Sailing To New York From The BVI's.
08 May 2010 | Hamilton, Bermuda
kurt Flock / Warm, breezy, partly cloudy skies
[Above photo shows Mikalka moored in New York City. Kurt helped sail this boat back to the states April 15-26th.]
[New Gallery Post - Sailing from Tortola to New York - 5/8/10)
I find myself floating above an endless expanse of a sparkling blue ocean feeling ridiculously happy, wallowing in a moment of euphoric delirium. Cotton ball clouds shift shapes as they dance lazily by, first a dog, then Mickey Mouse, a pig's face, a stone head on Easter Island. Damn life is good.
I had no idea sobriety and euphoria could park their respective asses so tightly and inseparably in the same seat. At the moment, that seat is C23 aboard Jet Blue flight 787 some 35,423 feet above the Atlantic. My body is en route to St. Maarten at 534 mph, but my mind has warped backward in time and moving much slower, something like 6.5 knots.
Time bends in strange ways when you're on watch. Life goes by mostly in slow motion. Less than 48 hours ago I was floating ON the Atlantic, not above it, when my ass was rousted suddenly out of a sleepy, underway, off-watch reverie by Norm's booming command, "We've got to get off this ocean. A gale's coming with 70 knot winds. Grab the ditch bag, throw in the EPIRB, and grab hand held VHF. Hurry, this is NOT a drill."
From zero to sixty in .5 seconds. That's what the adrenaline junkie in me loves about sailing. But incredibly, as reality threatens to pummel our boat with an angry storm, my mind grows oddly quiet. Panic is the enemy...stay calm...assess...then react.
The time between assess and react grows shorter with experience, and with enough experience, it becomes instinctive. Norm is experienced and knows we gotta reduce sail quickly. We're a hundred plus miles off the east coast, just north of Cape Hatteras, and our Raymarine digital radar and Sirius weather overlay shows a wicked bright red storm blob bearing down on us. He directs me to drop the main, so I grab a handful of sail ties and haul ass on deck. In short order, I have the main securely to the boom and am back in the cockpit. Our winds are only 15 knots at present, so we sit, clipped in and huddled in the cockpit awaiting the forecasted ass kicking. It just doesn't get any better than this!
Actually this part of my sailing saga began April 15th, a few days after Kate left St. Maarten leaving me to ready Myananda for her trip back to the states. We decided to extend our sailing season closer to home, and bringing her back to the east coast seemed to make sense. In a moment of inspired insanity I proposed to Norm Harlow that I help him sail his Valiant 42 back to New York, and he then help me sail Myananda back to Newport, Rhode Island. Well Norm is crazier about sailing than I am, so he agrees to this plan. That's how I found myself somewhere northeast off Cape Hatteras with a storm headed my way, but hell, I'm in a Valiant 42, Bob Perry's famous design that has more short handed circumnavigation miles under her than any other boat.
Norm and I are sailing with Kimberly Devon, a free-spirited, 46 year old sailing aficionado who lives on St. Maarten. Norm found Kim on a crew finder site. Apparently she was looking for a break in her work and personal life ashore, and she'd done this trip a couple times before. Kim turned out to be an affable, easy going crew mate who showed no fear in the face of high winds or stout seas. She does not however like lightning. Seems she'd had a close encounter or two before, so she's huddled with us in the cockpit, head down, hoping like hell that Norm's description of the "cone of protection" isn't just some skipper's crew comforting crock.
Before leaving Tortolla, Norm and I reviewed GRIB weather files and a forecast from Commader's Weather. Many people head north this time of year to Bermuda and then turn west or northwest toward the states, but the GRIB's suggested this route would involve beating with winds dead on the nose and then sailing through a large, nasty looking low pressure system that would catch us south of Bermuda. No fun.
We opted instead for a northwestward rhumb line in hopes we could skirt most of the bad weather and take advantage of wind directions that for the first few days would allow us to reach northwestward. The plan more or less worked, and for the first couple days we sailed briskly into 5-7' seas that churned us around with sickening cross swells. Putting up with moderate pitch and yaw is better taking a hobby horse pounding while motor sailing close hauled. So we fell into a rhythm, and clawed our way toward New York making something like 160 miles the first day. Not bad.
The trip to New York took about 10 and a half days. We managed to thread the needle and avoid most of the really bad weather that was pounding the east coast. The highest wind gusts I saw on my watch was 48 knots. I think Norm saw stuff in the 50's once, so we got plenty of exercise reefing the main down to it's second or third reef points. The Valiant lived up to it's reputation as a sturdy, blue water boat, and never once did I experience any real fear or apprehension that we had no business sailing along, hundreds of miles offshore as the Coast Guard issued one small craft weather advisory after another.
One of the highlights of our trip was gorging ourselves on pounds of sashimi from a beautiful yellow fin tuna I caught on day seven. I wasn't finished cleaning the fish before Kim had the rice boiling. We had plenty of wasabi and low sodium soy aboard, so talk about an awesome feast! It was more spectacular the second day after it was chilled. We finally fulfilled a long time fantasy of Norm's - catching and eating a tuna during a passage.
We arrived in New York City early Monday morning, April 26th. The weather had turned cold, wet and dreary, but motoring under the Verrazano Bridge and past the Statue of Liberty then along Manhattan was pretty special. We docked at the 79th Street Basin Marina and headed out to a fantastic Greek restaruant for dinner, finally crashing into our bunks about 11:30 p.m.
I've said a thousand times, you can sleep when you're dead, so I was up at 6:00 a.m. and with my gear slung on my back, I marched into an awakening city to catch a ride to JFK Airport. I opted to take the subway, and with the help of four or five friendly New Yorkers, I found my way to JFK airport. Total cost of the two hour transit was $4.50! Amazing. At the airport I bought a smoothie that cost me $6.50. And as Jen in my office said, the sail up the Atlantic to New York was - priceless.
And thus began my trip back to St. Maarten where Myananda rested well in her slip, awaiting my return and the assembly of a new crew for her sail back to the states. More to come...