Wednesday, November 12 –Christi woke up feeling like she was fighting a cold. It was warmer today than it was yesterday, but it was still too cold for our comfort. In the morning, we drove to Cova for lattes. Christi also stocked up on coffee since she knew finding good coffee in The Bahamas was not easy. Then Eric returned car while Christi and Keith did school.
We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon getting things ready to go. Since it was a major passage, we had to make sure that everything was put away and securely packed in the cabinets and drawers. Eric rinsed the boat down and cleaned the exterior windows. Even though we’d run water over the lazarette and it seemed water tight, we decided to be extra cautious and put tape around the seals of the lazarette.
We untied at 1500. At first, the ride was not bad. We ran at 1625 RPM and averaged in the high 5s for speed. The sunset and twilight were… striped.
The sea conditions slowly but steadily deteriorated. It was a very dark night. Earth had been hit with a sizable coronal mass ejection (CME) today, and the accompanying auroral lights were expected to be visible at our latitude. But, we saw nothing. After dark, we were hobby horsing a bit, which was strange since it was supposed to be beam seas. Usually, we only hobby horse in head seas. But since it was dark, we couldn’t actually see which direction the waves were coming from. The moon rose at 0030, but it wasn’t bright enough to see the wave direction.
By the time it was light on Thursday morning, we saw that it was confused seas. There was a swell coming from the beam and another one coming from the starboard forward corner, hence the hobby horsing. This wasn’t a surprise as we were approaching Cape Hatteras, which was infamous for big, confused seas.
At this point, Christi was definitely sick with a cold, and Eric was feeling like he was fighting a cold. Feeling bad from a cold magnified feeling bad from the sea conditions. Eric and Keith have been consistently taking the drug Sturgeron to prevent seasickness, so they weren’t having nausea issues. However, Christi was not taking Sturgeron and had “hunger nausea.” We’ve mentioned before that sometimes at sea, we’ll feel nauseous when we’re actually hungry, and eating makes the nausea go away. But since we’re feeling nauseated, it’s hard to force ourselves to eat — even though we know with our heads it’ll make us feel better, our bodies are saying “NO! NO! NO! You’ll vomit it all up. NO! NO! NO!” It actually takes a fair amount of will power to listen to our minds instead of to our bodies. Once she got some food in her system, she started consistently taking Sturgeron, too.
It was a mostly sunny day with scattered clouds. Temperatures were warmer than yesterday at 59-degrees real and a feels-like temperature of 53-degrees with wind chill. Meanwhile, Keith either forgot to take his morning dose of Sturgeron or decided he was acclimated enough that he didn’t need it anymore and he became really seasick. He was in bed for pretty much the whole afternoon and evening.
Sea conditions continued to deteriorate all day and we seriously slowed down. By noon, Eric had increased the RPMS to 1700 and we were still only doing 5-knots.
At 1500, we altered course to cross the Gulf Stream, which was about 60-miles wide. Eric estimated the stream was running at about 4 – 5 knots. Just like the last time we entered the Gulf Stream, the autopilot freaked out. The pink line with the 48 was our course. The blue line was the direction that the Gulf Stream was pushing the boat, so you can see why it was too much for the autopilot to adjust to.
We took the boat off of auto navigation mode and instead have the boat steer to a heading. The boat did okay with keeping on course for the most part, though we did have to make a few manual course corrections of 1 to 2-degrees each since the current did slowly push us off course.
Changing direction meant the waves were coming from a better angle, making the ride more comfortable. But, that said, sea conditions still continued to slowly and steadily deteriorated all day, so the ride still got progressively worse. This was taken at about 1630.
When the above video was taken, we were only doing 2-knots at 1700 RPM, so Eric sped us up to 1800 RPM. Fortunately, the slow speeds only lasted a couple of hours and then Eric was able to put us back down to 1700 RPM.
The sunset was blocked by clouds, but the sky turned a neat golden color.
Eric was sad to see that the transmission was still leaking. Eric has an O-ring kit onboard, and when we get to The Bahamas, he’ll try custom making the weird O-ring that the transmission needs.