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September 6th, 2009 – At Sea, Labrador Sea, 60 12N, 57 31W
by Herb McCormick and Mark Schrader
(Sept. 6): Back in the early 1980s in Newport, Rhode Island, my favorite band was a group called Sea Journey. I liked their music well enough, but I really loved their name. To that point in time, I hadn’t taken many real sea journeys. Most of my sailing had been round-the-buoys racing out of the Newport Yacht Club with one of the coolest guys ever, Bud Scott – my good friend Ian’s dad – who raced a little 26-foot cruising boat skillfully and winningly. But all that was in Narragansett Bay – I longed to sail to distant islands, to truly travel by sea.
Like all of the permanent crewmembers aboard Ocean Watch, since then I’ve taken plenty of sea journeys. In fact, we’re in the midst of a rather exciting and memorable one at this precise moment.
Our current sea journey is the longest to date in our quest to sail Around the Americas, a voyage of nearly 1,800 nautical miles from above the Arctic Circle to the island of Newfoundland. After a little over five full days underway, sometime in the last several hours we’ve reached the halfway point. We’ve done so in fairly sporty conditions.
Ocean Watch is currently beam reaching in anywhere from 20-30 knots of breeze – the wind is coming from almost due west, from the general vicinity of the coast of Labrador, which is about 200 miles abeam – meaning that its crossing over the deck of the boat almost directly amidships, right down the middle. We are flying a double-reefed main – a sail we’ve reduced in size to about half its possible sail area – and our smallest headsail, which is called the staysail. And we are absolutely soaring along.
We all love sailing, and we’d hoped to get a ton in on this leg, but not only for aesthetic reasons. Fuel depots are few and far between along this stretch of the coast, and under power, Ocean Watch can travel about a thousand miles between pit stops. So we needed to stack some miles under sail to make the run in a single go.
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| Ocean Watch handles most of the waves with grace and aplomb, letting them slide beneath her like a kid skipping rope. |
The wind has been cooperating. It filled with a vengeance last evening and shows no signs of abating. As the hours have progressed, it’s kicked up a fairly substantial seaway, or wave train. Ocean Watch handles most of the waves with grace and aplomb, letting them slide beneath her like a kid skipping jump rope. So it is that most of the big rollers roar harmlessly by, though their backsides – what surfers call double overheads – are pretty darn impressive as they pass. If someone were to be beamed up, Star Trek-style, from their Labor Day entertainments, and deposited in our cockpit for even five minutes, I venture to say they’d be impressed – or terrified – by the vision. The noise and motion are extreme. But you can tell when a boat is balanced, safe and in perfect trim, as Ocean Watch is right now.
All that said, every once in a while a roguish wave crashes the party without an invitation. If at the moment the autopilot is temporarily overpowered – except for reefing maneuvers and dodging icebergs, when we hand steer, we’ve employed the Raymarine electronic steering system almost the entire trip – the boat will round up slightly into the wave, which is a rare and bad thing. It happened this morning as Dave Logan and I came on watch and the cockpit was literally swept by a wave that, happily, our enclosed steering station mostly repelled. Still, the entire well of the cockpit was awash in ocean until the self-drainers expelled the water: Talk about your rude awakenings.
Every good sailor keeps a record of their sea journeys in something called the Ship’s Log, and a peek into the pages of Ocean Watch’s produce snippets and snapshots of our current adventures.
9/1 @ 1400 hours: “Motoring, wind on the nose, slightly east of south. Sunny.
9/2 @ 1900 hours: “Under 70 degrees North!!! Water and sea temperature 6.2 C (43 degrees F). Some icebergs.
9/3 @ 0700 hours: Sailing, main and jib. Broad reach. Swell now behind us. Excellent.
9/4 @ 2300 hours: Motorsailing. No icebergs this watch! Northern Lights!!! Very cool…
9/5 @ 1600 hours: Wind filling a little. Backed north slightly. Good boat speed. OW is humming.
That brings us up to today. And for the latest aboard Ocean Watch, here’s skipper Mark Schrader, from his personal log:
“The Canadian Weather Service was right. Shortly after putting last night’s potato, onion and sausage frittata in our gimbaled oven to bake for an hour our easy reaching on calm water with moderate winds started to change. When it was time to take it out of the oven and eat, it was also time to put on the wet gear, roll up the jib and try to hang on to whatever was left in your dish. In other words, our very nice conditions of yesterday suddenly became pretty average – for the Labrador Sea, that is.
“By early this morning the wind speed was just under 30-knots with seas of six to ten feet. At the change of watch it was time to reduce sail by setting the second reef in the mainsail. The jib had long since been furled and the staysail set. With OW on a beam reach making a solid 8-knots, seas boarding and sometimes breaking on Ocean Watch and a rising wind the reefing process requires several hands and some coordination.
“DT (David Thoreson) and I suited up for the deck work, Harry, Herb and Dave handled things in cockpit. Herb
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| With seas boarding and sometimes breaking on Ocean Watch and a rising wind, the reefing process requires several hands and some coordination. Pictured above, Captain Mark Schrader. |
steered Ocean Watch slightly further downwind to take some of the rolling motion away, and to reduce the wind pressure on the sail. As we where finishing the job and putting in the reef ties to secure the sail I climbed on the upper coach roof – yes, we were both using safety lines and harnesses – to secure two of the harder to reach ones at the outer end of the boom.
“With the boat pitching enough so that open water appeared under me several times while I leaned over the boom and fiddled with the ties to get them just right – I did wonder for a moment (with a smile on my face) why the captain was doing this, after all, didn’t I have ‘people’ for this sort of thing! Happy with my work I then stepped back with one foot firmly planted on our rather fragile sliding outer cockpit hatch – which immediately collapsed with a crash into the cockpit just above Dave, Herb and Harry.
“I was fine, the hatch wasn’t, and Mr. Logan – the fixer of all things – wasn’t happy either. I actually learned this hatch-collapsing move from Herb, who some weeks ago did exactly the same thing but with a little more enthusiasm. Sorry, Dave. I do admit I was just enjoying the gale while admiring my work and not watching where I was going. Before I was out of my gear he had put things back in order and managed to remind us that it wasn’t a safe place to stand.
“So here we are in the Labrador Sea, beam reaching in a moderate gale with some impressive beam seas. The weather forecasters call for more of the same over the next three days. These conditions suit Ocean Watch and crew just fine. We’re making good speed sailing directly toward St. John’s, 778 nautical miles almost due south. Our ETA of sometime on the 11th still looks fine… Bouncing, pitching and rolling along – literally – I’m happy to report all are well aboard Ocean Watch.”
On this holiday weekend, the crew of Ocean Watch wishes you the same. Here, we’re enjoying a stirring sea journey, and the rhythm and the beat are in tuneful accord.
- Herb McCormick and Mark Schrader with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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