ARRIVAL AT DELIGHTFUL BERMUDA
PINBALL WIZARD
Nigel North
Tue 3 Jun 2025 00:04
| It’s about 850nm from St Maarten to Bermuda, directly North. Shouldn’t be a problem right? Well there is a problem, it’s the ‘Azores High’ pressure that sits across the Atlantic and the centre sections are essentially windless, or not enough to move 7 tons of yacht. So several days of motoring are required, and you never quite know if you will have enough diesel..? I was carrying an extra 130 litres in cans, just in case, and ended up using 40 of them. But back to St Maarten - the Dutch side of the island. Left there way late at 1900, so a night departure, then made a mistake; I opted to sail up the East coast of the islands of St Maarten and Anguilla - which form an inverted V. Trade winds were blowing from the East and my route due North forced a very tight hard-on-the-wind tack to get past the Eastern end of Anguilla; ;and only just made it, on an inky black night, and never saw land.. It was also really really rough water. Should have gone the Western route. I was even tempted to cut through a passage on the NE corner of Anguillal, but it was narrow, and the night dark. Nope. After passing into the clear water beyond I could relax. A beam sea was giving out a fair old bashing, launching my bowl of oats nicely all over the place. But by next morning the sea had calmed down a bit. There is something wrong with the set-up for sending and receiving emails by my satphone, it doesn’t work. I believe it to be a cable problem, but, the result is I cannot update our position at sea on the Mailasail website, nor update position. All comms are through texts now, on satphone, which is working well. So that is why I’ve apparently not moved on the Mailasail chart (until now). By Day 4 we were running out of wind, so its engine start. By Day 6 it was a flat calm, the sea the colour of Quink ink, very beautiful, engine running day and night. That Yanmar was to run continuously for 2.5 days. Day 7 I took the opportunity to reseal the port lights (windows) plus seal all around the windlass which I believed had been letting in a fair bit of water in the rough seas. Also modified the hugely important ‘breadboard’ to stop things flying off when preparing food. Days were quite hot on board, no clouds in that great blue sky, so to increase airflow below I shoved a wood-saw out of the heads portlight so that its blade scooped in some air. Worked! Day 8 and my 3 bags of spuds in reserve were found to be infested with cockroaches - given the float test. Day 9 and we are about 100nm South of Bermuda, with a following wind from the South which gradually picked up through the day, just what I didn’t really want. At this rate we would be arriving at 0300 hours. No! Never arrive at a strange location in the dark. So hove-to in Pinball for about 5 hours, essentially maintaining position whilst Pinball sits quietly. A useful dodge.. By dawn next day, we were hurtling along before half a gale, with a 4m following sea, sufficiently uncomfortable to negate sleep, so that night I stayed up, always best close to land anyway. 8am Pinball was motoring into quaint St Georges, to drop anchor by the small township. Ahhhhh.. so good to stop. |