Passage notes Cape Verde to Martinique - part 1

Wednesday, December 5 - Wednesday, December 12th

The date is not optimal for leaving but we are ready and there are schedules to keep so we are going to make a go of it. PredictWind’s passage tool indicates that if we depart today we should have some decent wind 50% of the time, fair wind 30%, and then days without much wind on three of the four forecast models. Forecasts tend to change regularly so we might as well get going. By late morning we had weighed anchor and were off for a rough ride at first “motor-bobbing”, trying to clear the island and then we took off like a shot when the genoa caught the wind. 2080 NM to go to our first waypoint just outside the southern tip of Martinique. Estimated date of arrival if all goes well should be December 21st, and as always we give or take a couple of days so that we have no expectations. At the very least we hope to spend Christmas in a nice French restaurant.

We were going well, averaging about 7 knots and enjoying the ride until we hit the lee of the big island of Santo Antao. Once clearing that island we continued trying to sail for the better part of the day until the decreased wind drove us to deploy the gennaker (asymmetrical spinnaker). Eventually, during the darkest part of the predawn, the winds were giving up on us so the kite came down and the motor cranked on.

We enjoyed a daily dolphin show for the first few days out. At times there were at least a dozen swimming in synch along both sides of Destiny’s bow ducking and weaving as though choreographed by Esther Williams herself. Nothing much else is going on but standing our watches, enjoying some great meals (since it’s calm enough to cook), and also never tiring of the the starlit, moonless nights. Normally, the smell of ocean air is pleasant. The air in this part of the Atlantic Ocean, however, is not. There is something dirty and repugnant about the air here, a smell that I cannot describe and surely wouldn’t want to put into any air freshener. It permeates the skin and irritates our sinuses. The horizon is heavy with haze that likely comes from W. Africa. Perhaps we are picking up the odiferous lingerings of camel dung that travels in the trade winds!

Today is Sunday, Happy Birthday to my little sis, Bev. I called her from the IridiumGo! It’s so nice to have that capability out here to call anyone anytime, and we do. We are back on course yet disappointedly still motoring. We had turned south about a day out from Cape Verde hoping to scoop up some wind but then realized we not only were NOT finding our elusive friend but are going to end up in S. America if we don’t veer northward. We simply must get some wind because, although we carry a lot of fuel there simply isn’t enough to keep this up all the way across this big ocean. We are beginning to see a lot of small blobs of Sargasso weed floating by in the water. Nasty stuff. It will adhere to the hull and slow us even more if we are unlucky enough to hit larger patches of it. PredictWind is forecasting a hopeful 12+ knots of wind in our favor around 2:30 on Monday morning. 

Still Sunday, we were treated to an extraordinary Green Flash tonight! To top off the evening’s entertainment it feels as though those Trades are freshening so the gennaker is going up at last, not yet seeing consistent double digit wind but it feels great not to hear the droning of the engine.

Monday, Dec 10, the wee hours, we are doing very well with sustained winds in the low teens and hitting up to 8 knots SOG. It is a beautiful, albeit stinky night. The eyelash of a new moon crept up into the sky for a very short while only to quickly slip back down the horizon leaving zillions of bright stars above like pinholes in the floor of Heaven. The Southern Cross is visible. There have been quite a lot of falling stars leaving me to wonder if there’s a meteor shower going on out there. Beautiful night.

Daytime...what a day. With the kite we are making up a lot of lost time sometimes reaching up to 10 knots. In the late afternoon two young whales raced up behind and passed us as though we were moving backwards. Later in the day...the winds aren’t terribly high, gusting up to the low 20’s and yet both the halyard and sheet are sounding stressed. The seas are choppy and we are making such good time the decision was made to leave the kite up for the night.  Wee hours again brought action on the deck as the gennaker sheet popped loose from the winch during Frank’s watch. He fought it bucking violently back into place but because it bore so much pressure it took quite an effort. A short while later during my night shift I noticed the block that conveys the sheet from the tack to the winch wasn’t responding so I lit it up for inspection to find that the wheel had broken, probably when the sheet had snapped from the winch, causing it to slip into the mechanism itself. It was now in danger of chafing through so, as much as I hated to wake him, I called Frank up to help me. Jim heard the commotion and came back up as well. There was no possibility of getting the sheet off that block, so Frank set up a backup line to grab the sheet in the event the block blows. Without going into a lot of detail, later in the night during Jim’s watch the kite eventually came down of its own accord when the halyard snapped. The guys wrestled it back up out of the water and it is now secured on deck. I cannot say whether it will be used again on this passage. We are now two sails down, leaving only the poled-out genoa to move us downwind.

When I came back up to relieve Frank a short time after the first incident of the night, he told me he had seen the strangest phenomenon in the sky...he noticed a white blinking light, thinking it was an airplane but then a green laser shot out the front of it into a cloud. The laser extinguished after a few seconds; the white flashing light continued for a few more seconds and then it too went dark and the craft disappeared. I told him (tongue in cheek) it must’ve been a UFO. About an hour into my watch I saw a bright flash light up the southern sky but when I looked out there were no clouds and no lightning. It didn’t happen again. Very strange. When Frank relayed his sighting to Jim, he said it must be the military conducting secret tests where no one would see. Now that’s a bit discomforting.

The 11th, no one got a lot of sleep during last night, with all the theatrics and the disturbed seas, so I slept during my off time during the day and I’ve no idea what the men did. The genoa is up and we are still making fair progress. Night watch was once again filled with falling stars but no drama.

Wednesday, December 12th, a strange day. Wind’s up and down. The seas are all over the place with not much rhythm or consistency. Poor Destiny is tossing about. 10:30 a.m., GMT, marked our 1st week down and we are not yet quite at the half-way point. Feeling frustrated and a bit sore from being tossed around. Praying for wind. As if to send us a little spiritual lift, however, the whales are back now with some traveling in small pods. We think these are juvenile humpbacks. We have counted three different types of dorsal fins in the water; one might be a pilot whale, one was definitely an orca and the humpbacks. None are larger than about 15 - 20 feet in length. Jim spotted something that he thought might have been a turtle. Later in the evening, Frank and I felt like we were in the middle of a highway with whales passing by and then a pod of dolphins shot past. This is the bonus that brings us joy during what could otherwise be a very long, arduous passage. So we are bobbing and hardly moving but hey, we are being treated to a real-time Sea-world out here.