OCEAN SAILING | 1200 miles from home | Sailing Florence Ep.168

This year has been unprecedented for the number of summer storms rolling across the North Atlantic Ocean. We have been waiting for months in the Azores to find a gap between those storms big enough to sail Florence 1,200 miles across the open ocean home to England. Finally we think we have found one but the weather in the North Atlantic Ocean is unpredictable and since we will be at sea for nearly two weeks the chances of getting caught out in the storm are high. As we leave the security of safe harbour in the Azores we don't know what we will face. We are Amy and Matt and this is Florence, our home and safe haven upon the ocean. Together we have sailed almost 50,000 miles around the globe on a seven-year voyage of discovery and now it's time to sail back to where this journey began. Well the time has come to leave the Azores it's mid-August and the season's marching on for getting back to the UK and we also have now arranged our date for arriving into the UK so we've just topped Florence up with fuel and water and it's time to go. This leg of our voyage is going to take us from here in the Azores across 1,200 miles of North Atlantic Ocean to the tiny isles of Scilly off the southwest tip of England. It's a stunning day out here sailing between the islands in the Azores and we're expecting these calm conditions until about 11 o'clock tonight in fact we're expecting the wind to disappear before 11 o'clock tonight when it should come in again from the west which is the direction we want to blow us nicely on our way to the Scillys. But the reason we're leaving now rather than waiting until 11 o'clock tonight is we just want to use any breeze we can to get out there and get further north and that's because there's a weather event coming along in a couple of days time which has got us a little bit worried and that's a ridge that's going to come down and go across our course and that ridge is going to bring a lot of rain and a lot of squalls and the further north the weather models say the further north we are when we meet that ridge the less severe those squalls and rain squalls and wind should be. So that's why we're leaving now when it's very very light winds and it might be a bit drifty just to try and get a little bit further ahead of that. The weather model said even if we left at 11 we'd still be clear of it but we just want a little bit more insurance. After that it looks like we should have the beautiful breeze and then the weather models after about five or six days they completely diverge disagree with each other so who knows what we're going to have. The weather is a little bit unpredictable around here in the North Atlantic so we just have to keep our fingers crossed and hopefully have a nice passage all the way to the cities. It's really nice that it's such a calm day today because it's helping to ease our nerves a little and this is such a significant passage for the two of us because it's the last major passage of this circumnavigation before we obviously return to the UK for the first time in seven years. So as well as all of the the nerves and the anxiety that normally comes with with doing a passage which is in a kind of unstable or difficult area, we're both I think feeling the pressure that we really can't mess this up. A departure like this is always tinged with a little bit of sadness. Sadness to be leaving the Azores which is such a beautiful place but this one's also got the additional sadness of this being the final passage of this circumnavigation. It's not the end of our sailing and it's not the end of our adventures or videos but it is it's the end of a massive chapter. Setting off on a passage with unstable weather is always an anxious time but for me it's also the fact that this is the last passage like Amy says of this circumnavigation. It's so significant that we've been on this path for seven years now with this goal of sailing back to England and now we're on the last leg to actually achieve that goal. The closer we get to home the more lost we feel in a way because that major drive is going to be gone. We've got lots of other things exciting things coming up which we're incredibly excited about already starting the planning for sailing up to the arctic next year and what we're going to do with Florence to prepare her for that and sailing beyond that. We don't have any end to our sailing and video plans but it's very very major and it's suddenly starting to feel a lot more real about sailing around the world and for me this last stretch home to England where we set off from where we grew up is actually more significant than when we crossed our track in the Caribbean to actually complete our loop around the world. Actually this is really what we're aiming for and so there's a lot of extra butterflies in the stomach because of that and I think it's going to be a very emotional time when we do sight England again for the first time Well how beautiful was that? I was just sad because we had to start motoring because the wind's completely died which is kind of what we expected and then just this massive pod of dolphins came to play and they were just playing by the bow leaping out of the water and the water's crystal clear just oh it's beautiful absolutely beautiful. It's really sad to be leaving the Azores so just like the water surrounding the Azores are just teeming with life. We saw a couple of sperm whales in the distance as we were coming out, there's birds aplenty everywhere and then yeah a bit of a dolphin escort as we leave. Beautiful Pushing on north we successfully avoided the worst of the squalls that were forecast only to run into bad weather further on that was not forecast. So the first couple of days were really good we made loads of progress but today it's just been wet all day well all afternoon wind's going round in circles a bit we're supposed to have wind from that side of the boat and it's coming from that side of the boat doesn't agree with any of the forecasts I downloaded this morning so just a rain cloud rain driven wind just gonna make the best of it keep adjusting the sail and try and sail through it hopefully at some point it'll stop raining the wind will go back to the direction it's supposed to be coming from and make some better progress as we're going pretty slow at sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for I can't really show you much it's a bit wild but the trouble is that we can't just turn and run with this because we'd be running into the bay of Biscay which is definitely not something that we want to be doing so I'm just going to have to try and keep as much height or sail as close to when caught in bad weather at sea always remember it will pass but it may not be the end of your troubles so what's happening that well all was well we're sailing along on a beautiful day and then suddenly all the instruments turned off so first suspect of that is a fuse of course change the fuse it goes again so we've got a short circuit somewhere in the instruments loop now it's not too much of a problem because we have the chart plotter on a separate fuse so it's on a completely different circuit so we've still got a chart plotter which has got a gps position speed that sort of stuff so the main thing that we're missing that's linked to our instruments is the autopilot it doesn't really matter if we don't know what wind direction is we can look outside our depth would be good as well so I'm just disconnecting all of the instruments and then reconnecting them up one at a time individually to see if that's what's causing the fuse to blow and then theoretically if that's the case then I'll just leave the one that's causing it to blow unplugged and we'll do without that one for a while but yeah it just means taking all the panels off to get to all the wires and disconnect them which is not easily done when the boat's rolling around you're trying to do it before it gets dark and I'm trying to do it before it gets dark yeah good touch good job we got long daylight evenings because all of the instruments work and the last thing to check is the autopilot and I was really hoping one of the instruments would be not working which would mean the autopilot would be working but kind of indicates that there's something to do with the autopilot circuit which is gonna be really annoying if we have to motor when we're sailing it's not a problem because we use the wind vane this is what we're using at the moment it's not a problem we don't use the electric autopilot that much unless it's very light winds and the wind vane can't cope or we're motoring because you can't use a wind vane when there's no wind when you're motoring so okay that's annoying all right might not be that well we'll see might be something else well we're back in business that only took three hours so aim I've kept aiming up so I've been faffing around behind the panels turns out there's a short somewhere between one of the instruments at the chart table behind there somewhere and the rest of them and so I disconnected everything and then connected it all back one by one but it got a little bit confused because although I wasn't blowing the fuse on the fuse panel anymore the autopilot still wasn't working so I went and had a look at the manual and there's an extra fuse on the smart pilot controller for the autopilot so the only thing we don't have now is I've had to completely disconnect the autopilot from the rest of the instruments so the autopilot will just work on heading whereas normally we have it working off the wind vane on the top of the mast so it will sail to the wind so we just don't have that feature because that link in there something has got shorted and it's causing lots of fuses causing the fuses to blow so I just disconnected that and everything else works apart from wind vane mode on the autopilot so that'll do we're back in action brilliant well done Matt yeah so Amy can now get a bit of sleep and I can go back to keeping a proper lookout like I'm supposed to and I managed to get it done before it's dark so that's good as we sail close to the English Channel we start to see more and more ships sharing the ocean with us this is just beautiful ocean sailing it does not get much better than this I absolutely love sailing along under the spinnaker and it's really nice that we're getting some beautiful sailing like this on this leg back to England ahead of our winter refit because if we'd had some really gnarly horrible weather on the leg home and then a winter refit we wouldn't be as enthusiastic I think to go out sailing again but just having sailing like this it just makes me so much more enthusiastic for the sailing we've got coming up next after we've done our winter refit sailing north sailing up to the arctic although it's not going to be I'm not sure it's on the deck up there but yeah this is just beautiful sailing I absolutely love sailing with spinnaker feeling quite emotional about returning home to England and it's not really the country it's more family I haven't been home for the entire seven years that we've been away sailing around the world my parents did come out to visit us when we were in the Caribbean at the start but I haven't seen them now for six and a half years and they said that actually they've emailed us to say they've booked some accommodation to come down and see us when we arrive into Falmouth so I'm really really really looking forward to that and yeah I'm feeling quite emotional about that to be honest so it's getting on towards the evening and we need to jive because we've had a wind shift so we can't quite make the course we want to go on towards the sillies so we're going to jive but also because it's breezes picked up a little bit and we're going into the night we prefer not to sail with the spinnaker through the night if possible so we're going to drop the spinnaker jive and then put the genoa out on the pole on the new side and that should take us through the night. The first thing we do before dropping the spinnaker is ease the pole forward so that it's easier to reach for the drop. I ease the guy rope from the cockpit while Matt simultaneously pulls in on the tack line on the bow to keep the sail under control. Then I prepare to let the spinnaker sheet off once Matt's ready to pull on the spinnaker snuffer line through the block on the foredeck. If you want to see how we set this sail up in more detail check out our top spinnaker tips video which was episode number 94. Once Matt has the spinnaker snuffer sock pulled all the way down I join him on the foredeck to help drop the spinnaker. With the spinnaker safely down and in the cockpit we work together to take the spinnaker pole in. With that done we return to the cockpit to jive Florence through the wind. The first step for the jive is to remove the preventer from the boom then Amy takes the helm and I pull in on the mainsheet to centralise the mainsail which reduces the forces on Florence and all the equipment when the sail chimes over. Once Matt is ready I steer Florence through the jive and get her settled on the new course. Then we can set the preventer on the new side and get ready to pull out and goosewing the genoa for the night. With this set up there is no risk of us having to go up on the foredeck to drop the spinnaker if the wind picks up in the night. I swear, bang on course. We are now halfway through our final leg home to England. Join us next time as we return to British waters for the first time in over seven years. Don't forget to subscribe to catch the next episode we release a video every two weeks. As always we want to say a massive thank you to everyone who supports the making of these videos and especially our star patrons.