Moondancerx's BIG adventure

Two days ago we moved Moondancer over to a safer anchorage having spent the first night of winds gusting to 40 knots blowing right down the middle of St. George's bay producing quite a fetch to go with the gusts. This is the 3rd day of that now, but the weather report has been downgraded from gale warnings to small craft warnings until Thursday afternoon. Pretty much all of the boats in the anchorage moved over. Its still very gusty but we are getting used to it and are looking forward to a good night's sleep.

As I said before, sometimes its best to write this blog after the fact. We are still in Bermuda. The weather is still not in our favour to leave, even though the winds are pretty much in the right direction there is just too much whipping the seas up to more than we want to start this trip on. This situation reminds me of Coos Bay, where 7 boats were all gathering and sharing information until we basically pushed ourselves out of that marina - way too soon - and into very bad, big seas. We don't want a repeat of that, so we'll wait a bit longer. This is a nice place and the anchorage is free. We just have to try not to eat up all of the provisions we bought for the trip. The Bermuda Dinghy and Sports Club is quite empty now, as the Newport/Bermuda racers did leave yesterday, and maybe because they are heading back to Newport, will avoid the BIG system which is predicted to come through in the next couple of days. It was quite the race start, they had their start line right ...

The trouble with writing this blog ahead of time is that what we say we'll do and what we actually do are not always the same. I'm glad we hung around for a few more days. Instead of being out on the water on Monday during the 'Black Only' club's comet race and the start of the Tall Ship race back to Boston, we walked further around the point of land north of St. George's Bay and found a dairy farm, a couple more forts and some lovely lawns and beautiful little coves with really big parrot fish swimming about. Monday was a public holiday and thousands of people were out in lawn chairs and big picnic tables with umbrellas enjoying the day's events. The weather held until the end of the day when a really nasty squall came through the bay and made life very difficult for an incoming yacht to end tie up to the yacht club dock; he actually managed to hook onto the anchor rodes of the boats already tied up, and then after about 20 minutes of trying to get unhooked...

Preparing to leave Bermuda – 14th June Its Sunday morning and we are preparing to leave Bermuda tomorrow for the next leg (long leg) of our journey. We’ll check in with our weather router today and ask his opinion, but our reading of the weather charts looks like we can probably head east for a couple of days while a low moves north east of us, then we can head more north east, in the general direction of the Azores. Some of the other boats I have mentioned in earlier entries have already gone; Saudade left last Monday, Sheli left Thursday, a new English boat we met a couple of days ago, Wagtail, left yesterday. Our new friends Rob and Sue on Barbarossa are also leaving around the same time, though they don’t have SSB radio and nobody wants to be sailing too close to another boat it will be nice to know that someone else is out there – not too far away. We’ve enjoyed St. George’s Bay very much, the anchorage has been really pleasant in general. The Dinghy and Sports Club facility close...

We've been in Bermuda 4 days and just love it. What a pleasant experience to be able to leave our dinghy tied up to the wall in downtown St. George's alongside many other dinghies, no guards necessary, and then just walk around town doing as we please, stopping whenever we like to take pictures of all of these beautiful buildings which have been standing here for about 300 years and are in perfect condition. No hassle, no beggars, no hawkers, no bad attitude, just alot of friendly people who love their country. St. George's bay which is where we are anchored is a small town by Canadian standards, but a decent size town by Bermudan standards - which is only a 20 mile long atoll basically. We spent the day yesterday walking around the town looking at the ruins of a beautiful church, Fort St. Catherine which has been standing,and is kept up beautifully, since the 1700's. We walked into the alleyways which have wonderful simple English names like Spittle Alley and marve...

We arrived in St. George's Bay yesterday at about 2.30 Bermuda time - which we discovered is about 2 hours ahead of the time we were going by for the past 10 days. The sun rising at 3.45am should have tipped us off, and we kept marvelling at that - funny what 2 tired minds don't work out. It didn't matter anyway. We've not seen anything yet, but we already love the place. We are anchored along with about 50 other transient boats, very close to the St. George's Dinghy and Sports Club, who welcome all guests. Our arrival has coincided with the Tall Ships festival and race, hence the picture above of the Bounty as it arrived in the harbour yesterday. Last night we enjoyed the company of friends Jan and Yolanda from SV Saudade, a boat we have met a few times along the way. They leave tomorrow for Holland. They are not enjoying the long legs much and are looking forward to taking their boat Saudade home. We also enjoyed quite alot of beer and wine, as we don't drink ...

Halfway to Bermuda – Tuesday 2nd June Now this is more like it – we left Port Antonio last Wednesday 22nd May, and have been sailing on-course to Bermuda ever since. We definitely have had very nice conditions, mostly sunny with typical trade wind fluffy clouds which just seem to help keep the wind going at about 10 – 15 kn, sometimes a little less or more. Today is overcast which is nice for a change, helps to keep cooler. We are making between 90 – 100 miles per day, which is close to our expectations, making an average of 4 – 5 kn. We are very happy with our SSB radio, it is working very well for us. We have subscribed to a weather router, Chris Parker and each morning at about 0600 hrs we go on air, tell him where we are and listen to what we can expect for the rest of our passage. Of course this information can change daily, but so far it has mainly changed for the better, mostly light wind and seas we can handle. We are mostly sailing abeam to a close reach. Of course this does n...