Beating to the Berrys - Our Longest Night Sailing

And you too, Jason. Thanks for coming. Text me when you get somewhere. Okay. Thanks, Kayl. See ya. Enjoy. Bye. Thanks. That's it. The last of family. Bye, Mom. Bio side. I need the bio side. So, what do we need after that experience? Oh, man. Some Advil, maybe. Oh, ice cream and some booze all at once. Wind blowing you onto a dock and then yet trying to peel off of it with rocks in front of you stresses me out, man. Wish we could have shown you. Oh, there's no way. My nerves are fried right now. Yeah. The answer I was looking for was rub rails. Not ice cream, not booze. I think it's safe to say now that we've left Fort Lauderdale and the safety of fancy docks we really, really, really, really need rub rails. And Kent tried to tell us but we didn't want to spend three grand. Okay, let's get out of here. Engines are off. Sails are up. We got a long ass sail today. Tonight. Tomorrow. But, oh, and so much to catch up on. We have so much to catch up on. We're on our way to the Berry Islands. Finally, getting the hell out of the north part of the Bahamas. You say it like it's been bad. It's been good. We're on our way. It feels good to be on our way. Was that too much? It does feel good to be on our way. To get to the Berries from the west end is going to be about 85 to 90 nautical miles and it's going to take us about 20 hours. And we left this afternoon because there is a big blow coming. It's looking at like 30 plus knots of wind. Some 35 up to 40. Potentially. And that's going to be quite a bit. We needed to get there before that came. It's an overnight sail for us. It was going to be a long day anyway. Overnight now. I'm using PredictWind to do some weather routing and it looks like we're going to be upwind pretty much the whole time. Which means a lot of tack. Want to see? It shows us our different route options based off of the four different wind predictions that we have. Just like that we're there. Before it gets dark and while Nikki's on her sleeping shift it's about 4.30pm we are just a little ways away from the west end. We're coming up on Freeport we've tacked about 6 times yeah there's it's going to be a long long night but I want to talk about family and we picked up my brother from Freeport on the 14th and we've had today's the 6th. It was an intense 22 days it was exciting, it was fun it was stressful. It turned out to be a really good thing that we stayed at the marina but it is so freeing to be out and on our way to somewhere new. It's exciting it's nerve wracking. It's our first night crossing since Fort Lauderdale and I mean obviously there's so much going through my mind right now. I will stop now before I ramble too much and I will come back plus it's probably time to tack again. Quite the show. It just never gets old. Sunsets happen every day they just never get old. We're about to shift shifts. Shift shifts. Say that three times. Awfully cute pro pilot. Not as cute as you honey. City lights are coming on it's starting to get dark because it's winter it'll be dark for the next 12 hours. I'm feeling pretty good about it though because at 4 knots speed hopefully we won't get into much trouble. Alright, it's time to tack again. A whole bunch of zigzags. It was supposed to be calm tonight and the winds were supposed to be super light. We didn't even think we were going to be able to sail at a very fast pace and sure enough we have 20 knots of wind. The swell was supposed to be like .2 to .4 meters. Definitely not. So here we are beating up wind and when you're out here you understand why they call it a beat. Because you can describe it as nothing else other than two rams fighting it out to the death. You are one of them and the ocean is the other. The ocean is just relentless. It's over and over and over and over. Just clash clash clash clash. So it's good and exciting. I went down into the shower and it was just filled with water. Apparently the hatch had rattled loose and it was just every crash we took water was just pouring in. Thank goodness that's all it was because for a second I had a mild heart attack thinking we had some sort of massive leak going on and the bilges weren't working. We just got about 25 knots of wind. Apparent wind so it's about time to put in the second reef which is three turns on the Genoa. My shift's almost over. It is 158. Made some progress. It didn't look like it was supposed to be like this at all. It's way worse than we thought it was going to be. Which is okay. It's not horrible. Moon just set and it's dropped behind clouds so I couldn't shoot the moon set but anyway there goes all of our national light so it's pitch black now. Shrouded in clouds. It's exciting to say the least and our AIS has been working. It's been extremely helpful because I can see when these big ships there's so much traffic here coming in and out of Freeport. Tankers. Cargo ships. Cruise ships. A lot of people out here. It's nice to know that we're not the only one so if something crazy were to happen we could at least radio somebody and we do have the PFD. It's literally right next to me. It has the VHF that's floating waterproof VHF fully charged. It has a safety light or an emergency light and a whistle so we are not just playing around tonight. I'm legit. The next reef in and I'm going to try to take a little shut eye. Not that that's really possible. We are using a little camera because the big camera is too big for this kind of stuff so hopefully you can hear me. Hopefully you can see me and hopefully you can feel some of the intensity even though there's not. That right there is a Norwegian cruise ship that is coming right alongside our port side and passing us at 22 knots. I'm not looking forward to that wake. Not a lot of sleep. I just switched with Nikki and it's about to be sunrise so hopefully we'll be in for a treat but it looks like there's so many clouds we're not going to see it. Getting my eyes peeled. Trying to capture if it's there. There it is! Yeah! Woo! Oh man am I happy to see that. Whoa! It's definitely been one crazy sail. Carrots are the breakfast of champions. And we still have about 20 to 30 knots of wind. 6 to 8 foot swells. And we're getting ready for our last tack. Hopefully Hopefully our last Yeah and then it will just be another hour and a half maybe two and we'll be there. Woo! I'm going to be ready for a shower food nap and a pint of beer. And coffee. Oh I've already forgotten about coffee. There's one last scary thing and that's right here the water goes from 1000 to 62 feet depth. And that's scary because a lot of times the seas get confused and make for a very uncomfortable more uncomfortable than it already is experience. So I'm not looking forward to that. But I am going to run the action cam so if it is crazy we'll get to see it. But I'm going for the positive last half full it's going to be no biggie. I'm hoping for that too. Everything's salty. It's going to be a very hazy shot right into the sun. Alright two things you learned from sailing the past 24 hours. Two things I learned? I love my enclosure a lot. Keep me dry and not get beaten up by the wind. Second thing you can never trust the weather. Doesn't matter what they predict. Doesn't matter what they say. Could be different. Are you happy that we left last night and not waited for today? Well yeah. Absolutely because if we would have waited yes the wind was in our favor but the weather was going to be right on our heels and we're already seeing 20 to 30 knots of wind. Later today it's just going to get worse. So I'm glad we're getting there early and going to be able to get settled before crazy happens. So yes. Still always good to just go early. Give yourself plenty of time yet also not be in a rush. How does that all even work? What about you? I cannot stop thinking about feathering props. Feathering props fold up and they're supposed to gain you at least a half of a knot. If we could have averaged an additional half of a knot we would have been there like four hours earlier. A half knot sounds like nothing. But on a long sail a half knot is a lot. Imagine if it was a 20 day sail. I think when we go back to Fort Lauderdale or wherever we go back we're going to get the bottom paint done and we'll probably do feathering props if we can afford it. That's a big if. That's a really big if. Oh and all of our... All of our nav gear. Let's not talk about it. There are no upgrades honey. There is no. We have to fix all the breaking stuff first. Okay. Turn it off. It's getting sad. 1500 feet to 86 and going down. I'm so happy that was a non-event. We kind of thought it might be a non-event because it's not a narrow channel. It's just this wide open expanse where the water goes from deep to a shallow bank. But it's huge. It's not the rage that we would have gotten or could have gotten in the whale cut. It's not the rage like what we see in some of these other places that we're going to as we get further south and into some of the other islands. But we never know. When we've never been somewhere you never know. And that's exciting and scary all at the same time. We're about 45 minutes to an hour away from dropping the anchor. Feeling pretty damn good. Pretty damn good. Proud of our boat. Proud of ourselves. Proud of Nikki. It's been a hell of a night. A hell of a day. Wow. Well, we made it. We are tucked into the little channel here. Really just outside of the channel. Shown as an anchorage. And as long as we're not in the channel, we're okay to stay here. So says active captain. We'll see if that stands. I don't think anybody's going to bug us. It seems pretty quiet here. I'm not sure about this spot. But we're going to have a lot of other options. And there is a blow coming. So it should be interesting. If we have to move, we have to move. But we'll see. In total, it was 136.6 nautical miles. Because of all of the tacking that we had to do. And we had about 6 to 8 foot swells. And on average, about 20 to 25 knots with gusts up to 30. So we were well reefed. And bouncing and bobbing around. Oh, and 24 hours. Almost to the to the minute. Total. So anyway. It's been a very long 24 hours. And we are exhausted. To say the least. But it was good. It wasn't scary. It wasn't anything we couldn't handle. Just a very long 24 hours. Which going back to what Jason mentioned in the beginning. It's about having people on board. Definitely having family on board was a great trial run to see what's it like having people on board for an extended period of time. And while we learned a lot. And there was definitely a little growing pains in there. Not necessarily anything bad. Just things we learned about what it's like to have people on board. It showed us that we definitely want people on board. And we decided for sure that we are going to open up at least one cabin. To whether it's individuals or couple or whatever the case may be. So we will figure out how we're going to go about opening that cabinet up to people. And we will share those details coming soon. Because we'll most likely be one of you. That's what we would like anyway. Because we want to share. We want to share the experience with other people. Which was kind of part of the reason we got a bigger boat. So. We've got a few days of a blow. Headed our way. Which will give us time to catch up on work. And clean all the salt off of the boat that we have now thoroughly drenched it in. And catch up on sleep. And yeah. And that's it. I'll see you again real soon. Bye. See you next time. I guess so. Holy crap. Yeah.