Club Carp - Club Carp: Zen and the Art of Sailboat Maintenance

Well, it's been another wonderful sail, taking a little over eight and a half days.We've ate and drank well; had more laughs than a barrel full of monkeys; advanced our personal knowledge of sail trimming and boat performance; and added another 1200 miles to our sailing resumes.Club Carp sets a high bar when it comes to zen and the art of sailboat maintenance.She outperforms when asked and keeps us safe in all conditions.As for the crew, I can't say enough about them.Captain Jeff and Woody, the "maintenance twins," are an amazing duo.They might bicker at times like the two old guys in the balcony on the Muppet Show, but they always come to a shared solution in the end. Beyond their mechanical, electrical and carpentry expertise, I can only hope to someday obtain the same depth of sailing. read more...

Club Carp - Club Carp: Dueling Objectives

Today appears to be the final day of our Carib1500 voyage.We are currently about 125nm from the finish line with an estimated time of roughly 18 hours.However, the initial race objective has been complicated by a flight departure for one of our crew members at 2pm on Wednesday out of St. Thomas.We now have to make the difficult decision of crossing the finishing line and/or heading to a new destination.The two options that appear most likely are to head straight to Sopers Hole so that our crew mate can get the first ferry to St. Thomas. Alternatively, we can sail directly to Redhook for our crew mate to get a cab across St. Thomas to the airport.  The challenge is that the winds have not aligned with the forecast, and instead of backing to the East, slightly Northeast they have. read more...

Club Carp - Club Carp: Boats life

Following yesterday's Easting, we've reverted to a Southern tack and have been making good headway under roughly 20 knots of apparent wind.It appears, based on some of the other boats that have popped up on our radar (really our AIS for those familiar), that everyone was trying to find the optimal course over the past 24 hours.Those boats that attacked the South, while we were making our Easting, have now crossed back over our course.We can't see Sail Tracker to view the courses of our competitors but I'm thinking something like two skiers coming down an untracked powder slope on opposing slaloms to create a beautiful repetitive figure 8 pattern (skiers will know what I mean...think of any Warren Miller flick).  Over to the daily meal recap (really all we do out here is sail, drink,. read more...

Club Carp - Finally a fish

FINALLY, yesterday just before cocktail hour we managed to hook a Mahi.He was on the smaller side of what one hopes to catch, yet is plenty to feed the crew dinner tonight...we're thinking fish tacos.On the weather front, we ended up with too much wind on our nose to continue on our previous course and are basically only able to sail SW or E, neither really in our favor.We ultimately chose E based on our current wind forecasts.  Adding to today's fun were several squalls this morning (winds in the upper 20s), which resulted in us having to reef our sails on multiple occasions.The one benefit was that we got free fresh water showers on deck.Additionally, we got to see an end-to-end rainbow, which is always a treat.That's it for today as the Captain requested I not write another Club. read more...

Club Carp - How many 360 degree turns does it take for the crew to notice?

Answer: 1.5!So, get ready, this is a good one.Let me first lay the scene.Weather conditions: it's very overcast almost fully blocking out the moon; we had just gone through a small squall; and the wind is extremely light and directly on our nose which means the Yanmar humming it's lovely tune.Crew mental conditions: it's post dinner and all four crew members have settled deeply into their food comas; laying in the breeze up on deck; and bobbing our head to some really mellow tunes (no, not kenny G, more like Eric Clapton genre) which have to loud enough to drown out the engine.As a quick aside, we still have not caught any fish and dinner was the spiral cut ham and canned green beans I had foreshadowed in our last blog.But as I also mentioned, our "Cooke" prepared it in outstanding. read more...