Make sure you’re caught up on Day One, Day Two and Day Three before you read Day Four below.
Day Four (Tuesday): DOLPHINS!
Matt: Today was just hot. There was absolutely no wind. The wind vane would just spin around from the motion of the boat instead of the wind. The seas were like glass.
Michelle: Matt spotted a dolphin jump in front of our bow mid-morning! We all screamed and ran up on deck and watched two beautiful dolphins in crystal blue water swim with us for about five minutes… What an amazing way to start our day!
Pretty much the next four hours consisted of the boys complaining about the heat. We were roasting. We would have stopped the boat again to swim, but Matt and I were doing math trying to figure out how much diesel we had and how many more hours we needed to motor. We decided we would rather just get to Florida…
Since we didn’t stop for a swim, we did a fresh water hose down on the transom, and the boys literally hung out naked in the cockpit the rest of the afternoon. Because they could. We passed our last oil rig early in the morning, and didn’t see another boat, or oil rig, or any form of civilization for the next fourteen hours. Just ocean all around us.
Matt: We needed music or something, but I did not plan well before we left. I realized that I had not copied any music over to my phone to play on the stereo. So I fired up the laptop and copied over some random songs. Music definitely lightened the mood this afternoon when everyone was pretty beat down from the heat.
Michelle: With music playing, we drank a beer (our one beer per day rule for each day of our journey) with chips and salsa, and chatted about how awesome it is to live on a boat in the middle of the Gulf without a soul around. The boys were still naked.
We had survived three very busy/exhausting days & nights. Today was all about relaxing. Before we started the trip, I expected every day to be like today – with us in the middle of nowhere with no one around. But during the first three days, we never felt alone. There was always a boat, or an oil rig platform, or something nearby. I actually thought, huh, I guess we will always near something. But nope. Not after today. Nothing. For miles and miles.
Matt: With nothing but time on our hand, and not a lick of wind, I decided to check the port engine impeller. I noticed that the exhaust on that side seemed like it had a slightly smaller water volume as compared to the starboard so I figured it might be a broken or missing vane on the impeller. After getting down in the engine compartment and sweating my ass off, all was fine. Just a little cruddy muck in the strainer basket but nothing that would restrict flow. I did notice that the sail drive fluid level was a little low. It looked like it was bubbling over and running out on top of the sail drive. I will need to look into this a bit more. I’m concerned with the sail drives as I just had them serviced when we hauled out in Seabrook.
Night watch #4: Excitement at Sunset!
Michelle: Night watch usually starts at 7 pm when the sun goes down. The sky gets dark quickly. Matt was pulling in the fishing line for the day…
Matt: I had the fishing line out all day (except when I was working on the engine) and didn’t catch anything. As I was reeling the line in for the night (we didn’t want to fish at night, one less thing to worry about on watch), I was watching my lucky lure “Pinky” skim on top of the water. I remembered that I needed to stop short so I would have enough slack to hook it off at the end. At that very moment I stopped to change my grip and BAM! Something grabbed the line. Not more that 20-30 feet off the boat. Damn near ripped the rod out of my hands.
After a short, but vigorous fight, we had fresh tuna on board.
Michelle: Matt caught a 20 lb Albacore bigeye tuna! In the pitch black night. We cut the engines and floated along at 0.9 kts so he could filet the fish for lunch and dinner the next day.
Matt: Oh, and all this happened just as we were switching engines, AND I had just got out of the shower. So during all of this craziness, I was wearing only a towel. Fun times.
After a brief honoring of the fish I cleaned it and we had four sizable filets for the next day.
Austin was so excited. Each day that we didn’t catch a fish he would get upset. I was preparing mentally to explain to him again tonight how fishing requires a lot of patience and so often you go without catching anything. (Not always true but helps to level set expectations in a ten year olds mind.) At least I know that’s one of his favorite foods so it will not go to waste. Hah, as if fresh fish would go to waste ever with this crew. I’m surprised they weren’t asking if they could eat the little sashimi pieces off the bones!
Michelle: Around 8 pm, we were back on our way to Florida. This was our first night with no oil rigs or ships around. Night time in the middle of the ocean is SO DARK. Completely black. The stars don’t really light up the ocean. Did I mention how dark it was? Just 360 degrees of piercing blackness.
Matt: Tonight we did shorter night shifts as neither of us took decent naps today. Rule #1 about night watch schedules: Be flexible if necessary. It’s important to have a set night watch schedule, but don’t try to stick to it if it is not conducive to a rested crew.
Michelle: My shift lasted from 12:30 am – 4 am.
For the first hour of my shift, I was on Ninja (the cat) watch – he finally found his sea legs, and escaped the salon hatch to wander the deck (for the first time ever) on the darkest night ever. I was not about to have a cat go overboard on my watch. So I lured him inside with food and shut the front hatches so he couldn’t escape without passing me in the cockpit. Which he tried several times.
Other than that, tonight was the most boring peaceful night ever. I only saw two ships pass in the night – one about 13 miles south and another about 12 miles north. When you haven’t seen another boat for 14 hours, you get really excited to see one! I watched their lights go by in the distance and wondered what the actual visibility is to the horizon. Is it 13 miles? I always thought it was 7 or 8… but clearly, he was on radar at 13 nautical miles. How many nautical miles equal a land mile? I was grasping for things to keep my brain occupied so I wouldn’t fall asleep. I also realized my addiction to Google.
Minutes go by SOOO SLOOOOWWWLLLYYY when you watch the time. How many more minutes until Matt is back on shift? Oh, two more hours? Awesome. I did yoga. Ground coffee for Matt so I could make coffee for him before I woke him up. I studied the charts. I did math on how much longer until Florida. I stood the entire 3.5 hours so that I wouldn’t fall asleep. I finally sat down at 3:53 am and thought, “Okay, in seven minutes I’ll start making coffee so I can get Matt up by 4:30 am.” And then I totally dozed off!! I felt my head flop and I quickly checked the time to see how long I had been out… It was still 3:53 am. Sigh.
Matt actually woke up by himself at 4 am, right as I started up the stove to boil water… I was so happy to be done with my watch.
Matt: Wind started picking up slightly out of the south, so I was hopeful that we could sail later in the day. I was thinking that we could use the gennaker or spinnaker depending on the wind.
I watched the moon rise then disappear into the scattered clouds. I know that on our next night watch we’ll have light pollution from the mainland off to the east, so tonight was the last night in total darkness. Sad about that, but excited to get to Florida.
Haha. It’s crazy how slow time moves at night. It was 4:37am on one of my watches for hours, and then we went outside a time zone and it was 3:37am. Literally, the worst!
hhahaahhah – OMG, that would totally be the worst… yes… that was by far the most boring night ever.
For what it’s worth, I heard a rule of thumb for horizon distance somewhere: Horizon (in miles) is 1.1 * (square root of the eye height in feet).
But, of course, that assumes the thing you’re seeing is at sea level. If the superstructure of a ship is, say… 100 feet above the waterline, then…
that’s a lot of math. 🙂
Are you guys in St. Pete yet? Have you had access to the hurricane info for that area? We’re under a tropical storm watch.
Deb
SV Kintala
http://www.theretirementproject.blogspot.com
We are here… We have seen the watch. Looks like winds might be up to 35 mph tonight and into tomorrow… We will add extra lines this afternoon and bring everything inside overnight… Hoping it doesn’t shift west any more. Keeping a close eye on it all.