Saturday, May 25, 2019

St. Georges Bermuda...

It,s a beautiful town on the northeast corner of Bermuda, also the port of entry where all sailboats must clear in with customs.

Will be here 11 days, due to needed repairs, fuel and bad weather coming thru. Looks like we can finally leave Monday 27 for our 1800 miles to Horta Azores. the anchorage is very full, with lots of international sailors waiting for a good weather window..


the best way to describe St. Georges is by photos- and you can, take a bad one here.



Onto Bermuda..

Finally getting around to the &Blog&, that I promised to keep.

After fueling up, we casted off our lines in Stuart Florida at 1:30 and motored north on the ICW to the inlet at Fort Pierce. Motored thru the inlet around 6:30 - rough 1/2 mile passage as we had strong winds against tide, with breaking waves sometimes slowing us down to 2 knots. Finally around 7:30 turned north, set sail and rode the gulf stream for 1 1/2 days, then turning east towards Bermuda -

Our first sunset motor sailing east.

We spent the next couple of days sailing east - doing a little north also, but tried to stay under 29 degrees latitude, advised to us by our weather router. Glad we did as we saw lots of lightning, squalls and thunder north of us.

Another sunset at sea.

5/11  sailed and motored hot and humid

5/12 changed course to 90, first squall hit us at 11:00 PM, got us all awake and  drilled to reef our sails

5/13 lighning to north sailed/motored. Someone left a post galley window opened and about 20 gallons of sea water poured around 6pm.

My sea berth 

5/14 - got hit by 3 squalls tonight - winds recorded up to 42Knots- reefed main only. All 3 of us on deck. Lasted a good 2 hours. We three ended up having a 24 hours day

5/14 -  3am ran out of fuel- bleed system in daylight. 6:30 fuel lines bleed motor running again, engined died again - 9:00, changed primary filter- lots of gunk from empty/ tank. Decided to keep better records of engine hours/fuel consumption.

12:40 water tanks dry ---turned on water maker to make sure we have fresh water.

5/15 2 am started engine  - motoring for all day so far, cloudy but cool with no storms .

5/16 - wind picking up able to do some nice sailing - 6.5 - 7 knots. Sighted Gibbs lighthouse on Bermuda around 11:00  pm.

5/17 - made landfall around 8 am in St. Georges Harbour, had toanchor out and await sace on the customs dock.

Another sea view...



 

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Departing in 3 hours for our trans-Atlantic sail

We are finally set, boat full provisioned, lots of food, just need to top off with fuel and water.

Will be stopping in Bermuda, for additional fuel, as we are probably going to have to motor the first couple of days.

Then on to the Azores for, hopefully a nice 10-12 day stop before heading to Gibraltor.

the Happy crew, with Captain Merrie Bergmann ..


the very sweet 43 foot Passport sailboat "Allore:


I think we have enough ships store- this is the view of the forward, V-berth cabin- full. Food, clothing, towels and much more..

T

Next contact willbe from Bermuda.. 

Monday, April 29, 2019

New Journey soon..

On to Europe for the summer...

On May 7th I will be crewing on a beautiful Passport 43' sailboat from Stuart, Florida to somewhere in Spain. Our crossing should take 5 - 6 weeks, in addition, I will be staying on board helping the owner, Merrie Bergmann, sail around the Mediterranean for an additional couple of months.

Here's our expected route...

There will be 3 of us for the ocean crossing, when we arrive in Gibraltar Joel, our third crew member will be flying back to the USA.

If you want to follow my journey, I will have actived a device called inReach. It will track my progress across the ocean and around the Med..It is a satellite device that  allows me to maintain contact with certain people and shows where we are every 4 hours, click on the link and then bookmark it for future reference. -
https://us0-share.inreach.garmin.com/roland2019 

Here's what it will look like ..


If you want to book marked my blog here is the link -- https://svkoda.blogspot.com/

If you want to subscribe to my blog, here is the link to learn how to do it..
https://svkoda.blogspot.com/2017/05/subscribing-to-my-blog.html.