Gone with the Winds
by Iona Taylor – Deckhand aboard Sea Dragon.
So we crossed the Caribbean Sea last week! This was definitely not the peaceful calm week you might imagine but an unexpected and incredibly rewarding challenge giving us a huge sense of achievement.
We had 25-40 knots of wind with 3 days of it persistently between 30 and 35 knots, with 10-15 ft waves. We covered an astonishing 1201 nautical miles in a 5 and a half day period.
photo credit Iona Taylor
Our boat comprised of 4 regular crew, a film maker, 3 experienced sailors and a fisherman completely new to sailing; creating a boat full of strange accents, mashed up words and some culinary masterpieces.
photo credit Iona Taylor
The start of our week went pretty smoothly with the obligatory introductions, a ‘final supper’ and an M.O.B. drill (just in case).The first few days were fairly calm with 25 knots of wind sailing at 7-10 knots. We were blessed with a pod of dolphins guiding us out of the Grenadian waters and happily playing in our bow waves.
photo credit Jennifer Pate
After 48 hrs of fair winds and moderate seas it was safe to say that everyone had adjusted to our 4 & 8 hr watch system, managing to enjoy our off periods on deck with any thoughts of vomiting finally gone.
We had a new moon appearing half way through our week and so our night shifts were blessed with brilliantly clear starry sky’s with shooting stars and the largest meteorites I have ever seen. The sea, not wanting to feel left out, lit up with bioluminescent (phosphorescent plankton) on the breaking waves and off our stern.
photo credit Jennifer Pate
We spent the majority of the trip steering a course straight down wind with a reefed main sail and partially furled yankee, goose winged on either side meaning our helming had to be fairly precise to prevent a gybe or backed head sail. Our new sailor Dave was fast to learn that ‘thump thump’ meant something bad was happening and quickly became an
impressively good helmsman.
photo credit Jennifer Pate
This week also saw us celebrating Shrove Tuesday with sweet AND savoury pancakes, cooked and served at 40 degree angles, which required a double team effort on the clearing up side- sorry everyone!
We also had Valentine’s Day which we celebrated with princess pasta,love heart chocolates (thank you Lisa!) and a beetroot (beet heart) risotto with chocolate chip and cranberry cookies- delicious!
Everybody did an incredibly good job at helming through the big waves, keeping on top of the hourly log and cleaning, one watch in particular being super keen at time keeping and log documenting providing an amusing read to the oncoming watch. We suffered a fair few waves onboard with the occasional bunk soaking until everyone wizened up to
keeping their hatches shut.
Sea Dragon’s Helm
Our boat also provided refuge to an immature brown Noddy which spent the night asleep in our snake pit. Unfortunately we were unable to save another bird the following night which took a rather unfortunate dive into the wind turbines on our stern leaving a bit of a mess to clean up the following morning- RIP Noddy, buried at sea.
The sense of achievement arriving into Panama was huge for everyone on board, and a real congratulations to all of those who participated in this adventure. We smashed our speed record for a 24 hr period achieving 244 nautical miles on 12/2/18 and over the 5 full days of sailing averaged 9.1 NM/ hour. Well done everyone and thank you for an incredible week onboard Sea Dragon.
photo credit Iona Taylor