make me seasick. That's another reason for having meals prepared before we leave. After dinner we tacked and it was time to make our last preparation for the open ocean. We've been beating upwind in the nice calm waters in the lee of Long Island all day and we've been sneaking up here to make use of it to shelter us from the open ocean swells. We're about to reach the point of Long Island and head out into the open North Atlantic Ocean so we're expecting a bigger sea state there and because we've been tacking lots up here we've had our inner force state off which allows the Since we're now going out into the open ocean we might want to use our stay sail so we're now going to put our inner force state on and we're doing it whilst we're in the nice still in the lee of the island. We've just put a couple of extra reefs in the genoa to slow down and make it all nice and easy up here to do this job. The downside of doing this of course is that then when we've got the inner force state on when we next tack we would have to furl the genoa completely, tack and then unfurl it on the new side and we've still got a few more tacks we need to do to clear Cat Island in the night tonight. With the inner stay fitted we can hank on our stay sail ready for the stronger winds we are expecting ahead. This sail is smaller and stronger than our genoa designed primarily for sailing upwind in strong winds. The inner force day is also an extra stay to support the mast so we usually fit it when sailing offshore just in case the main force day breaks. With that done we put a reef in the main sail for the night and I headed below to bed as we settled into our watch system. Although there are two of us on board for the next week we will see very little of each other just an hour or two during the day when we're both awake and short periods where we change over watches or work together on sail changes. This is the evening now of our third day at sea and to be quite honest with you yesterday was rubbish. We had quite a lot of wind and quite a short steep sea state. The performance was bouncing over the waves, we were both feeling rubbish. I was head over the side feeding the fishes most of the afternoon but only just today this afternoon felt like eating anything again. We've both been absolutely really really tired, been impossible to get any sleep. I think I've only had about three or four hours sleep in the whole voyage so far so we're only just starting to feel normal again this afternoon and we're going upwind we're zigzagging to get to our destination. Bermuda's over there not even going in the right direction so yeah yesterday was a bad day hopefully things will improve now. Matt doesn't normally get seasick and I think that was actually only the second time on this whole round the world voyage that Matt's actually physically been sick. I quite often feel pretty rubbish but so often that I think I've kind of got used to that feeling. Matt however yesterday was really annoyed about the fact that he was feeling ill. I feel like we've both hopefully reached a turning point though the first three days are always the hardest especially when it's rough to start with. It's just so hard to physically move yourself around the boat and just manage doing day-to-day tasks like eating using the bathroom and even sleeping so we've just been swapping between one of us being on deck and then as soon as our watch is over we have been straight down below and laid horizontally on the bunk which is the most comfortable place to be when the boat was rolling around. It's even impossible to hold the camera steady even oh this is this is like a dream in comparison to how the sea state was yesterday we were just being thrown around by the waves and then every so often we'd like jump off the top of one and then just come crashing down and it wasn't like we had too much sail area up we were only doing three and a half knots it's just the sea state was horrendous. I'm still exhausted even just holding the camera up just now to film Amy talking my arms are tired and just being seasick just takes it completely takes it all out of you. Unfortunately I downloaded the latest weather forecast this afternoon and the weather that we're expecting has deteriorated we were expecting to have a little bit of upwind bouncing conditions and then a bit of a wind hole where we might have to motor through and then we were expecting to have downwind conditions on the other side of wind hole and the forecast I've just downloaded says yes we're going to have some upwind conditions the wind hole small wind hole we were expecting is now a very large wind hole which is going to take us a couple of days to get across according to one forecast and then on the other side that wind hole we don't have nice downwind conditions we have yet more bouncing upwind conditions to get to Bermuda so I've no real idea what's going to happen but the forecast keeps changing and just got to point our bow as close as we can to the destination and keep going and hope it improves we've just had so many days of waves just breaking over the whole of the boat spray going across the whole of the solar panels they are covered everything is covered in salt so to keep them working well that's one of the chores to rinse them off but without using too much fresh water these two solar panels have provided all of the power that we've used on Florence over the last seven years we've actually only plugged into shore power I think twice and we've probably used the engine to charge the batteries when it's been a rainy day maybe eight or nine times and that was really only so we had enough power to run the laptops for editing actually these two have given us plenty for living on but it's never really enough we do ration power like when we're on a passage like this there's nothing around us there's no land to show on the chart plotter so so we turn the chart plotter off to save power overnight so it would be nice to have a little bit more everybody always wants more power bigger solar panels and bigger batteries so maybe that's something we can do when we refit Florence it's on the list well this is the evening of day four and it's the first time since we left the shelter of Long Island behind that we've been able to stand up here on the bow without getting completely and utterly soaked we've had waves going over the whole boat and soaking us in the cockpit as well the promised wind shift that was going to have us heading straight towards Bermuda now has not materialized it lifted us for a few hours and we were on a good course straight at where we wanted to go but now the wind is coming directly from where we want to go so I'm to zigzag up I've just got to hope that the light winds stay enough wind so that we can keep sailing you don't have to motor and then yeah unfortunately later on the last couple of days in towards Bermuda look like we're going to get some pretty strong headwinds which is going to be really uncomfortable and unenjoyable again so it's a bit of a mixed feelings on board really we're kind of relieved that we've got these conditions now and we're going to enjoy them but we're not looking forward to what's coming at the end of the trip we've actually just done the washing up for the first time on the trip it was building up because there was no way you could get yourself wedged in the galley well enough to do it until now and since we've been feeling a bit ill we haven't actually been eating that much so thankfully we didn't generate too much washing up after the last few days of bouncing around all over the place this is a good opportunity to go up on the bow and to check everything and the dinghy had moved a little bit so we relashed her down ready for what comes a bit later what an awesome day of sailing we've had today it has luckily rejuvenated both of us for ocean sailing which is a good job because in a couple of days from now we have some really strong headwinds again but today has been absolutely gorgeous the sea state has flattened off we've generally had somewhere between 10 and 15 knots of wind which is absolutely perfect the only trouble is that the wind is still dead on the nose so we've been zigzagging all day but the sea state easing off has made life so much easier on board we've both been able to have a shower have something to eat and i brushed my hair for the first time i think in about four days so we're both feeling a lot better and a lot less tired than we were we both knew that this was not going to be an easy passage and particularly those first couple of days with the headwinds that were forecast but i think it hit us both really hard just how much we struggled i haven't seen matt that badly seasick in probably about five years mentally it was a pretty big struggle because in the back of our minds we both knew that this is just the start of our north atlantic crossing and actually the next bit across the azores is potentially even more difficult to get decent weather for because it's just a longer section and it also has a pretty bad reputation it's tough feeling like that and and knowing that you've got the best part of a month of tough ocean sailing ahead of you and no real easy way out of it but it's days like today that make all of that worthwhile today is just a fantastic day to be out on the water and we're both really happy to be here next time we enjoy calm conditions out on the open ocean but there is no respite and we have to use this time for repairs and to prepare for more bad weather ahead if you enjoy our videos please subscribe to the channel to make sure you don't miss an episode and that's absolutely free we are usually a couple of months ahead of the videos in real time and that means that right now we should be part way through our north atlantic crossing sailing florence offshore from the caribbean to england via a couple of islands on the way if you'd like to see where we are in real time then please join the crew over on patreon to see the tracker map where we post a daily update as always we want to say 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