A Good Day on the Water

Day 6 : Azores to Ireland

Monday, May 23rd 2022

They say “A bad day on the water is still better than a good day in the office”. I’m not sure who “they” are, but I’ve definitely heard it said, more than a few times.

And while I don’t fully agree with it (I loved my work, the good days were awesome, and I’ve had a few pretty awful days on the water), I still understand the sentiment.

We have no commuting, no pointless or non-productive tasks to undertake to fulfil shareholder or management responsibilities, no office politics or worry about achieving goals or targets, plenty of fresh air and exercise (of sorts), and the freedom to choose our own destiny and destination.

We are indeed pretty lucky to be out here doing what we’re doing.

It just doesn’t always feel like it. Especially on ocean passages, which are often to be endured as much as to be enjoyed.

The discomfort is a large part of what can make passages a lot less fun than being in the office. Large waves or swell, heavy wind or rain, lack of (or very disturbed) sleep, living life on a 20 degree lean, cooking and even just getting dressed and performing basic ablutions can all be very challenging indeed. Sometimes for days or even weeks on end.

There’s the requirement for constant vigilance 24/7, the need to avoid rocks and reefs, ships and curious, sex-deprived whales. The need to be scanning the forecasts and planning for the potential storms coming your way, the lack of certainty about arriving in your new port, including the need to avoid arriving in the dark, and the ambiguity of arrival protocols and procedures.

And then, of course, you have the stuff going wrong. Breakages are a way of life on a boat, and you quickly get used to it. It’s rare indeed not to make landfall with a long list of maintenance projects.

But there’s also the constant fear of breakages – the low-level but permanent state of anxiety that sees you nervously examining every whale-song from your steering, or change in engine note, or creaking from the mast.

All of which means, when a good day on the water really does occur, it’s something to be appreciated.

Day 6 was one of those days.

Perfect weather was a large part of it. Enough wind that we were sailing at close to maximum speed with just our Mizzen and Genoa. The seas were flat, no swell at all and just small waves. The sun was shining and the sky was blue – neither of which we’d seen since we left the Azores. The daytime temperature was a positively balmy 20 degrees (we’d been expecting 12) so we were actually in t-shirts.

But it wasn’t just the current weather that was making us feel good. Past and Future weather was part of the cause of my good mood too.

Making the call on when to set sail from the Azores was a tough decision. It had been on my mind since August of last year, when we made the final decision to sail to the UK from Tanzania via the southern route (via South Africa), rather than the northern route (via the Red Sea).

A large part of planning ocean passages is making sure you’re in the right place at the right time to minimise the risk of bad weather. And while I knew that the southern route would see us pretty much spot on with the preferred seasons for most of it, our long-standing desire to reach the UK by the end of May was going to put us in a difficult position for the final leg from the Azores.

The North Atlantic Ocean has a fearsome reputation with giant storms all year round, and more than half of all the yacht sinkings or abandonments we read about happen here.

At least with other challenging passages such as the Mozambique Channel and the South African Wild Coast, there are places where you can take shelter, but there’s no such luxury out here. The weather is also MUCH less predictable here, and quite variable - a forecast that looks very moderate can suddenly transform, so it keeps you on your toes.

Conventional wisdom has it that June or July are the preferred months for this passage – it’s not that you can’t do it in other months, but just that the risks of encountering storms are higher. With a mid-May departure, we weren’t being foolish, but we needed to choose our weather window very carefully indeed.

We originally planned to leave last Saturday (15th May), but as the day drew closer we didn’t like the look of one of the systems that was coming through (the winds looked pretty bad but would have been manageable on Steely, but it was the 9 metre swell that gave us the heebie-jeebies), so we decided to defer our departure.

It was a good decision – on the day we finally left, three days later, a Golden Globe entrant from Australia called Captain Coconut experienced several knockdowns, damaged rig and loss of communications in the exact spot we would have been in if we’d left on our original planned day.

But even leaving when we did was questionable. We woke up that morning still not sure whether we were going to leave or not. The forecast had been changing quite a bit from one day to the next, and although we thought we could see a good window, there were three pinch points in it.

Firstly a very spicy start, secondly a long period of flat clam in the middle when we’d have to motor, and thirdly a good looking final 3 days which could easily turn into a very challenging few days if the depression that was forecast to pass through to the NW of Ireland shifted course southwards or intensified.

It was a close call, and we almost didn’t leave, but a couple of factors swung the decision.

Firstly, the two forecasts that we rely on the most (GFS and ECMWF), which had previously been divergent for that final 500 miles (one said good weather, one said dicey) came into alignment, with both showing a nice broad reach and 15-25 knots. The storm we were tracking seemed to be staying north and weakening if anything. Plus the spicy start looked like it would be short lived. But also there was no sign in the future forecast that it would get any better as far as we could see.

Since then the forecast has proven largely accurate, but we have been keeping a very close eye on the system to the North to ensure we didn’t run into worse weather than planned on the final few days. And yesterday was the moment when we finally got into that system, and could see for sure that it was going to be just fine. Perhaps 5 knots more wind than originally expected, but not so much as to be a concern.

I also took the time yesterday to go back and run some forecasts as if we were leaving the Azores today – and I really didn’t like what I saw then. In essence there has been no good window since we left, and still none visible over the next 10 days.

In short, if we had not left when we did, we would have had to give up on the notion of sailing home for the two big birthday bashes, and had to fly instead, leaving the boat in the Azores, and come back for it in July. Not a disaster by any means, and something we always had as our contingency if the right weather window didn’t ever materialise, but still, it felt good to know we had gotten the window just right, and made the perfect decision.

And finally on the weather front we now had enough visibility going forward beyond our Cork arrival to feed into our decision about where to spend my 50th birthday.

We had options to either sail onwards from Cork quickly and try to get to Glasgow by the end of May (my birthday is the 31st), wait and celebrate in Cork, and then sail onwards in early June, or split the difference and stop in Dublin en route.

Sometimes that kind of freedom can be refreshing, but sometimes it just feels like annoying ambiguity – and after almost a year of not knowing where I’d be spending the day, yesterday’s onward forecast removed the question altogether. There will be no decent weather window to sail onwards from Cork until 2nd June at least.

So I’ll be celebrating my 50th in Cork. Yee-hah. So long as there’s a very old cork removed from a very nice bottle, and I’m with my beautiful and talented wife, I’ll be very happy indeed.

But it wasn’t just the weather that made yesterday such a good day.

I’d had a brilliant sleep, extended by half an hour by Jen’s generosity, so was feeling decidedly perky.

We got news of the Australian Federal Election outcome by email – a much needed change of government including an expanded role for the Greens and Independents, all good moves when it comes to tackling some of the bigger issues in Australian society, I believe.

The food was perfect - Avocado/Feta/tomatoes on toast for breakfast, amazing home-made deep crust pizza for lunch, and a Red Chicken Curry (that I cooked on the bone in South Africa, and then shredded the meat off of and froze for passages) for dinner.

We enjoyed a beer for sundowners at 5pm, the name of which is a bit of a joke – we’re so far north now that the sun doesn’t go down until after 9pm, and will be after 10 by the time we get to Glasgow.

The latest weather forecast continued to confirm a fast but reasonably comfortable finish, with an ETA now of late morning on Wednesday 25th.

Amazingly, the whale song noise from the steering system seemed to be reducing throughout the day, and as I write this this morning, semes to have almost completely disappeared – hopefully this is the outcome of the new pin lapping itself inside the rose joint and mating perfectly.

For once, no other boat issue appeared – everything worked, nothing broke, nothing leaked, there were no new mysterious noises to investigate.

And interspersed throughout the day, I made it through 4 more episodes of season 1 of the old TV show “24”, which has held up surprisingly well, although it’s still laughable the lack of eating, drinking or going to the toilet. Just once, I wish the Director had chosen to cut from a scene of mayhem, with car chases or bombs going off, to Jack Bauer, sitting on the loo at the CTU offices, calmly reading the newspaper or his palm pilot (yes, it’s THAT old), while the countdown clock ticked away on the screen. It would have been AWESOME).

It was indeed a great day on the water, with much to be grateful for.

Day 6 Statistics:

Time on passage so far: 5 days, 20 hours
Distance covered in last 24 hours: 156 nm
Average Speed in last 24 hours: 6.5 knots

Distance to go: 329 nm

Number of times the CTU phones made their iconic “bee-bee, woo-wooooo” ring tone in yesterday’s 4 episodes: At least 250. Seriously, that ring tone is burned into my consciousness, and will be downloaded for my phone as soon as I have normal internet. Then I can imagine I’m Jack Bauer, and never need to go to the loo again.