Posts In The “Atlantic Ocean” Category
When we arrived into Port St. Charles, Barbados on February 3rd of 2016, we were ready to slow down and take it easy. In the six months prior, since leaving Tipperary Waters Marina in Darwin, Australia on August 10th of 2015, we’d travelled 12,237 miles. We’d made our two biggest non-stop passages ever: 3,023 miles…
We rented a car for a few days to explore Barbados and do some shopping. We spent the first day at the south end of the island in the area of the capitol, Bridgetown, starting with a trip to the Mount Gay Barbados Rum factory. Then we explored other parts of Barbados, including a tour…
To give Jennifer’s shoulder some time to heal, we took it easy for the week after her collar bone break. We got a few boat projects done, and made sure Jennifer got lots of “medicinal” rum to speed her recovery. Kathy and John Youngblood of Mystic Moon tell us this is called limin’, something the…
For the first few days after arriving in Barbados, we attended the informal 2016 Nordhavn Barbados Rendezvous with Robbie and Jo Ashton of Nordhavn 47 Southern Star and Jennifer and Mark Ullmann of Nordhavn 46 Starlet. They’d just crossed the Atlantic together from the Cape Verde Islands and had arrived in Barbados a few days…
Yesterday evening, Jennifer got hit by a snapping line from the super yacht on the dock beside us. The line hit hard enough to break Jen’s clavicle (collar) bone. It’s now a bit of a mess with the bone broken through, displaced and overlapping. The doctors are confident it will heal well but I know…
We arrived into Barbados 25 days and 3,689 nm after leaving St. Helena. We’re told this is the longest non-stop run in a Nordhavn under 100ft. Including the 11-day, 1,711 nm trip from Cape Town to St. Helena, we’d been at sea six weeks to the day between Cape Town and Barbados, and covered exactly…
By January 31st, we’d covered another 1,500 miles on our 3,650-mile journey from St. Helena to Barbados and had been at sea for three weeks. A lot happened in this portion of the trip. We crossed the equator and returned to the northern hemisphere after nearly three years away, and passed the halfway mark on…
Stabilizers are used on ocean-going vessels to remove the discomfort of ocean swell. Generically they come in two broad forms, passive and active. Passive stabilizers are the metal fins that you might have seen hanging from outriggers on fishing trawlers. And, if you saw the movie The Perfect Storm, that was a passive stabilizer that…
Earlier this week, we brought the boat up on the wing engine and shut down the main engine to change the oil. Normally we’d never do this, even though the chance of a problem is small, because in the unlikely event that a problem does occur, it would be a very big problem. (See To…
We departed from St. Helena on our longest non-stop run so far: a one-month, 3,650 nautical mile passage to Barbados. We were always planning to stop at St. Helena, as we’d need to refuel enroute to most destinations after South Africa. From St. Helena, we’d gone through several iterations of trip planning before deciding on…
On our last day in St. Helena we cleared out in the morning for a weekend departure and spent the rest of the day on a custom island tour with Derek Richards of No Limits Travel and Tours. We generally don’t like the constraints of a guided tour and initially were planning to hire a…
On our fourth day at St. Helena, we learned more about the island’s history, geology and ecology at the excellent St. Helena museum, and visited St. James Church, the oldest Anglican church in the Southern Hemisphere. We also walked a track around Munden’s Point to Rupert’s Bay to see the new wharf and port facilities…
Oil changes at sea get pretty close to a universal response from boaters I know. Everyone says loudly “DON’T DO IT.” The risk of something going wrong when hundreds, if not a thousand miles, from shore is simply too high. And, with oil change intervals ranging between 250 and 375 hours, there typically is no…
On our first three days in St. Helena, we handled the country arrival overhead, spent some time exploring in and around the main center of Jamestown, and made a trip to the St. Helena Distillery for a tour and tasting. The island most famous as Napolean’s place of exile has a rich and varied history…
We currently are underway on a 3,650nm non-stop run from St. Helena to Barbados. Prior to this passage, our longest non-stop run without fueling was 3,023nm from Dampier, Australia to Rodrigues, Mauritius. The current 3,650nm passage is at the very limit of Dirona’s range and we are, naturally, monitoring fuel economy closely to ensure we…
We arrived into St. Helena after an 11-night, 1,713nm passage from Cape Town. Conditions were somewhat rough for the first few nights, but calmed down considerably after. For the rest of the way into St. Helena, we had light winds and condtions so calm it hardly felt like we were at sea. En route, we…
We cleared out from Cape Town for St. Helena on December 23rd, just over a month after we’d first arrived in the city. We’ve had a few questions as to why we left when we did, particularly with 12ft seas forecast during the first couple of days. In all things around engineering and boating, the…