THU 25-MAY
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| The Crew of Relish: Silvio, Gary, Chelle & Rick |
At around 0800 all boats
departed their Med-Moorings and headed to the long concrete Penno wharf to meet
the fuel truck. With the longest leg of the crossing coming up, and with
fuel priced at $0.81 per liter (about $3.07 per gallon), each boat topped off
their tanks. Relish took on 4,045 liters, or roughly 1,068 gallons of
diesel. Given that we’d traveled a total
of 1400+ nautical miles since the last fill-up, that calculated to an average
of 1.3 NMPG, a fairly efficient burn rate given we were also running the 20KW
genset a good portion of the time.
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| Cap'n Bernie, Gary, Chelle & Rick on Relish |
All that took half a day,
and then we headed just across the harbor to drop the hook and wait out the
approaching weather.
Aleoli took the opportunity to have a diver clean
its running gear, and Relish was hunting down a plumber to help with
reconnecting its ice maker. (We were tiring of using egg cartons and
muffin pans to make ice cubes.) But even with all that going on some
crews launched a dinghy and got some more quality time in St. George and
Hamilton.
FRI 26-MAY
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| Relish at Anchor in St. George's Harbor |
This was to be our departure
date for the leg to the Azores, but we delayed to avoid the nasty sea
conditions that the coming weather system would be churning up. The front and associated precipitation rolled
in right on schedule (early evening); we saw gusts to 30, but the major TRW activity
stayed south of us. The south end of the
anchorage provided excellent protection and good holding. The only disturbing thing was seeing a couple of
sailboats who were also seeking refuge drop their anchors a bit too close to us
for comfort. Thankfully we all swung
together as the winds changed. Rain was
light and intermittent for the most part, so all folks had ample opportunity to
dinghy into town for additional provisioning and souvenir shopping.
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| Angela & Aleoli at Anchor |
We also finally found a
plumber who was willing to tackle our fresh water reconfiguration under the
galley sink. With the time it took to
dinghy him back and forth to find parts that turned out to be an all day
job. While he attempted and failed to
restore flow to the filtered water faucet (his patch hose leaked like a sieve),
we were able to restore water flow to
the ice maker. Hoorah….time for a scotch
on the rocks.
SAT 27-MAY
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| St. George Town Square Actors Put on a Show for Us |
Still in Bermuda…and staying
for another day. N52 Aleoli had
discovered a significant bottom fouling issue since our arrival (along with the
growth all over its running gear), and yesterday also determined it had
hardened to something resembling concrete.
The suspicion is that it has a type of bottom paint that doesn’t take
too well to being dry, and it had been shipped to its new owner (Stefan) quite
recently. Basically that meant another
full day of trying to clean the hull below the waterline, and in waters that
were getting uncomfortably cool for staying submerged for very long, even with
its hookah breathing contraption. Bottom
line (pun intended) was that she would need to be cleaned if she hoped to have
enough fuel to make it to Horta in the Azores.
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| Chelle and Silvio Take the Dinghy to Shore |
Stefan was willing to go it
solo so as not to delay the other boats, but as Bernie put it, “We came here
together and we’ll depart here together.”
So we had another down day of mostly relaxing activities – and the
weather was very pleasant. Skies had
cleared, winds were down in the 15K range, and morning temps were in the upper
60’s.
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| White Roofs of Bermuda |
We had shut down the 20KW
genset the night before and run on batteries all night to conserve some runtime
hours for the 10+ day trip to Horta without tripping the oil change clock. By 0700 the house battery bank had depleted
to around 65%. We wanted to test out the second, smaller (6KW) genset for
battery charging and other light loads, so after starting up that unit Silvio
and Rick spent some time gingerly testing how much charger load it could
handle. It turned out to be quite
capable of running two chargers at 50% output, and within a few hours the house
battery back was back to 100%.
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| The Famous Swizzle Inn |
Michelle and Rick took the
afternoon off and dinghied into St. George’s to catch a bus to the other (east)
end of the island. We toured the Crystal
Cave with its visually stunning subterranean stalagmites and stalactites,
lunched at the famous Swizzle Inn, and took a short spin into Hamilton to see
what the “big city” looked like.
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| Swiizzle Rum for Chelle |
Bermuda isn’t a big island –
it is the remnants of a volcanic seamount, occupying only 21 square miles with
a population of around 61,000. It has a
very mild climate with temperatures rarely moving outside a range of 65F to
85F. One almost startling visual impact
is that nearly every structure on the island has a white roof, each of which
are designed to funnel rainfall into the building’s cistern – there is no other
naturally occurring source of fresh water here.
(You can buy water from a desalinization plant if needed, but by the
time transport is figured into the cost, the price is around $100 per 1000
gallons.)
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| Downtown Hamilton |
SUN 28-MAY
It was time to
get moving again. The early morning
weather forecast from Commanders looked quite good for the coming week, but
they did recommend an initial leg that presented a slightly more southerly path
to avoid some lumpier water to the north.
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| Crystal Cave |
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| Departing Bermuda |
The remainder of the day was totally
uneventful – clear skies, pleasant air temps in the 70’s, sea surface temp of
75F, with light SSE winds and gentle rolling 3-4 foot swells. The five boat fleet assumed a pentagon
formation with one mile spacing, and we did our best to match Aeoli’s speed at which she was getting
an acceptable fuel burn rate. As the
smallest boat with the least fuel (even with a 300 gallon bladder in her
cockpit), this long leg could present a challenge if her fuel wasn’t managed
carefully. In such cases – and this isn’t
a totally unusual challenge for ocean crossers – the protocol is to set your
throttle to a burn rate that will assure arrival with a 15% reserve; that
inevitably will be a very slow speed, but at various intervals along the way
you always recalculate and adjust as required:
as you burn fuel and reduce weight the boat gets more efficient; and you
may get more favorable currents and sea conditions along the way (or not). Either way, you can control your range with
your throttle.
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| The Big Lugger That Rick Likes to Hug |
It’s often said that it doesn’t take
long for Nordhavn owners and crew to fall in love with their Lugger engine, and
that was true aboard Relish. That engine just kept on humming. For the mechanically inclined: a “Lugger” engine is the brand that Northern
Lights gives the John Deere diesel engine after they marinize it to the point
of being nearly indestructible. That
beefiness makes it a continuous duty motor – e.g., you can run it 24 hours a
day at its max throttle setting (100% load) and have no fear of abusing the
thing. It is the ideal powerplant for a
passagemaker. Ours was the L1276A model, which is a 6 cylinder 12.5 liter
displacement block (766 cubic inches) producing 340 horsepower at a loping 1800
RPM. It may sound like a coffee can full
of rocks down in the engine room, but elsewhere in the boat it’s just a
reassuring and throaty background burble that is music to the ears.
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| Another Gorgeous Sunset Underway |
With that lovely Lugger purring away, it
was another beautiful sunset on our stern as we continued to motor eastward in
fair conditions, and readied ourselves for our night shift routines.
