How I Blew The Crossing

Treasure Cay, Abaco Bahamas
NoLL


Above you see the record of our track (the blue line) sailing from Rodriguez Key Florida, USA to West End, Abacos, Bahamas. I really blew it on this crossing. I'll try to explain but to do so I'll have to get a little technical.

First the weather. All day long the wind was from the East, roughly from right to left on the picture above. It blew 15 knots in the morning, and dropped to 8 knots in the afternoon.

Look carefully at our track. You can see three segments. The first, and shortest segment was as we motored due East. The goal was to get far enough up wind to be able to sail the rest of the way.

Segment two curves to the left. Actually, we were in the middle of the Gulf Stream all that time, and our track follows that center line almost exactly. In the early part of this segment, we were able to sail with course 040. That pointed us directly at West End. It also pointed Tarwathie as close in to the wind as we could manage. That was good.

As the Gulf Stream turned to the left, it carried us with it. However it also moved the apparent wind vector more to the left. That means that holding Tarwathie as close to the wind as we could, our course shifted from 040, to 030, to 020. Finally, by sunset, the best we could do was 015 degrees. I thought this was fine because our course made good (the component of our velocity vector in the direction of West End) was more than 7 knots.

In the third segment, we left the gulf stream and headed for West End, but now we were so far North that our course was 060. We couldn't sail. We had to motor into the wind, which I hate. The last leg took 14 hours.

What I should have done was to maintain the 040 course the whole way, using the motor if necessary to avoid the swing left with the Gulf Stream. If we had done that, we would have broken free of the Gulf Stream well South of Miami and been able to sail the rest of the way to West End without the motor.

I must confess something. Even though we have been sailing for nearly 40 years, and full time for 4 years, I'm not a very good sailor. I've never raced, so I never learned how to get maximum speed out of a sail boat. I'm also poor at passage planning, as the above anecdote illustrates. I started sailing as an antidote to work -- to do something that was enjoyable without a lot of thinking. I guess that bad habit carried over. It is very noticeable to me that many other sailors with less experience than I have better sailing skills.

Do I care about not being an expert sailor? No. Will I resolve to do better in the future? No. I just enjoy the life style.