Are you ready for Day Three of our Gulf Crossing? If you haven’t read Day One or Day Two yet, be sure to click the links… Here we go!

Day Three (Monday): Swimming with the Fishes

Michelle: Today was warm. Sun was out. No clouds. No wind. No sailing. No ice maker.

Matt: This seemed like a much more lazy and relaxing day.

Since there wasn’t much going on… I worked on some boat projects that needed some attention. Reflecting back on Day One… we had an issue where the hot water fitting to the starboard lavatory broke loose. Because we couldn’t hear the water pump over the engine noise, we only heard the bilge pump alarm. Well, the bilge pump would empty the bilge faster than the water pump would fill it, so when we would check, we didn’t see any new water.

Finally Michelle saw water coming down into the bilge under the starboard head floor and I found the issue. I was able to re-fit it and tighten the hose clamp back down, but we were unsure of how much water we lost.

That all being said, and three days into our crossing… we needed to know just how much water we had left in the tanks. Since our water tank gauge isn’t working (yay! more boat projects!), I had to manually look into the tank from the inspection port. Luckily for us the tanks were still fairly full. Thank goodness.

I also cleaned the speed log so that we could have a better idea of what our speed through the water was compared to our speed over ground. We were concerned about fuel burn. Especially since the port engine seemed to be burning twice as much fuel as the starboard. I honestly think this is due to a mismatch in RPMs. One of our tachometers is wrong. I just need to figure out which one and fix it. I also need to fix our hour meters and the engine panel backlights. These all have been sketchy since we bought the boat so it’s nothing new. Just more of the items that have been on the list.

Michelle: Matt also had a chance to inspect the shroud. He figured out that it probably just needed to be tightened… If we had had an ounce of wind, we would have tried sailing, but with nothing, we just kept motoring to Florida.

The seas were so calm that I cooked baked potatoes and pork loin in the solar oven on deck for dinner.

We were very lazy. And very hot.

I tried cleaning the ice maker and plugging it back in to see if it would make some ice. We really wanted ice. Instead, we got a weird, new symbol on the screen (hadn’t seen it before when it stopped working.) With no internet, I couldn’t google what it meant, so we couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Bummer.

By mid-afternoon, it was miserably hot, and we needed relief! So we stopped the boat, in the middle of the ocean, and jumped in the water!

Matt: We had a refreshing swim. We were in about 250 feet of water and the water temp was about 84. It was nice to soap up and get clean with a freshwater rinse.

Michelle:  The ice blue water was amazingly clear and refreshing. Little fishies swam with us. We were hoping that there weren’t any big fishies looking for the little fishies near us. After our bath and rinse, everyone felt a million times better. When else do you get a chance to swim in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico!?

Matt: The wind was so dead, that our apparent wind speed dropped to 4 kts, and true wind was so low that you couldn’t even get a valid reading. I was looking forward to a more calm night ahead I guess.

No fish today. Had the line out all day and barely a nibble. We’ll try again tomorrow.

Night watch #3: CREEPY!

Michelle: As the sun set, a hazy misty fog settled on the water. The waves were eerily calm and extremely creepy. The haze made me think the Pirates of the Caribbean ship was about to surface on the water. Seriously, this was the most creeped out I was the entire trip.

I was glad that Matt took the early shift of 9pm – 1 am. I was hoping that the creep-factor would be gone by the time I was back on watch.

Matt: We weaved in between deep-water offshore platforms all night. They each broadcasted via AIS that we need to give them a 2nm safe zone. We tried to keep that distance, but there were one or two that I cut a little tight because they overlapped with each other. Oh well, they’ll get over it.

Seas were calm and skies were clear, with little rolly swells coming from the north east. But the eery haze on the water gave the platforms a weird glow. There was a storm well off to the north-northwest of us that I watched through my shift.

Michelle: When I awoke for my 1:30 am – 5:30 am shift –  it was still creepy. Whereas there were dozens of oil platforms every couple of miles the night before… tonight there were only a handful of oil rig platforms about 10-20 miles apart. I would see one on the horizon through the mist, while the other faded off in the distance.

At one point during my shift, we passed the last platform – the last sign of life. There were no more platforms ahead and I seriously COULD NOT SEE the horizon because it was SO BLACK. Nothing. AT ALL. Just blackness straight ahead. The moon had not risen yet. I couldn’t tell where water ended and sky began. After the creepy vibe I already had from the mist, and the idea that we just left behind the last sign of civilization, plus the thought of sailing into pure darkness, I had no choice but to promptly chew every nail and cuticle right off…

I was sure that something ominous was in the water and/or dead pirates were about to emerge.

I kept thinking about explorers like Christopher Columbus – those crazy people set off into the darkness without knowing what the hell was in front of them. I had to keep telling myself that I knew there was ocean in front of me. We have a GPS that knows our exact location, an auto-pilot that keeps us on course, and charts that tell us which direction to go. Even though I couldn’t see a damn thing in front of us, I pretty much knew that we were good. Pretty much. Those early explorers had nothing. Crazy people.

The moonrise at 3:30 am, however, was spectacular. And the stars above were magnificent. The Milky Way was so bright. A MASSIVE shooting star shot through the darkness like a fireball in the sky.

When the pirate ship appeared on the horizon, I freaked out! hahahah Just Kidding… However, a freaking bird swooped me at 5 am and almost made me pee my pants. What the hell is a bird doing out there in the middle of nowhere by itself, at night??? Almost had a heart attack. 

When the sun came up, the water was GLASS. It is amazing that an ocean could be that calm. 

The calm water meant we were looking at another day with no wind. No sailing. And we were in for another HOT day. With no ice maker. 

Whew! We are more than half-way through our trip!! What fun things are in store for us on Day Four? Stay tuned!