West Palm Beach to Bermuda 8
25 April 2019 | 31:35N 066:04W
Richard Rowley
Dawns rosey fingered glow
818 down 83 to go
Hi its me again, 4 hours or so later, I have had a kip and now back on watch. When I got up the wind had increased a bit, and we needed to slow down a bit, as we do not want to arrive at Bermuda in the dark, so I thought we could sail, we hoisted the yankee back up, and with the wind backing round further to the west we are now on a nice beam reach, for a while a big black menacing cloud raised the wind speed to 13-14kts and we were creaming along for awhile at 6.5kts, the cloud now passed we are now back to a wind speed of 10-11kts and boat speed of 4.9kts. We are only 80 or so nautical miles from the entrance to St Georges Harbour,Bermuda with an ETA at our current speed sometime in the wee hours of tomorrow morning, if we had continued motoring at 5kts we would have arrived sometime in the dark before midnight which we don't want to do for various reasons.
The main reason for writing to you again is to tell you about this mornings dawn. Obviously when sailing in the ocean day after day we see lots of sunsets and sunrises, some are spectacular and others are not, or even non existent hidden completely by cloud, others just another like the one before. What make a sunrise or sunset spectacular for me the is the cloud, if there is some clouds but not thick layers of stratus. When I got up for this watch at 4am (local time we are GMT -4) it was still dark, but the moon had risen since I had been down below, casting a rippling silver streak across the sea towards us, just a few clouds had appeared in the sky not much still plenty of stars to sea. Once i had got the sails set and settled myself down cozily in the cockpit the pre-dawn loom of light started to appear over the horizon in front of us, 'civil twilight' as it is called for navigation purposes, the time when there is enough light to use a sextant and still see celestial bodies from which you take readings of. This for me is the magical time, not the actual sunrise. This morning there is a bit of cloud ahead of us. There was a band of clear sky just above the sea and below a broken layer of clouds with fluffy cumulus clouds here and there poking out the top, the colour of this band of sky is a rich blood red orange bounded below by the inky black sea and above by this band of gunmetal grey clouds and above these clouds the clear sky changed to a amber orange for a bit then the sky graduated with different hues of dark turquoise almost green, through to past shades of blue, with the odd fluffy white fair weather cloud dotted around then above that blending into the darker blue of the night sky between us and the breaking of daylight there was some thick heavy black clouds, as i look up in the sky over the starboard side to the south up in the sky the moon is still there partially hidden behind some cloud creating a halo of different colours on a rich dark navy blue background...that's the reason we do this...last nights sunset was equally spectacular off behind us as we watched it with a sundowner of tonic water (no gin whilst we are sailing) the band of orange just above the horizon with the big golden orbe about to set above the sky pastel shades of blue with patches of small cotton bud patches to cloud, it didn't look real it looked like a child's picture of what a seaside sunset is supposed to be...but it was real it was there.
Well it is a delightful morning with the sun now rapidly climbing high into the sky and we are sailing along at a pleasant speed in a gentle swell, no noise except the the swish of water from our wake, the occasional flap of sail in the gentle breeze and the gentle hum form the wind generator...just magic
It is time like this that reminds me how lucky we are to be doing this and to share it with you.
ohh and by the way, the beep from the radar alarm turned out to be two ships one passing either side of us each going in the opposite direction to each other. That reminds me my brother sent me a message yesterday to say that my position had been the same on the past two blogs, 'had i anchored in 5000m of water' well obviously not we only have 60m of chain, i manually input our position into the blog site and sometimes i fotget, but having said that a tanker passed with in 2miles of us yesterday doing abut 11kts and when it got behind us it turned up into wind and stopped, just doing 0.2 of a knot or so, and remained in there about the same position until the AIS signal slipped off the bottom of the screen. I assume not anchored in 5000m of water either, but obviously in no hurry to get to anywhere in particular and awaiting orders, saving fuel and mooring charges, clam sea in the middle of nowhere and not much other shipping to worry about and a nice bit of sunshine.
Time I had a cup of coffee and a peanut butter and marmite sandwich...mmm
Fayre Wynds and Kynd Seas
Richard and Alison yacht Cerulean of Penryn
if you want to see pictures or more look us up on for us at www.yachtcerulean.com facebook @yachtcerulean, instagram and if that is not enough you can always search 'Yacht Cerulean' on youtube if you are really bored.