june 27, 2003


hello all --

new crew in bermuda, john mcginley, my personal weather man continued
from the bermuda leg and we added amanda stevenson (friend of a friend of
a friend ...) and adam boggs (former student).  amanda had sailed lots
in the chesapeake bay but not much off shore. adam had never sailed
before.  both were excellent crew and didnt get seasick or scared by
the big waves and bouncing around.   more important, they were both
great cooks.

we arrived in horta, on the island called faial in the azores yesterday.
the sail from bermuda, 1800+ miles, took 15.5 days.  that seems pretty
good, especially when you have 4 people living for those 15.5 days in
very close proximity and not killing each other for squeezing the tooth
paste tube "wrong" or drinking the ginger beer that someone else was
saving/hoarding.

the weather was pretty good, a couple of days of head winds that were
strong and made bouncy seas and a couple of days of big (12-15 ft)
following seas, and a couple of days of winds that were too light.

we started off with gentle winds and seas, which was good since the 
crew was inexperienced and had never sailed together before.  for adam,
it was his second time on a sailboat and the first time was an afternoon
sail in a lake in colorado.  amanda had sailed before, mostly racing in
the chesapeake bay area, but no open ocean experience.  john had lots of
lake sailing in nebraska, week long charters in the caribbean, and the
florida - bermuda run a week earlier.  we did 3 hour watches so everyone
got plenty of sleep, 3 on and 9 off.

second day out we caught a mahi mahi.  had wasabi on board, so dinner was
sashimi appetizers, followed by the freshest fillets ever, sauted in butter
and lemon.  yumm.  that was the last fish we caught.  one other got away
and another time the rod made the i've-got-a-fish noise, but when we reeled
it in, it was just the empty lure.  we had fish that looked like small tuna
or mackeral following us for days, but they didnt want to come on board and
supply dinner.

as it got rough, we got thrown about the boat a lot.  in the galley, there
is a stainless steel rod in front of the stove that has two loops on it
for attaching a strap to keep you in the galley if you are cooking and it
is rough.  these two loops stick out about 1.5 inches and are lethal weapons
as you are thrown across the room by a random wave.  we each got multiple
bruises all around the butt and hips at exactly the height of these loops.
design flaw, they need to stick in toward the stove instead of out toward
our tender flesh.  it got so that every spot at that height was already
bruised so that leaning against the bar even without a loop poking at you
was uncomfortable.

rough seas seems to mean waves over the boat and that seems to mean wet
bunks, especially up forward.  the hatches that are over the other bunks
leak just a little bit when a big wave hits, so its like chinese
water torture, knowing that once every 10 minutes a drop of water
will hit your face just as you have gotten nicely to sleep.  the portholes
are carefully placed so that even if you switch head to foot of the bed
there is one ready to drip on your face.

another feature of rough seas is that you bump things you ordinarily wouldnt
and they sometimes break.  for example the doors to the bathroom and to the
two cabins have a hook that holds them partly open for ventilation.  but if
a wave launches a crew member into the door and they arent holding on, the
door frame breaks and the door slams shut.  we have some repairs to do.  our
second incident of bumping something resulted in a huge mess.  the fire 
extinguisher is mounted on the table right in the middle of the boat, so 
that everyone can see it and reach it in an emergency.  it has a gauge on
it that says if it is fully charged, half charged or discharged.  the gauge
sticks out at about knee height.  an inopportune wave arrived, threw john
across the room, aimed his knee at the gauge, and bingo, the gauge fell out
of the extinguisher and then the entire contents sprayed out the little hole.
john tried to stop it with his hand but it was coming out too fast.  soon the
entire boat was covered in a yellow powder.  john was busily trying to clean
it up, the rest of us were up on deck coughing our heads off.  at one point
i tried my little vacuum and it worked very well.  but when it got full and
adam dumped the bag, the stuff flew in his eyes, he closed them, and the
bag from the vacuum fell overboard.  end of vacuuming it up.  at some point
we read the ingredients which said it was a non-toxic powder that contained
among other things "nuisance dust".  definitely well named.  weeks later and
several washes later for all surfaces, there is still a yellow dusty cast to
everything.

for the first week we didnt see any ships at all, just our little 40 ft boat
in the big old ocean.  then we saw a sailboat pretty close who was heading
north.  john is a weather man and our personal forecast by his buddies at
noaa said that to the north were gales and we should continue east.  so
we called the sailboat we saw heading north and told him.  he was a french
single-hander coming from guadelupe to the azores.  he turned east and was
in sight for a long while.  as it got dark he got closer and closer and was
about to run us down when we turned away and called him on the radio and
told him he was about to hit us.  he had gone to sleep after turning east
and his boat was faster than we were.  he got to about 1/2 a block from our
stern -- scary.

as we got close to the azores we started to see lots and lots of birds and
several schools of dolphins, maybe 100 in each school.  they would play with
the boat and encourage us to go faster to make them a better bow wave to surf 
down.  we also saw whales, maybe 10-12 of them.  pretty close to the
boat and really big.  not sure what kind they were, probably humpbacks
and grey whales, and a bottlenose whale.  they blow a huge spray into the
air and you can see it a long way off.  we sailed as close as we dared.

the azores were active in whaling thru about 1970 and there are lots
of beautiful scrimshaw carvings and engravings in the shops and museums
here.  pricy though.  a nice pocket knife is $150.

john and amanda fly back july 1; adam will stay on a bit more.  i go to
new zealand july 5-16, sail here july 17-26, then have friends from florida
coming (russ and jody) july 26 to august 8, and then will head to the
portuguese mainland.  anyone want to sail that leg or the coast of portugal
and spain in late august/sept?

just split a pint of strawberry haagen dazs with adam.  life is good.

hugs.

-evi