Bermuda to Azores, Day 3: Seaweed, Trash, and Man-of-War
If yesterday I woke up living in a tractor, this morning I woke up living in a washing machine.
I normally write these updates between 4:00 AM and 8:00 AM on my night watch, but today, I was busy hanging on for my life in very confused seas, and there was no way I could look at a screen.
So I am late writing this, but my stomach is grateful for it :)
We spent the day on the engine yesterday, which we took advantage of to top-up the batteries and the water tanks. We had nice showers, hung out in the cockpit and listened to music. In spite of the engine running, we had a good time onboard.
When the sea is so flat, you can see everything that floats on top of it from afar.
One thing that we’ve seen a lot of since departing (that we weren’t expecting to find so far north) are huge patches of sargassum.
Sargassum is bad news, especially when we are on the engine. Every so often, a bunch of seaweed gets stuck on our propeller, creating a lot of vibrations and making it a lot harder for our engine to get proper speed.
When seaweed gets in our prop, you can immediately hear and feel it. Our speed drops, the entire boat vibrates and we need to put the engine in reverse to try and get it unstuck. When we do this, we can see entire bushes of sargassum coming in our wake.
But sargassum isn’t the only thing that floats on the surface of the sea. We also saw A LOT of trash (random stuff like bags, construction signs, plastic...), including what I believed were empty water bottles.
Upon closer inspection, I realized that those were not water bottles, but rather a highly poisonous species of jellyfish called “Portuguese Man-of-War” (though we could be wrong, as we do not have access to internet to confirm our belief).
Throughout the day, we saw dozens of those little translucent pink and blue crescents floating and drifting in the sea of glass.
That’s about when our buddy boat Sargo messaged us to let us know that they were going to take a swim in the middle of the ocean.
I told them about the jellies, but it sounds like they had a good time jumping in the sea regardless!
We didn’t dare take a swim and instead got the drone out for some epic footage of some the calmest seas we’ve ever sen offshore.
We have now lost track of both Sargo and Zanzibar, though we are still in touch. Sargo is a little farther north of us, and Zanzibar a little farther southwest.
Around sunset, the wind picked up enough that we could finally sail again. We kept the engine on while I was cooking (a dish of squash & lemon risotto that Anett honored by having seconds) and we watched the sunset under sail again.
A nice current added 2 knots to our speed over ground, and we were already averaging 7 knots of speed when I went to bed at 9:00 PM.
We had been warned that for the first 24 hours of our sail eastwards, the sea would be confused, and we are not disappointed.
When I woke up at 3:50 AM this morning to take my watch, it looked like a completely different world outside.
Today, the waves have no idea where they want to come from or where they want to land, so they mostly crash into each other. Sometimes, they crash into each other on our boat and we get wet.
We were still catching a current this morning and were averaging between 7 and 8 knots, rolling and bouncing in the waves like a pinball.
At 8:00 AM this morning, we added a second reef to the main sail and jibed east/southeast (it’s that sharp turn you see on our track).
The seas are still confused, but at least they are now confused mostly behind us (as opposed to on our beam, which was uncomfortable). This sea state is very tiring and reminds me of the first week of our Atlantic crossing westwards.
So I went straight back to bed after my watch and I am currently laying in our cabin as I am writing this. I will probably spend some of the afternoon sleeping before I take on some galley duty later.
The seas should get a little calmer tomorrow, and the forecast looks good for the coming week! In the meantime, I predict a lot of sleeping onboard until the seas even out and spread a little ;)
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Playlist of the day: "A Moment Apart" by Odesza