Sailing ALTAIR

Sailing ALTAIR a helia44 by Fountaine Pajot transatlantic from France to the British Virgin Islands in Spring 2018. Home port: Tortola, British Virgin Islands

11 June 2018
01 June 2018
28 May 2018
26 May 2018
24 May 2018
21 May 2018 | Las Palmas
08 May 2018 | Porto, Portugal
24 April 2018 | La Rochelle, France
18 April 2018 | La Rochelle, France

We have arrived!

11 June 2018
Hello Mates,

Thank you so much for your many check-ins and good wishes! As it turns out, the only thing malfunctioning on our transatlantic was the blog, we apologize for the infrequent updates - but, we are HERE! We safely made it Tortola late last night (Sunday, June 10) and we were very happy to see Virgin Gorda come into sight after 19 days at sea. Our passage was relatively uneventful and we were blessed with the Tradewinds, gentle rolling 2-3 meter seas, good humour and only a few rain squalls.

Here is a very quick update on the last two weeks of our journey which we were unable to blog due to some technical difficulties!

We had a few magical moments with marine life and were lucky enough to see a whale breach twice right off Altair's bow about 350meters off. We figured out the whale was actually two whales - a mother and her calf. As we got closer to the little family, Mama whale slapped her massive tail three times to make sure we knew we were to stay away from baby - it was absolutely magical.

We were visited by a few more dolphin pods although none as big as the 200 strong pod Sandy spotted during our first week. The Dolphins became our favourite visitors because they were so curious and fun, playing with the bow and showing us how absolutely majestic they are, fast, smart and full of personality. We will miss them on-shore!!

Perhaps the most exciting moments of the trip were while Mark the Fishing' Magician was hauling in over 20 catches - the last day being the MOST impressive. The lines went out at sunrise and he hauled in a barracuda which was quickly released (not great to eat, and can sometimes carry a poison!) - he threw the line back in and not 10 minutes later landed a 35kg YELLOW FIN TUNA. We are rich in tuna meat and excitement after that one! An awesome way for us all to finish the crossing.

We will post a few more reflections while we are here at "home" in the BVI for the next 10-14 days. We are thrilled to be joined by Monica & Ally (sister/sister in law of the Munros!) and will be cruising through our beloved islands celebrating with painkillers and conch fritters.

Thank you for your thoughts and prayers, a safe passage in the Captain's Log and Altair is 'home' safe and sound.

The Altair Crew
Fi & Harry, Lynda, Steve, Sandy & Mark

Halfway to the BVI!

01 June 2018
Ahoy Mates

We have passed the halfway point on our crossing from Las Palmas to the BVI! As we write we are current at 19.51.67N 41.07.40W and we anticipate arriving in Tortola in about 9 days. Our weather and seas have been absolutely perfect, we are well into the trade winds and are cruising with the spinnaker up on a run at an average speed of 7.3kts

Our days have little routine and a lot of freedom (and naps) but each morning Harry turns on the water maker to top up our tanks with fresh water, Lynda preps all the food for the day (sometimes some delicious baked goods if Fi or Lynda are in the baking mood!), Mark works on fishing lures and usually someone swabs the decks or sweeps the floors. It is amazing how clean the ocean is but we still find dust in the nooks and crannies and as you boat owners know Altair requires constant upkeep! We all share the 24/7 watch schedule: 2 hours on, 6 hours off. We also celebrated Fi’s birthday May 23 and Mark’s birthday May 28!

We are reading lots of books (All the Light We Cannot Sea, the Hidden Life of Trees, The Girl who takes an Eye for an Eye) and listening to great variety of music (Beatles, I am BOLT soundtrack, Captain Ron soundtrack, Bryan Adams, Calvin Harris, Bob Marley, Eric Church, Brooks & Dunn, KYGO, Rolling Stones, Zac Brown, Rod Stewart, Celine Dion, Mamas & the Papas etc!) and podcasts (Tony Robbins, Oprah Super Soul, Somebody Knows Something).

Our biggest excitement of the past 5 days has been the Fishin’ Magician Mark who has reeled in 16 Dorado fish at latest count! We have two lines out: one “modern” with a PENN deep sea fishing reel and 90lb line and one donated to the crew by Lynda & Steve’s father Cecil Cranton which has a wooden handle and seems to be bringing in just as big a catch! We have had BBQ’d filets and fish tacos (twice!) with the catches and have only lost 2 lures (one to what Sandy thinks might have been a fiesty Maco shark!!)

Thank you all for your good wishes and for following along! We will update when we are nearing the Caribbean.

Safe passage,
Fi & Harry Lynda Mark Steve Sandy

On our way

28 May 2018
Well we are really in the trade winds now, in the last 24 hours we’ve made over 170 NM in steady winds which are almost exactly behind us. There is a minimal swell of perhaps two meters and the air and sea temperature are 24. Mark Fleming has been nick-named “the fishing magician” and has supplied us with two suppers and fish tacos for lunch today. He has caught and landed four moderately sized Dorado and released at least at least the same number. We have also had Cec Cranton’s vintage deep sea reel out and it has also landed a 9lb Dorado. They make for delicious eating and add variety to our diet. Morale is high and we are well into the voyaging mode as we skip across the Atlantic. Today was laundry day as Sandy and I did our wash by hand and hung it up along the windward rail to dry.

Currently looking like an arrival in the BVI sometime around the 8th to 10th of June.

Harry

Life Aboard Altair

26 May 2018
Well its a Saturday afternoon May 26th, but out here there is really nothing to distinguish it from any other day of the week. We are now in the trade winds and are making good time. Attached you’ll find a screen shot of our Chart-plotter showing exactly where we are as of 13.35 UTC. The winds are blowing 15 to 20 knots gusting to 23 and Altair seems to be loving it.

There are several daily routines which you could class as work raising the spinnaker at dawn and then lowering it at dusk. The spinnaker we bought came with a spinnaker sock made by ATN, the sock is pulled down over the sail from top to bottom to “douse” it and make it easier to control when bringing it in. The bottom of the sock has an oblong fiberglass ring attached to it which guides the sail into the sock. However the ring is not strongly built and on only the third use it snapped in half: the same thing happened on Tequila Sunrise which Sandy Lynda Harry and Steve sailed over in 2015, so it’s obviously a design problem, we lol wonder why in this age of fantastic modern materials ATN still uses random matted fiberglass for this purpose? Any way we attempted to repair the fibreglass, but after a crew conference we all decided to forego the sock and raise and lower the sail by hand without the com, which we had already done twice with success. Having a large crew allows us to do this.

We also have to keep our water tanks topped up, the six of us use between 120 and 150 liters of water a day and to make that much requires the generator to be fired up and the water maker turned on for about an hour or so. After a water making session it has to be flushed out with fresh water and the whole operation takes a good chunk of the morning after breakfast. At the same time the additional power made by the generator tops off the battery bank, which is used for the freezer and refrigeration, navigational instruments, lights, entertainment system, hot water heater etc. Lynda cooks on camping gaz, which is how the boat was set up in France.

Throughout the day we sit and read, play cards, rummy and Skip-Bo (remember that?), chat, take our showers as there is a limited supply of hot water at any one time and most often just sit in the sun., watching the water and enjoying the sensation of sailing and looking for the ever-changing wildlife. Since we last wrote we have seen blue bottle jelly fish floating by, more and more flying fish, and yesterday afternoon a huge pod of dolphin likely two hundred which raced past us on what looked like a very important mission! We are too far off shore to see any seabirds, except for the occasional albatross.

The Altair Crew

Altair En Route

24 May 2018
Harry Munro
Altair left Las Palmas at 1900 hours on Tuesday May 22nd. We had a successful stopover, registered our MMSI number (MMSI # 316 037 153) and got our Vesper transmitter up and running which allows our name, position, heading and speed to be seen by other vessels carrying the same AIS technology. You may be able to track us by going to a web site that shows the location of AIS vessels. We also cleared immigration out of the EU, by taking a trip over to the commercial port and having our crew list and passports stamped by some border police who couldn’t speak a word of English.

We enjoyed Las Palmas which is a large and sophisticated city of 500,000. It is the fourth busiest harbour in Spain and is chock full of drilling ships and oil rigs being serviced. It also has a huge container port. The city is situated on an isthmus and on the side opposite to the Harbour is a delightful beach and promenade area, which we visited and swam off couple of times, the water temp must have been around 20. Prices for everything from restaurants to grocery stores were very reasonable and the large Deportivo (marina) was clean and well maintained and also very reasonably priced. The crew enjoyed some great meals of tapas, risottos, calamari and local goat stews. The first twelve hours of this leg were calm with no wind and so we had to motor through the night, but from then on we’ve been favoured with gentle winds out of the North and Northeast blowing at between ten and twenty knots which have been perfect for spinnaker sailing.

We are currently just about a hundred nautical miles off the Western Sahara and closing in on the prolongation of its border with Mauritania on a course which will put us just west of the Cape Verde Islands where we plan to rendezvous-vous with the trade winds blowing a steady 15 to 25 knots from east to west. We are averaging 6.7 knots and get a bit of a boost from a current going our way at .7 of a knot.

Despite our southerly position, it is still surprisingly cool a high of 22 in the day time, dropping to 19 at night but with a strong, strong sun. Last night was quite beautiful with a cloudless sky and a clear and bright half moon. Sitting at the helm watching the waters rushing by with the glow of efflorescence is one of the great privileges of an adventure like this.

Over the last few days we’ve seen a lone turtle, (what was it doing out here all alone?), bird life, consisting of gannets, gulls terns and frigate birds and two pods of dolphins which were too busy fishing to pay any attention to us. There is very little shipping in fact we haven’t seen a vessel in the last twenty four hours visually or on radar.

HARRY

Shore Leave Update - Las Palmas

21 May 2018 | Las Palmas
Altair Crew, 28 & Sunny
Hello all -

We have just seen the sunset on our second day of shore leave in Las Palmas but the day was anything but lazy! When arriving in any port (as you sailors and navigators will know) the first line of business is usually just that, business! We spent our first day (Sunday) on shore getting our bearings: registering with the Las Palmas port authority, presenting our crew list with passports to the port authority, docking Altair (a LONG walk from the showers!!), finding wifi (always a challenge with a sweet reward!), grabbing necessary provisions (usually the local beer!) and settling in to our new ‘home’ for a few days.

Our second day was even more ‘productive’ (albeit exhausting!) We split into three teams each with a task at hand. Lynda and Steve searched for and found a supermarket (Super DINO, complete with dinosaur mascot), bought a TON of provisions (“groceries” for our land based fans) and decided to forego attempting to explain how to get back to the Marina in Spanish to an unsuspecting taxi driver and walked with their VERY heavy load back. If you know the Cranton family, you know no load is too heavy for Steve & Lynda to attempt to carry 4km on their backs (including 2 bags of potatoes, and a lot of carrots).

Harry, Mark & Fi decided to tackle getting customs papers for the boat. This is necessary to prove arrival into, and out of Las Palmas (so, as it turns out, we can’t stay forever!) A 10km walk, many hand gestures and attempts to explain their cause in Spanish and they ended up at the Capitan de Port 15 minutes after the office had closed for its siesta (although, all members of the office were still sitting in the office shooting the breeze and promptly informed us, “itsa closed, open 9am mañana” when the crew arrived looking worn – very helpful!) We will return tomorrow bright and early to complete the challenge.

Lastly, Skipper Sandy took on the task of cleaning Altair’s decks which were very salty after our last 5 day sail. As we said in our last blog, fresh water whether from a hose, a tap or a shower is an absolute luxury, especially during a transatlantic! We also want to acknowledge Sandy’s expert docking of Altair here in Las Palmas, stern to amidst some old looking relics with lots of protrusions waiting to attack her brand new gel coat – well done and a drink to you Skipp!!

We are completing final preparations to set out on our official transatlantic leg from Las Palmas to Tortola, British Virgin Islands by Wednesday morning. We are all set, sea legs are strong, water tanks full and extra diesel onboard, food stocked, clothes cleaned & night watches are now routine. We won’t have access to wifi but will be updating the blog via our SAT phone every two or three days.

Check out the latest photos in our photo gallery.

Many thanks for your good wishes, safe passage!

Altair Crew
Vessel Name: ALTAIR
Vessel Make/Model: FP Helia 44
Hailing Port: Tortola, British Virgin Islands
Crew: Harry Munro, Lynda Munro, Fiona Munro, Mark Fleming, Steve Cranton, Sandy Marr
About:
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ALTAIR's Photos - Sailing Altair - Transatlantic 2018 (Main)
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FP Helia 44 : The 2018 Helia44 from a bird
 
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Created 11 May 2018