Noon Report June 20, 2007 Position 35-48.9 N 44-48.7 W as of 12:00 Atlantic time (GMT - 3 hrs) Wednesday, June 20, 2007 Course 095 deg M Speed 5.3 kts @ 1800 RPM Distance to go: 792 NM to go to Horta, Faial, Azores (44% of the way) Distance made good past 24 hours: 148 NM (6.2 kts) Distance made good since Bermuda: 1023 NM (56% of the way) Total fuel consumed (169 engine hours) 650 gals, average 3.8 GPH (incl. genset), fuel remaining 830 gal. (fuel used/remaining: 44%/56%) Conditions: Wind 12 kts., swells 3-5 ft from 240 deg M, partly cloudy, visibility good. Barometer 1015.9 mb and steady Sea water temp 74 deg F, air temp 89 deg F. ETA Horta: June 27, 2007 What in the world, you may wonder, does the crew of Bluewater DO all day! I can tell you that the days out here just seem to melt from one into another. With just three persons onboard, we're always on watch, doing boat work, reading, or sleeping. Keeping even with engine room checks, log entries, radio chats, boat work, meals, and watches and sleep keeps all three persons on board busy. (And, of course, we keep Judy chained in the galley preparing sumptuous meals.) We hear from the other boats that they're watching videos, but aboard Bluewater when there's spare time to be enjoyed we have our noses in books. George has gone through nine or ten. Those of you who have made ocean-crossings on small boats know that we're much at the mercy of the weather; the very nature of being on a yacht at sea makes every crewmember is constantly aware of the weather. Bob Jones called for conditions to get worse yesterday, and sure enough the barometer began dropping--a front was overtaking us. Judy didn't consider the conditions all that bad, so she began a dinner of low-medium complexity: baked chicken, sautied peppers, garlic bread, garden salad, and our usual & scoop of ice cream. Mid-way through the preparation, she wished she had gone for a simpler meal like popping a quiche or lasagna into the oven because she was over her head as the wind piped up and already rolly seas grew to 4-6 then 5-7 feet and more. Wind and seas were from the starboard quarter, meaning the boat was not pitching but also meaning that our single working stabilizer was not up to keeping Bluewater on an even keel. On ocean passages Judy has non-skid rubber matting on all the galley's horizontal surfaces which makes meal preparation in such conditions possible. The stuff holds on to plates, glasses, pans, and other galley-ware like glue. Still, to envision what she has to ensure imagine your kitchen on gimbals, moving 10 or 20 degrees to one side then to the other in one axis, pitching a few degrees fore and aft in the other. Think, for example, of trying to open the refrigerator, hold the door open, and remove, say, a container of iced tea, while keeping everything else from crashing down from the shelves on top of you. Consider how many hands (and steps!) are needed to light the stove, put oil and garlic in the pan, lock the pan in place on the stove with potlucks, then add and sauti the peppers. Judy does heroic work in the galley and George, Katy and I are the great beneficiaries of it! The wind continued to increase on my 2100-2400 watch, and seas grew to match. Bluewater's anemometer never showed wind higher than 30 knots, not that big a deal. Dennis reports that Salty Dawg saw steady winds at 26 knots true, and Bernie on Moana Kuewa saw gusts to 35 knots. The wind-driven seas, however, were the real culprit. We all estimate the seas at 8-10 feet for at least a few hours. Bernie was tossed out of bed, and I was too. George had it worse: he was summarily thrown off the commode in the forward head, all the way in the pointy-end of the boat. Nobody was hurt, but George reports his dignity took a real hit. Nobody slept much overnight, but perhaps an hour into Judy's mid-watch the wind and seas began to drop. When George took the watch at 0300, the front had passed-winds were down to 20-22 knots and seas back to to a relatively calm 4-6 feet. Let me be quick to point out that these are not truly bad conditions. The motion is second nature to us--we've all become accustomed to it by now, Katy very much included. We move about our boats carefully-one hand-hold to the next, using hips to brace ourselves where possible. "One hand for yourself and one for the ship," takes on new meaning-it's more the way we live than something we have to remember. I remember being at sea with the ship rolling like this during my 20-year Navy career, but to make a 600-foot Navy cruiser behave like this the winds and seas had to be much higher. With a few exceptions, you don't find stabilizers on Navy ships but ships of the line do have speed at their beck and call, something we certainly do not have in oceangoing trawler yachts. Speaking of speed, while our RPMs are up and our fuel burn rate is up slightly, we're bacl to a slow speed of advance. This time we're sure that we're back in the grips of current on the nose. In all the rock and roll conditions overnight, our boat speed was consistently above six knots. Now it's barely over five. Our fuel numbers are looking good, and I'm confident we'll arrive in Horta with plenty of fuel. In fact, we will likely have to speed up near the end and burn some off to get down to the point where we can take on 5,000 liters (1,321 gallons), the minimum amount to quality for duty free fuel. It's natural to focus on what doesn't work, but let me be emphatic: stabilizer problem, stuffing box problem, contrary currents, and occasional bad weather notwithstanding, we're not feeling sorry for ourselves. Not in the least. The bottom line is that all three Med Bound yachts out here are performing extremely well, are giving their crews a good and safe ride, and have covered the first 2,000 miles of this Atlantic crossing with minimum problems. All of us all well-fed, have plenty of water and fuel in our tanks, have good company, and are enjoying the experience-and we're all learning from it. To be sure, each yacht has a few issues to take care of in Horta, but the yachts are performing well, virtually everything onboard is working as advertised. Not one in 1,000 Americans ever get to cross an ocean in a small yacht, and those of us here on Med Bound 2007 are very much enjoying the experience. --Milt, Judy, George and Schipperke Katy P.S. Sincere thanks to Ben Ellison (who runs the terrific marine electronics blog www.panbo.com) for sending information on daily news available in text format from http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/email/news and http://www.nytimes.com/mem/email.html and sending me a sample of the BBC version. Likewise, a Bluewater salute to erstwhile Bluewater crewmember (and tech-head) Dean Wiley who, in the interest of keeping the Bluewater crew plugged in, has sent us two daily news summaries which he took from the BBC and personally edited. Perhaps the best news on news comes from our good friend Glenn Tuttle of the Grand Banks 46 Tothill, currently in Panama. Tut has signed Bluewater up to receive a CNN daily news "headline news mail" which comes in text format. We'll let you know how it goes!