Bermuda to Azores, Day 4: Confused Seas and the Return of Nausea
Have you ever asked yourself what living in a washing machine would be like? Probably not (lucky you), but let me describe it for you.
Imagine that your bed is mounted on a swing and that the person pushing the swing is your fun uncle who has no children and no perception of what “too much” is. You know, the one you would ask to push you “higher, higher!” until your mom realized what was going on and would ask him to stop?
Well, from 9:00 PM until 4:00 AM last night, as I was trying to sleep, that swing was my bed and the “fun” uncle was the waves, but there was no mom to tell the fun uncle to stop.
It is interesting the positions one assumes in bed in order to minimize the motion of the boat in an effort to get some sleep.
I tried building a fort with some blankets and pillows in order to avoid gliding and rolling too much, but I was unfortunately quite unsuccessful at getting any kind of sleep.
Also for some reason, my stomach was way better at handling that kind of motion when I was a kid than it is now that I am reaching my mid-thirties. Go figure?!
Subsequently, my night watch this morning was one of the hardest I’ve ever had. I managed to cook some porridge and stuff it down my stomach without feeding the fishes, but that wasn’t without struggle.
The seas are still really confused today, and the waves that built up in the wind are very close together. This doesn’t feel like the typical ocean swell we’re used to; rather more like the short chop that we saw in the Mediterranean.
As a result, we roll and surf in the sea, with the occasional massive roller coaster of a wave that sends us on our side and shifts Polar Seal’s position by almost 90 degrees.
On the bright side, we are moving at a fantastic speed (albeit a little too far South) and this should be a fast passage if we continue like this.
After we jibed yesterday, we set the autopilot on windvane mode, meaning that we are asking it to keep the boat at a certain angle to the wind rather than holding a set heading.
This helps us keep our angle to the wind really deep downwind while lowering the risk of an accidental jibe in case the winds shift.
We asked our autopilot (affectionally named George) to keep Polar Seal at a 130 degrees to the wind, which for us is really deep downwind.
In winds coming from the west/northwest (see our current weather on the live tracker), this means that we should sail east/southeast until the winds shift and push us a little farther to the north.
But that shift hadn’t happened and our course over ground was taking us a little too far south for our taste (as you can see on our track).
So today, we decided to try a new sails configuration. We kept our two reefs in the main sail (meaning we have it lower than when it is full sails out), kept it on our port side and poled out our headsail on starboard side.
With this set up, we can have the wind almost straight behind us at a 150 degree angle.
We are now sailing a lot less south (you can probably see our track stabilizing to the East) with the waves also coming straight from behind us, which has made the motion of the boat a lot more comfortable.
We are still rocketing at 6 to 7 knots and I am now able to look at screens without nausea!
Fun news from land!
When we are so far away offshore, we are properly disconnected from the World with one exception: our Iridium-Go satellite email inbox.
Only the most important people in our lives have access to our satellite email address. Right now that is our family, our friends and Patrons, but also the two people who transform those satellite updates into blog posts with photos (hi Erin and Liz!!!) (hi Sophie, Ryan, and Anett!!) and our immigration attorney.
Yesterday, some real fun news landed in our satellite inbox, and because it feels weird to be disconnected from the people we want to celebrate with, I thought I’d share it with you here :)
The first news is that our little YouTube channel reached 50,000 subscribers! I’m not one to care for numbers too much, but heck, this feels big! It is almost the amount of people who live in my hometown!!!
I’m thinking about what kind of “celebratory video” I will create for the occasion when we land in Horta, but in the meantime, I want to send a big thank you everyone who subscribes to Ryan & Sophie Sailing!!!
It has been three years since we left Stockholm onboard Polar Seal to create a life of adventures for ourselves and three years of sharing little video snippets of our lives for anyone to watch.
Never in a million years did I imagine I’d be sitting here, still on my boat, on our second ocean crossing, with a fun community of like-minded people to share our adventure with! It is a humbling experience and I feel very lucky to have all of you around :)
The second big news is that after more than two years of not being able to travel to the United States, USCIS has finally received my new visa application!
In June of 2019, I applied for a tourist visa that was denied on the grounds that I was “too much of an immigration risk” (Google “214(b)"), and it threw our lives upside down.
The repercussions on our sailing plans have been massive, and will continue to be for the coming couple of years. As an example, the reason we are sailing across the Atlantic right now is because we weren’t able to escape hurricane season in the United States.
So around the end of 2020, we decided to take the matter seriously. Ryan’s parents offered us a consultation with a really good immigration law firm for Christmas, and we ended up hiring them.
It took us a while to gather all the paperwork necessary and finally, our immigration attorney informed us yesterday that my visa application has been received by USCIS.
We now have somewhat of a timeline for that process and the relief is IMMENSE!
We can now project ourselves in the future and are toying with different ideas for how we will make the most of my renewed ability to be in the United States.
I also never imagined that I’d be emailing with an immigration attorney through satellite connection from the middle of the ocean — Ryan and I had some fun sharing some details of our current passage with her (hi Scott, Jeanne and Faye! :))
We are still at least 10 days away from Horta in the Azores, but we already have so much to celebrate!