The passage was fun, exhausting, frustrating at times, but never boring! We really had ideal weather for a November crossing. We subscribed to a weather/routing forecasting service (Chris Parker) that we access on our SSB radio two times per day. It’s really pretty cool to be able to hear people talking from all over the East Coast and Caribbean. On Chris’s advice for a good weather window of 4–5 days, we left a bit earlier than we felt comfortable doing because we needed to cross the Gulf Stream before a northerly front came through. Our crossing of the Gulf Stream was relatively easy. Very confused seas, but nothing major. A lot of rolling, but David didn’t get seasick. We had no rain the whole trip. We did have one raucous night with wind gusting up to 25 knots, but it was as Chris forecasted so we had the correct sails up and were prepared.
We had the benefit of an almost full moon each night although it didn’t come up until midway through the night. It is an eerie feeling sailing in the pitch dark at 6–7 knots which feels like you are flying! You can see nothing in front of you! You just trust that you won’t run into anything. In reality, we only saw a handful of other boats for the entire trip, so it was unlikely we would run into another boat. Once we did have to radio a ship and ask them to give us a wider berth (they were only 0.4 miles away). Anyway, once the moon came up, it was just much more comfortable because you could see around you a bit at least in the cockpit. Just feels friendlier …
Our major problem was the trusty engine. We have had no issues with it in the past 3 years except for a misaligned alternator belt on our first trip bringing her down from the Chesapeake. We use quite a bit of power to run our navigational instruments and auto helm while sailing. We have a 345W solar panel, but we also really need to run the engine for an hour or so each day when running 24 hr/day. With no engine, our battery voltage was very low. We had to turn off any non-essential electronics like the VHF radio and the AIS (if you were trying to track us, this explains why we disappeared at times) and had to hand steer to preserve the batteries. Hand steering in the pitch black with no visual clues and quartering seas that are constantly trying to knock your stern sideways is a bit of a challenge!
We were convinced we had a dirty fuel issue from the ocean sailing churning up debris from the bottom of the fuel tank, so David changed the primary fuel filter—no luck. We ended up changing the primary filter twice and secondary filter once and vented everything repeatedly to get rid of the air. David also removed a vacuum gage he had added just before the trip to monitor how clogged the filters were. One night, I was climbing out on deck at 3am with a headlamp to siphon diesel fuel out of our spare diesel fuel cans that are lashed on deck. We used some clean mason jars I had brought to grow mung beans. Rolling seas, salt spray on the deck and the dark make this an interesting task to say the least, but I got really good at it by the time I did it for the third or fourth time! David needed the fuel to fill the replacement fuel filters and to bleed/vent fuel lines. We took all sorts of fittings apart, replaced a fuel line ... all to no avail. The engine still wouldn't hold rpms. We ran the engine for a long time in neutral while at anchor last night—no issues. We still need to get this one figured out. We need an engine to maneuver around all of the shallow areas in the Bahamas. I am confident we will get it figured out, just not sure when! No worries though ... we are on island time now.