Haganes – En route Tampa Fl.  –  Aug. 2012

We got away Wed 15^th and it was as rough as a boars backside for the first 48hrs. 25kts on the beam and rolling like only this old girl knows how. Couldn’t work out why it was so quiet though, and then I realised we’ve seen little of Carol the cook for the last couple of days. In fact the conditions would be perfect for Splash Tango, 20-25 on the beam, warm, even a rare glimpse of sun, but not so good for a 120ton vessel shaped like a pencil!

There was a tropical depression just east of the Antilles that looked like making itself into a hurricane and heading through the Caribbean a couple of days before we left. My friends Mel and Geno on their cat Meow are in the San Blaas Islands and I had thought that if it did, it could be opportune to join them and wait a day or two while it passed. However it fizzled out so we carried on with the task at hand but I was sad to miss them.

It’s been very ‘wet season’ tropical since leaving Mexico, very hazy, humid and cloudy.

ETA Tampa is Tuesday about 1400hrs and all hands are looking forward to that. There is a lot of work to be done once we get there, ‘retrofitting’ new gensets, winch gear and electronics, before we head out to the Bahamas to trial the new equipment. But arriving in Tampa will be the realization of the original objective when we left Singapore and as such, that seems like the goal for me at least.

Two days out of Panama, we reached our first waypoint and turned towards Cuba heading up between the Rosalind and Gorda Banks off Honduras.

Heading towards Cuba we were joined by a pod of pilot whales. I didn’t have time to get my camera up as this cow and calf came up and had to “shoot from the hip”. It would have been a great shot if I’d managed to get it in frame.

We are making good progress in calm and clear conditions with a 1.5 kt current in our favour. There seems to be a lot of water heading the same way as us. It’s all rushing to get in the queue to join the gulf stream off Florida and catch a ride north east to the Azores and Europe. Nice for us though, we can pull the revs back and still trundle along at 11kts with a nice cool engine throbbing away down below.

See the little bird on Ray’s left hand. He appeared on board 150nm from land probably having come across from a passing ship. He stayed with us 2 days, flying around the boat and in and out of the wheel house.

Ray tried to tempt him with a bowl of sugar water buy he wasn’t really into that. Then when Cuba appeared, a faint line on the horizon 11 miles off the starboard beam, away he went. Probably smoking a big fat Cohiba cigar and telling his mates all about it right now.