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Tara - Leg #2 Bermuda to The Azores




Wednesday morning the dreaded start of the longest, most dangerous leg of this three stage passage was upon us. Approximately 1800 miles of the North Atlantic. I know that 35 degrees north of the equator does not seem like very far north but you need to keep in mind that we are advised not to go north of 40 degrees because of ice bergs! WTF! It’s known as the ‘Roaring Forty’s’. The Azores are located at 39 degrees latitude and I’m hoping that the wind God’s allow us to enter the island chain from the west, or even south, without going on a Titanic-like iceberg ‘watch’ (well hopefully we would do it better than they did). The dilemma is that the winds south of the Azores are notoriously light (who wants to take a month to get there? Not me!) and hence the delicate balancing act that is navigating to the Azores. I imagine you are looking at the plot of everyone’s departure from Bermuda and can see the wide variety of attacks that boats use to get there. We get daily position reports aboard TARA via our Iridium satellite dome so we plot them and can see what other boats are doing. A northern departure can be perilous! For example, we get weather forecasts in ‘boxes’. We were straddling two boxes last night. The box below us called for winds of 18-21 mph (16-19knots) and the one to the north of us called for 33-39 mph winds with gusts to 50mph. Keeping in mind that winds above 64mph are considered a hurricane, I’ll be interested to see how ‘Defyr’ did last night since they were smack in the middle of the northern ‘weather forecast box’. I've been in 30 knot winds with 17 foot seas before. It is anything but fun. The good news for them is that the wind is behind them, pushing, so it may just end up being a super-fast exhilarating sail!

Lisa and I have been studying the route options for months and even watched the last two years rallies from home as you are on ‘FleetTracker’. For a number of reasons, most important among them is that we are total wimps, we chose in advance to do the most southern of three dominant route options. We are tracking right on that line. It is interesting to see that many boats are south of us and that we are somewhere in the middle. The southern boats are going to have to get north pretty soon or they will be motoring to the Azores. We have a lot of fuel but nowhere near enough to stay low (south) the whole way.

I’ve jumped a little too far ahead. I need to tell you about the start out of Bermuda. We started in three categories of boats so there were no more than 15 boats fighting for starting position at the sound of the horn in the small harbor. Well, any sailor will tell you that the start of a race will tell you a lot about the quality of the skipper. As forty plus boats were maneuvering to a) get a good start and b) not hit another boat milling around waiting for his start, as skipper I will tell you that those sailors are right. After careful maneuvering and counting down the clock to the second, we crossed the start line in dead last position. Adding insult to the process was that Charles and the crew on ‘Agua Dulce’ had to be laughing heartily that he had trumped me again! We struggled to get out of the harbor in the light and fluky winds (everyone else seemed to do just fine though). Once out, we looked back and saw that the final class of boats that left five minutes after us was closing fast with several spinnakers flying. It made for a nice picture, but I wasn’t enjoying the humiliation at all. Fortunately, Jack suggested that we swap out sails into a wing-on-wing position and mimic having a spinnaker (we don’t have one because as live aboard cruisers, we use every square in of this boat for storage and a giant spinnaker would just take up too much room in the sail-locker (where we store a million items, none of which are sails). It worked, we took off sailing on the line that was dead-down wind and the speed indicator jumped. There were several boats ahead of us that had chosen a similar route plan and within a few hours we had passed them all. It turned into a beautiful day that made us feel like we were still in the Caribbean. Bright sun, warm, low seas, decent winds. We held that same sail plan and course for 2-1/2 days and nights. It’s been simple, easy sailing so far. We try not to think about what could be coming and just enjoy these great hours. Two days ago the forecast was calling for things to start getting nasty (headwinds of 20 knots) but we are hoping to skirt more eastward and stay under the front line that has formed. We can see the line of clouds off on the far horizon and now we are racing that not the other boats. The front is supposed to stall, so if we can stay south of it, we are hoping to avoid the bad winds just on the other side. Anyway, it is Saturday morning and we are making our best speed yet as the winds have gotten more southerly and TARA loves those beam winds as we head just a little north of east.




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