28:27.7N  079:20.9W

 

The planned passage is to be Fort Lauderdale to Bermuda (900nm) whether that turns out to be successful we will see.

 

After ascertaining that the US Border Authorities were indifferent to the fact that we were leaving we left without gaining any clearance documentation. We cast off at 09 35 on Tuesday 27 May passed under the 17th Avenue Bridge and headed out to sea. The first obstacle to progress is the Little Bahama Bank so we set a course for the northern end. At first we could lay the waypoint but as the Florida Current took hold we were soon up to 20 degrees off course. The current can reach speeds of 4.5 Kt so it tends to be boss. That’s OK when you want to go were the current is going but problematic if you want to go across current in a fairly light wind. The forecast we had showed an easterly turning into a South Westerly after about 24 hrs and staying like that for a further 2 days. So all seemed well. So without much wind we were doing up to 7 kts generally in a northerly direction when we would have preferred to go at 32 degrees.

 

There was a delay in activating the Sat phone so we set off without it activated. It did get activated by Iridium as promised a few hours later but it proved impossible to get it to work with the computer. What happens with the connection to the host computer all sorts of rubbish is automatically downloaded over the satellite link which overloads it. We had this problem last time we used the phone but was able to sort it out on land by deleting the offending programme. Namely the virus protection, not a good idea but necessary in this instance. Anyway this hasn’t worked at sea and so we will defer to voice comms to keep our position recorded and to get weather information. Having told Pat that we couldn’t make the Sat phone/computer combination work I was looking at how we could up date our position on the blog and more importantly get some weather info.

 

28 May At about 07 00 fed up with going north and the promised SW wind not materialising. We started to motor sail. The hope was that we could get out the strongest part of the current by getting more offshore and await the SW wind.

 

I had another go at sorting out the computer and uninstalled a few more programmes. This time I managed to get the sat phone and computer to work. I uploaded a test Blog and managed to get a weather forecast.

 

Someone described sailing as going nowhere in particular, slowly and at great expense. Well this is what we are doing at the moment. Drifting along north on the conveyor belt called the Gulf Stream. We are doing 3 Kts almost north in next to no wind. We have got bored with running the engine and are just sitting here waiting for the wind to decide what it wants to do. Only 800nm to go.