Bermuda - Azores crossing 39:22.7N 31:09.9W

Lotus
Sat 18 Jun 2011 12:13
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Once Ade and Bex arrived the sun came out and the seas flattened off so whilst they took themselves off to see the highlights of Bermuda, John and I filled our tanks and went for a scuba dive.  My dive computer battery had died so we had to borrow a depth gauge from the local dive shop, the owner there was so helpful; drawing us a map showing the location of the tunnels on the dive site we were about to do, that we took the opportunity to book on a boat dive for the following day.    I was a little disappointed with the diving; John however was elated ( he says I must have been spoiled in the past) the sites had some stunning coral formations but the fish were a bit scarce and Bermuda does not have the variety of species like the Caribbean.
 
After the boat dive we downloaded a new grib file and decided that we should leave Bermuda for the Azores as soon as possible as the winds were blowing and it looked like we wouldn't have another window of opportunity for at least another week.  So we got ship shape, waited for Ade and Bex to get back from their jaunt to the crystal caves and set sail at 8pm. 
 
During the 15 day crossing to the Azores we had decent wind needing to motor for only 2 days.  Most days we saw hundreds of Portuguese Men of War jellyfish and several loggerhead turtles floating on the surface; apparently as juveniles they set off from Spain to the Caribbean on a 5 month journey. I'm glad I'm not a turtle ,as a two week passage is long enough! We also encountered numerous pods of common dolphins which came and played on our bow, basking sharks and a pod of 4 Killer Whales.  On one of the 'no wind' days, approximately 400 miles out from land, we stopped the boat and took turns diving in, we were in the water for at least 10 seconds! How brave are we?
 
 
John
Ade
Lara
We had high hopes of success with the fishing rod as Ade is an experienced 'big game' fisherman (well, he goes fishing now and again!).  In Bermuda Ade bought new lures to attract Marlin, Wahoo and Tuna but having the big white hunter aboard made no difference as all we caught were a few tentacles from a dismembered jellyfish. 
 
On one day John decided to check in with an amateur weather router called 'Herb Hillingberg', this octogenarian has been voluntarily routing yachts around the Atlantic for decades.   He gave us the scare of our lives when he said that if we carried on sailing North we would experience storm force winds (over 55 knots of wind with seas up to 15 meters) - there were several more turtle heads visible for a few minutes.  We downloaded a grib file, called John's brother Gareth for additional information from the internet and decided to ignore Herbs advise which was to heave to for 36 hours and then to sail south as fast as we could.  Only upon our arrival in Flores did we realize that this advise would have cost us at least 5 extra days and put us in the middle of strong winds and big seas.  All in all and with hindsight we decided that we'd had a good passage across the Atlantic as several well found sea worthy boats had taken at least a week longer than us and had had to spend a week effectively treading water between 42 degrees North and 36 degrees North, without making any easting.