How to get afloat again

Goodness, is that the time already? It’s been three months since my last post.

Starting this business one of my work items was to log some fresh miles at sea. I did the bulk of my sailing in the early years of the decade, with a peak in 2004. I wasn’t quite sure how to get fresh sea time on the CV, but this turned out not too difficult. In the last couple of months three trips came together that I went on to skipper for a total of 3,500 miles, and there’s a delivery trip as mate coming up shortly to add another 2,000.

So that should do the trick as far as recent mileage is concerned.

I was lucky enough to land the job of delivering Magic Pelagic, a Dufour 44, eastbound across the Atlantic. She was in St Lucia following the ARC 2008 - a well-known annual transatlantic rally - and her owner could not spare the time away from his business to bring her back himself.

There were different crews for the Caribbean-Azores and for Azores-Lisbon so that they were really separate trips. From my own point of view the transatlantic felt like one five week long voyage – as long as any I’ve done before and my longest as skipper by some way. It does take it out  of you…

We were able to keep a micro blog going on Twitter, and I won’t go over the voyage in any detail here. If you were watching: thanks for following our progress and hope it was good value.

Just to say that it was a great experience, both crews were fantastic, and the crossing was on the slow side of expectations due to fickle winds, mostly on the Caribbean-Azores leg. (Though not as slow as Alastair Buchan reports in Sailing an Atlantic Circuit. His passage took 35 days – we were in after 22.)

For me, if I was to sum up the experience with one photo it would be this one. Lacking in glamour compared to eighties pop videos, perhaps, but long ocean passages do revolve in large part around domestics. So the boat ends up festooned with washing on various improvised clotheslines a lot of the time.

The picture features Sian and Alex having a jolly old time on watch one afternoon.

Here’s part of the crew at landfall in the Azores. Nice how the shot is entirely natural and not at all posed. Oh, no. Not a bit of it. Alex again in the foreground, with Val and Steve behind him. The island in the background is Faial, where most boats visit on their west-to-east transatlantics to stop off in Horta.

Finally then, here’s the obligatory picture for yachts passing through Horta: it’s traditional to leave a painting on the harbour wall. From left to right Tuomo, who joined in Horta, Geert, Steve, Val. Leaves Witold who joined a few days later in Ponta Delgada, and Paul, the boat’s owner, who had had to leave in Antigua.