Location: 37º41.234’N, 18º50.020’W
Right now, it’s Lanie writing the blog, but Nick should be back shortly. Today started early with watch team 2 of the 12-4 am shift. Watch team three, then proceed after them from 4-8 am. Charlie, one of our watch team leaders, was feeling a little under the weather, so we were very nice to him, most of us. Henry and Greyson skipped his entire queue of songs, but other than that, we were very sweet to him. Brady helmed and kept the boat very straight so that hopefully we will be able to get to Gibraltar faster. Our king Zac started bright and early fixing ALL of the heads. He slayed it up in the head bilge all the way up until dinner time. Alex, Macie, and I may (or may not) have caught him taking a short little break to watch TV in the bilge. When I woke up this morning to do laundry, all of the heads except for the port forward were not able to be used, which was rather scary. Thankfully, Zac always fixes up the heads without complaint because there’s NO way any of us could do that. Anyways, Watch team 1 had the 8-12 shift where they cleaned the stern of the boat. For lunch today, we had chickpea ceaser salad wraps, which were to die for. I don’t even like chickpeas, but those things were amazing. Mimi, Logan, and Lizzy were our superb chefs for the day. Unfortunately for the rest of the boat, Brig, Alex, and I have to chef up tomorrow, and I do not see that going too well
After lunch, we had seamanship class, which we started off by taking our VHF exam. They were multiple choice, so they weren’t very hard, thankfully. That took about 20 minutes, AND THEN we made a TikTok. There’s this boat TikTok dance that we had a competition for. We narrowed it down to Jack, Hayes, and Brady. Eventually, we chose Brady, who then got on the bow sprit of the boat, and Shane got out the drone. All of the rest of us got some sort of rowing appliance to row in the background of the video while Brady danced. It took a few takes, but we eventually got it down, and it’s supposed to look really good.
Okay Nick’s Back GOODBYEEEE
Hello, this is Nick now. My day was average. It started around 9:30 in the morning. I went down to the engine room to check the oil level in the main engine, which has been pushing us along reliably for a few weeks now. Then I went to check the weather. For those of you wondering what weather forecasts to look at to tell what your son or daughter is currently experiencing. I usually look at the ECMWF and GFS models on a site called Windy. You can take the coordinates of the vessel off the “vessel tracker” on the semester page, and plug those into Windy, and choose between a litany of weather overlays including wind, primary and secondary swell, currents, pressure, temp, etc, and see what’s currently happening in our part of the world. I also use Predict Wind weather routing, and NOAA Hurricane Center, who provide a lot of useful graphics for the northern Atlantic for those who know how to read them. If anyone is wondering “why is the boat zigzagging over the past few days” or “why did the boat head North towards Bermuda for 5 days when the Azores are over there?” If you follow along with a weather app, you will kind of see how I try to avoid areas with unfavourable conditions and head towards areas with more favourable conditions. Currently, im expecting a high-pressure system from the North West to bring us Northerly winds by tomorrow morning-ish. So I positioned the boat more to the North to hopefully take advantage of that system earlier and for longer, which is why I had the boat heading to Portugal for a day instead of Gibraltar. Thus, the zig-zag on the Vessel Tracker. With the previous passage from BVI to Bermuda, that’s a tougher one. SO basically, you have a high-pressure system that sits right in the middle of the Atlantic, called the mid-Atlantic high. And a characteristic of high pressure is usually in the centre of them; there is little to no wind. So typically you have to sail around them, thus a typical route from the Caribbean brings you up North of Bermuda, then you turn there towards the Azores and approach from the NE. See the wind and current move around the North Atlantic Clockwise. North with the Gulf-stream on the East coast of the US, then it turns East up by the Coast of Nova Scotia, then turns South off the UK and Europe, to finally turn back West off the coast of Africa with the trade winds, North of the Equator. This motion of the Atlantic Gyre is generated by the rotation of the Earth called the Coriolis Effect, which is responsible for all the weather patterns on Earth, and the reason why toilets flush clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. The North and South Atlantic Gyres also do this. But this year, about 2 days out from Bermuda, the plan changed. ~right around day 9ish, a tropical depression formed about 300nm ENE of Bermuda. This system was moving NE at about 10kn, so not a danger at all to us. What it did do is take all the wind with it.. So the first few days we sailed out of BVI, we had the trades on our Starboard beam, then as we got North, the wind went behind us and weakened substantially, as we were in the E quadrant of the gyre. Then, when that system sucked all the wind out from North of us, I made the decision to turn and go straight for the Azores. Because there was no point in spending more time going motoring North just to motor East, when I can just turn the boat and start motoring East now. Thus, the 14 days of straight motoring we had from the BVI to the Azores. I’m more optimistic about this passage; however, I think we will be sailing by tomorrow morning (July 13th). You should always take the forecasts with a grain of salt when doing stuff like this, because the weather forecasts are exactly that, a forecast. Humanity’s understanding of weather forecasting, after all these years of study, is boiled down to a (often incorrect) educated guess, assisted by iffy computer-generated models and satellite imagery. Anywho, the rest of my day was spent adjusting a watertight door, transferring fuel between tanks, and watching SpongeBob. After that, we had dinner, which was a pork chop stir fry thing, which was delicious. I usually do this squeeze thing where at the end of the squeeze I say “rock paper scissors tournament, and to the winner I’ll take your cleanup job,” which sounds like a nice skipper of the day thing to do when you are skipper of the day. But really, it’s my ploy to do anything except write the blog because im not a fan of writing, and I’ll usually take whoever won and make them come write the blog, while I go do their cleanup job. Which is why you had Lanie for the first part of this blog. But Meg (the program manager) wasn’t having any of my shenanigans, as per usual, thus you got me typing in run-on sentences about the weather for the second half. I took some cool pictures of the chart house and all the navigation instruments, for those of you who are nerds like me, enjoy. The End.
-Capt. Nick
Hi mom