Ocean Passage Cut Short – Not yet the salty sailors we hope to be.

Well, those were two very long nights. NOAA did us a bit wrong with their forecast and we paid for it. So we tucked back in at Jacksonville, FL and are running down the inside on the ICW now. No photos – I’ve been too busy holding on, trying not to fall over.

The story… We exited the Georgetown Inlet as darkness fell and quickly experienced seas of 4-6 feet with occasional 7s on the nose. That's what was forecast, with spaced southerly swells. The reality was about a 3 second interval. That means that the boat would start at the top of wave, drop forward and immediately pop up on top of the next wave in about 3 seconds. It’s relentless, over and over, for hours and hours. Martin went down for the count from sea sickness during his first watch (even though he’d started taking Dramamine the night before) and I was at about 50% with my patch. Jim, a long time boater, was fine and had his work cut out carrying most of the driving. Some people might note that 7 foot choppy seas aren’t that big for a Nordhavn, and they aren’t!  Blossom was in her element and she felt like a ship without a care in the world, heading to Florida. The crew however, didn’t do so well. Martin and I are both prone to sea sickness and unfortunately these circumstances took us out. Patches for both of us next time and maybe a try at the bracelets too...

For friends and family who haven’t experienced joy like this, I’ll describe the past 36 hours... 

The boat is pitching up and down (thank God the stabilizers keep her from rocking side to side). Sometimes dropping hard with spray coming up over the bow. Walking was pretty tough because you’d get thrown forward and back. We put all the hand holds to use, including the undercut grips on our granite.  When on watch, you can sit in the helm chair, feet on the dash and wedge yourself in.

It’s loud too because the boat engine, blowers, stuff banging in cupboards (I need to pad a few), the waves smacking the boat and the boat smacking the waves.

It’s moving too much to prepare any food but then no one could stomach much anyway. Jim munched some prepared foods but Martin and I had a 36 hour fast. Not a bad thing for me but not so good for Martin.

The forward section of a boat moves more than the center. We found that the salon is by far the best place to be. Martin slept on the floor or a chair and Jim and I swapped out the couch when we weren’t on watch. We discovered that the storm windows stored under our bed are not secure and they caused such a racket that even if we could have stood the movement in the room, it was too loud to sleep.

We tried to trade off watches but our set 3 hours on and off went to hell because Martin was too sick to sit in the pilot house and I fluctuated between being okay and not. Jim took longer watches and then I would sit for a few hours. So even under good circumstances you don’t get much sleep, 2-4 hours at a time through the day and night.  Sitting watch was a bit more involved because our navigation function on the autopilot isn’t working right. So rather than set waypoints and have the boat steer itself to them (while you look out other ships and hazards), we have the autopilot set to point the boat in a direction toward a certain setting and then tweak it as wind/current/waves throw you off. We think we just have to mess with parameters to get it back. We’d been trying to finesse it and it looks like we put it out of whack a bit.

You’re also supposed to do engine checks regularly. Some people adhere to an hourly schedule or you can do one on the watch change, every three hours. We have a clipboard and infrared heat gun that we take into the ER and note several temperatures and several visual checks (for fluids, fan belt dust, bilges, etc).  I started out doing them but found that I had a choice – do an engine room check in a 115 degree, rolling room and then need to lay down for a couple hours from sea sickness – or not do an engine room check and be able to relieve Jim for a while.  I also dropped the infrared heat gun in the bilge so I figured it was a sign. We have several Maretron sensors so we know many of the temperatures and fluid levels as well as a camera in the engine room so we moved to quick walk through visual checks and monitored our sensors for temperatures when we had to.

So basically, you feel lousy while you sit watch, sleep, sit watch, sleep, etc. It was a very different experience from when we came up the coast with Jeff and Jim when it was life as normal with night shifts.  What a difference the sea can make!

The boat performed flawlessly as I mentioned above. She’s such a solid ship.  We did manage to sustain some damage though. We did well at “battening the hatches” and nothing fell off, over or broke. But a drawer full of cans made a break for it. Even with the lock engaged, the force was such that it flew out and fell down the stairs creating several gauges and nicks in the stairs and wall. Blossom doesn’t look as new as she did. I hope we can touch some of it up a bit.  Apparently there’s a wood stopper on the back of the drawer to prevent this from happening but I didn’t know about it and it wasn’t engaged.

Going in to the second night I got a migraine and became worried that Jim could be left alone at the helm. Martin was also still so sick he hadn’t even had tea in 36 hours, that’s just not right, so we made the decision to come in at Jacksonville, FL. By morning I felt better than I had since we went out, but the forecast was for up to 8 foot seas outside Jacksonville and the thought of another 36 hours like that is, seriously, sickening.

We entered Jacksonville Inlet at dawn, passing a huge and impressive Navy warship in the channel – the same one we saw as we left Yorktown, #99. As soon as we passed the breakwater it was over. Calm, quiet, you can walk around. The most amazing part is the sea sickness just disappears, as if it had never been there. You just find yourself tired, a bit delirious and very hungry.  So Jim is now getting some well deserved sleep, Martin is running the boat and I’m typing J

I don’t know when we’re going to arrive in Stuart. We were hoping to arrive Monday afternoon but now we’re shooting for Tuesday afternoon. We still have 237 miles to go. At 7 knots, that’s quite a distance. If the seas look more settled tomorrow, we may try to pop out at Cape Canaveral and run outside to Stuart. We can’t run the inside at night but we can in the ocean so we gain 12 hours of travel - if we can stomach it. We’re pushing because we’d really like a day or two in Stuart to get some cosmetic work done before the boat show and would like to pick up our packages that we had delivered to Stuart, etc.