Antigua to Bermuda - Day 1
Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Wed 2 May 2012 21:43
We left at almost 12 noon from the dock at Catamaran Marina in Antigua.
The last few days have been hard work ensuring all the final jobs were
completed satisfactorily, but we got there in the end. Having had new
deck level navigation lights sent out form the UK, as ours seemed faulty,
it actually turned out to be more of a wiring issue! When we had to fix
the flyscreen in the front cabin, we had to take down the ceiling and the
wooden frame holding it up, before we could fix it. Behind the ceiling,
there is a maze of wires for cabin lights, as well as other things. It
would appear that when we pit the ceiling back, we had attached the
navigation light to the cabin light circuit, and vice versa! This meant
that when we put the cabin lights on, all but 1 worked but we also had the
port navigation light on as well - maybe we should check more carefully
next time we take things apart!
The last jobs were to visit Nelson’s Dockyard to clear out and then ensure
the dinghy was securely fastened and we were off!
The first major obstacle involved threading our way through the Antigua
Race Week fleet, and then after this it was just us in the middle of the
ocean. The weather was different to what we expected, much windier, with
lots of fast moving, very wet squalls! The wind was regularly in the
25-30 knot range with huge downpours. The problem was not so much the
wind, as the waves, as the seas were fairly high at around 3-4 meter, with
even larger waves coming with the squalls. Apart from this we had a good
day sailing, and a pleasant over night sail, albeit with the sails well
reefed down.
Distance so far - 148/945 miles