Quaudaloope to Bermuda

It’s Sunday. And after some Sunday morning chores of tying down dinghy checking the rigging and making sure everything is stowed safely. One final check of the Forcast, It’s time to commit to the plan. 1000 miles due north of open water. I layed in a coarse to get out through the reef and out in to open water. It was 53 NM. I was about to find out why this places name was cul de sac de Marin. Sails up, anchor up, a gentle gill forward to pass close the motor boat of some Canadians we had spent the morning chatting with. We bare off and head for the exit to the lagoon. The wind angle looks promising as we head for the channel through the reef mindful that the wind could change at any moment. We are lucky we get through on one tack and are pointing exactly where we want to go, but not for long. 1 more mile and the wind shifts straight on the nose. 53 miles is about to become 70. Miles it looks like we will be eating tea and beating up wind in the dark lucky it’s nice and warm, even the sea birds up here are more friendly. After 70 miles we are past all the little island and the routine of a weeks sailing ahead of us is back . Trying not to tell rob the same old stories. But it’s un avoidable. Luckily he either polite or a gold fish. (Update to follow)
We are heading pretty much due north and we are expecting 7 days at sea. There are no hurricanes or tropical storms forecast for the next 7 days. I have a paper chart for this trip and start to plot our position once a day, at mid day. Its us paying homage to doing a noon site with the sextant. I noticed we are passing over the Nares Abyssal Basin,
Sounds a bit daunting. I look carefully at the chart and see we are passing over big valleys and giant mountains. To put this into perspective the tips of the mountains are kilometres beneath our boat and the depth of the valleys isn’t even marked. I pondered how long it would take for a stone to reach the bottom and how dark it would be when it got there. A whole other planet we don’t even know, just beneath us. Wild life spars but rob catches a dorado for tea.
We were hoping to stay in a northerly air stream without deviating from our coarse to far, but that wasn’t to be. The low pressure system that was quite weak deepened and moved East and we had no choice but to follow it east and 100 miles too far east the upside is when it past we had pleasant winds to motor sail the last of 7 days towards St George’s and Bermuda. With 50 miles to go it went dark the clouds filled in and we had torrential rain and lightning to see us in. It a narrow channel and the advice is to do it in the daytime first time. GPS and Radar have made us a little too confident. But we entered anyway 6 Lit Bouys 6 unlit bouys. And plenty of other bits and pieces to hit if we don’t concentrate. Job done Anchor down in Powder hole quick tidy and off to bed for a well earned lie in.Lue lisää