Sulmar's Atlantic Crossing

We left Santa Cruz de Tenerife on Thursday 14th. Being the smallest boat in Blue Water Rally, we left a day ahead of the planned departure date in order to keep in touch with the radio net. However, an Atlantic depression and its associated trough kept the fleet in Tenerife for a further three days, so we ended up with quite a head start. The rest of the Blue Water Rally fleet left on Monday 18th November and had very strong headwinds for the first couple of days.We got about 360 miles south of Tenerife before we experienced any southwesterly winds associated with the trough. 'Sulmar' points very well to windward, so we continued on our way, without too much trouble. We had a couple of days after the trough went through with very light winds, so much so that one afternoon when our speed dropped to 2 knots, the boys towed Kalle's boogie board and surfed mid ocean! We had some totally amazing sunsets between Tenerife and 20N30W. Just north of 20N30W, the wind became more Easterly and from that point, we were able to more-or-less sail a rhumb line to Antigua. We were the first yacht in the fleet to reach the half-way point, celebrated by cold beer and fresh popcorn. We were eventually over-taken by 'Matata', 'Kalypso','Backwater' and 'Windfall' in the last three days before we reached Antigua. It was great fun recording all the fleet positions every morning during the radio net to see who was catching us up. Chatting to other yachts a couple of times a day also helped boost morale on board when we got tired of constant rocking back and forth.

After months of preparation, the Atlantic crossing was some of the easiest sailing that we have ever done. The major challenge throughout the voyage was living in such close proximity to each other, especially with crew that we didn't know very well. Cooking was also quite a challenge as we surfed down large waves.We ate very well, despite our small fridge. Our fresh vegetables survived very well in their personal hammock. We still had fresh cucumber the day we arrived, and could have had plenty of other fruit if we hadn't eaten it all.

We were extremely lucky with the weather. We didn't experience squalls of any more than 40 knots, and those we did have were reasonably short lived. We spent our watches keeping an eye on the lines of cloud racing up behind us, but most of them missed us. Our night watches were lit by an incredibly bright full moon for much of the crossing. We also saw another first one night - a full rainbow in the moonlight as a squall approached us.We had several attempts at collecting water in the squalls, but this was not particularly successful, as the guys were more interested in having a fresh water shower. Sadly Gillian's hair is too long to wash in a 5 minute downpour. She stuck to salt water showers every couple of days, dreaming of long freshwater showers in Antigua.

We sailed most of the way goosewinged, with our main out as far as it could go without chafing on our aft-swept spreaders, and the genoa poled out on the opposite side. We tried our twin headsails for a day, flying the second headsail free on the spinnaker halyard and using a block on the mainsail boom to pole it out. This worked well, but proved very difficult to drop when the wind got up. Our main halyard jumped off its pulley again when shaking out a reef, so we used our spare halyard all the way across. When we arrived in Antigua, we removed our wire halyard and replaced it with rope.

We used our hydrovane for part of the way, but found that we could sail much more efficiently by hand steering. As we had two young crew in addition to Robin and I, we hand steered most of the way.There was still plenty of time for sunbathing and fishing. Fishing proved to be extremely successful, so much so that we caught something everytime we put the line in the water. It was lovely to have fresh fish, especially a fish with such delicate textures as dolphin fish. We were also very glad that our crew seemed to relish gutting and filleting it - lots of scales and blood on the foredeck. We gave up fishing about half way across. We caught two large dolphin fish in the same day, which meant we had fish in the fridge for days and couldn't face it any more.

We saw flying fish every day. Almost every morning, there were several dead on the foredeck. On one occasion, we even found one stuck in the second reef in the mainsail! We saw many dolphins from Tenerife to just north of the Cape Verde Islands. After that, we only saw dolphins once, but they were an extra special sighting as they were Altantic Spotted Dolphins - a school of about 10 mothers with tiny calves in tow. The adults were very pale grey with spots all over their backs and the young didn't have any spots.

We saw two minke whales, one in the first week, which surfaced in front of us and then dissapeared. The second whale that visted us stayed with us for about an hour. It circled us swimming next to us for a while, diving under us while turning on its back showing us its white belly. It was quite exciting having a whale of at least 7 meters long so close to us. It would disappear, swimming up-wind for a while, and then reappear surfing down the huge waves behind us. Twice it behaved very like a dolphin, throwing itself completely out of the water right in front of the bow, crashing down with a big splash of its tail. We were a little nervous of it getting too close because 'Windfall' another rally yacht had bumped into two whales earlier in the voyage. The only photos I managed to take are the two above the first is a dark shaddow of it swimming next to us, and the second is it swimming on its back.

The wind died when we were two days off Antigua and we motor-sailed for the last 36 hours. We had such a good start, we didn't have to worry about conserving fuel. Apart from running the engine in neutral for a couple of hours a day to keep the batteries topped up, we had hardly used any of our diesel.

We finally arrived in Jolly Harbour Antigua on Thursday 6th December, 21 days after leaving Tenerife. We were very pleased to reach Antigua three days before our expected 24 days. We now look forward to 5 months of blissful cruising before returning home via the Azores in May 2002.