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S/V Heaven heading North

15K views 103 replies 27 participants last post by  travlin-easy 
#1 ·
I have another delivery with owners that are okay with some sharing.

I'm bringing Lagoon 42 Heaven from St Thomas (yes I know I was just there) to Annapolis (yes I know). I'm leaving in about a week and a half. The trip should be about 8 days, weather permitting.

First I still have crew space - interviews continue - so if you want sea time with a reprobate like me this is your chance. Crew interviews continue and I'll make final decisions by close of business tomorrow, Friday. I have one confirmed, ten candidates, and two more slots. Judgment is more important than experience. I don't put much stock in paper certifications.

I don't expect long-range communications on this trip so I'll keep a log during the trip and post on arrival. The tracker will be working again.

This time I'll focus on preparations - all the planning, provisioning, weather, and other logistics.

Questions are welcome. I have a ton to do catching up from Magic, getting ready for Heaven, and keeping my other business interests afloat. Accordingly please don't expect instantaneous responses. I'll do what I can when I can.

For the next week what you will be seeing is the management part of passagemaking.
 
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#3 ·
I'd throw my name in the hat to join you, but no way I'll be able to get time off work.

Plus, my sailing experience is... limited. :)

Safe Travels!


Another thing I was thinking of... was the HF gear on the last trip a part of the boat or yours?

I have some equipment that's otherwise being unused if you wanted to consider borrowing for the trip.
 
#4 ·
Plus, my sailing experience is... limited. :)
I'm actually okay with that. My priority with crew is judgment. I always try to make room for one inexperienced person on my trips. Where else do I get future crew from?

Another thing I was thinking of... was the HF gear on the last trip a part of the boat or yours?
The Icom M710RT was on the boat. I have a shortwave receiver I carry when there is no long range comms on the boat. I appreciate your offer. Even a small transmitter means an antenna tuner. I'd have to dig my Pactor modem out of the depths of my boat and build cables. I just don't see all that happening in time. My baggage is already looking pretty substantial. *grin*

If I'd known I was going to turn around and head back to STT I would have left a bunch of stuff with friends.

Y'all will just have to watch the Spot track and speculate about why I turned left, or right, or did the hokey-pokey.

I crack myself up.
 
#5 ·
So here is what has happened so far.

I got an expression of interest to which I responded with a proposal. My proposals are pretty detailed. I don't know any skippers who put as much work into a bid as I do. I use some software (Visual Passage Planner) that uses pilot chart data to support routing. It's pretty good. I look at alternatives and do manual updates from Jimmy Cornell's World Ocean Atlas and from the Technische Hogeschule Delft ocean current forecasts. I talk about all costs including provisioning and put an estimate together.

In this case I was not low bidder. The owner's pushed back on price but I held the line. I think it was the page of plans I sent for the other skipper to make sure he considered that made them decide to sign with me.

A message goes out to my crew list (about 600 I think) and to Offshore Passage Opportunities and in this case to SailNet. Email starts rolling in. About 2/3 are people saying "I really want to go but I can't." *sigh* Please don't send me those. I sift through the rest and pick the most promising for telephone interviews. There are only a couple of people who always get a berth with no interview. They know who they are (Chip and Jon).

My priorities are good judgment, some basic skills and experience, and attitude. That's why there are phone calls. I can't assess judgment and attitude from a piece of paper.

I've been on the phone most of the last couple of days. Have I mentioned how much I really dislike phones? I really don't like phones. Ah well.

I have a couple more interviews today and will make my final decisions and notifications before I go to bed tonight.

Tomorrow I start working on flights and schedules and the details of provisioning.

I have lots of provisioning lists already but crew likes, dislikes, and allergies are taken into consideration. I don't cater to boutique concerns (if you're gluten-free you better have a doctor's diagnosis of Celiac), and there is no room on a boat at sea for someone who thinks they can bring their own food and take care of themselves (it happens). The latter is too disruptive and takes too much space and the former just irritates me.

My provisioning file isn't pretty - it's working papers - but here it is: http://auspiciousworks.com/provisioning.pdf

The first page is notes and recipes that aren't yet in my go file or in my head. Each page after is based on number of people and planned trip duration. The lists include extra food for delays and the occasional voracious crew. Snacks. Lots of snacks.

I frequently cook ahead either at home, on my boat, or on the delivery boat and either can (pasta sauce and soup) or vacuum seal and freeze (lasagna and casseroles). A lot depends on whether I drive to a boat or fly.

Not all the meals are listed - the list is just a reminder nudge for me. The basis for the list is a meal plan that turns into a shopping list. After that the meal plan is just guidance, not rules. I adjust based on the crew, the conditions, and what I feel like making and eating myself. I already have a lasagna made. Next Tuesday is probably cooking day to make pasta sauce and a stew for canning.

I sold some of my bits and bobs to the owners of the last delivery so replacing those is underway. I need to pull out my little shortwave radio and antenna for weather fax on this trip and test everything. I'm low on lithium batteries for my Spot so I have an order out for those. I'll post the Spot link again before we go.
 
#11 ·
On the run up to a delivery, once the crew is established, I send an email to everyone, including the owners, about a topic of the day. From four days out that email is dominated by weather. Before that I address a topic each day that comes up underway. Light discipline. Consideration. Cleanliness. Lots of things. Addressing procedures early means we can focus on the boat when we are all aboard. After all, I still haven't seen the boat yet. *grin*
 
#12 ·
Dave, regarding weather, someone down in the Caribbean once told me that winter swells down there can get pretty strong based on storm activity in the North Atlantic. He said it takes about 3 weeks for the swells to arrive from a New England winter storm. If course, you know what's going on up there right now (and last Thursday), and we'll be departing from Granada for a week of sailing exactly 3 weeks from today. So this is more than a curiosity to me, and may also affect you on your trip north. So I'd be interested in hearing your comments on this.
 
#14 ·
Seriously

I think you may be overthinking, besides will seas 5-10 have you not go or prepare differently. Easy does it. 3 weeks out and thousands of mikes.

I am sure on a long open passage like Dave is making he will look at his weather very seriously, but won't stop for a storm in the Gulf of Maine or in Massachuettes. He probably will be more concerned with front passages and local gribs 3-5 days in advance.

In Grenada , down off the Coast of Venezuela . You will be doing line of sight sailing and can get in the lee off the islands you can see if it gets to rough for you easily.

Here is one of the unsophisticated sites I use to keep a watch on the swell heights and intervals. Course these are open ocean readings in most cases. Individual swells will increase as the water shallows around the islands and the undersea geography affects it.

Central Caribbean Wave Buoys & Weather Stations

We are going to be there for 10 days from St Lucia to Grenada. I expect seas at least from 5-10 . You will have a captain onboard so I assume that he won't be putting you in danger. I also suggest taking some motion sickness medicine. Anyone can get seasick.
 
#16 ·
Someday I'm going to have to gather up all the email I send before a trip and write a book. It will have to wait until after the book I'm already working on. Ah well. What is life without projects? Of course it isn't really a project unless blood is shed, and how do you do that when you write on a computer?

I do write all these missives, to you and to my crew, on the fly. Someday I will tell SailNet how I learned to type. *grin* That won't be today.

So every day there is a rambling email (y'all know what to expect from me) with one principal subject and other odds and ends. About four days out (this Thursday in this case) the focus is on weather so I try to get a lot of other prep taken care of beforehand.

I received a lovely email from one of my crew yesterday who has done a lot of delivery work who said she hasn't gotten so much helpful information from any skipper ever. Add that to @Donna_F saying that sailing with me was a master class in cruising and my head has gotten pretty big. Someone please find a pin. This has to be bad luck. I'll probably run into a buoy or something. Or a continent.

My energy is focused on logistics now - addresses, phone numbers, getting ready to pack, cheat sheets, chartlets, phone calls to friends at each end, confirmations from CBP that procedures haven't changed (Norfolk primary with Beaufort and Charleston backups), TowboatUS for updates on the US end, rental cars, parking for rental cars, updates on prices for provisions, and all kinds of other details.

I once did three long deliveries back-to-back. My head almost exploded getting everything prepared for all of them. There is a lot more work than just walking onto a boat and sailing off into the sunset.

One of my personal rules is to never ever buy airline tickets on the other side of a boat transit. Fully refundable tickets cost too much and there there are too many things that can go wrong to buy a nonrefundable ticket. Not relevant on this delivery (Janet will come get me) but for those of you who might want to crew on delivery for me or anyone else in my opinion if you can't see the dock at your destination it is too early to book a flight.

To save you looking it up in another thread the link to my Spot II tracker is here. At the moment it points to my basement door. If you show up I will put you to work. I have a 'honey-do' list to whittle down before I leave and I could use all the slaves ... er, help ... I can get. I have tools. I'm short on hands.

I would be remiss if I did not thank Janet for all her help. Even though she thinks I'm nuts for loving to sail offshore she supports me. Delivery work is not a big money maker. It's a good thing she loves me. It will be a really good thing on Sunday morning when she gets up at 3am to drive me to the airport.
 
#17 ·
Not a lot exciting going on. Lots of logistics. Crew have airline tickets (except one is on delivery to the VI). Planning for things like parking rental cars, parking personal cars for rides to airports, and such. Shopping lists are about done (I have templates but crew preferences always get taken into account).

I'm testing everything in my go-kit and found some split and leaking batteries so cleaning up after that is on the agenda for today. All the stuff I needed to replace is back in stock and tested. I have a table full of "pack this" and clothes will be added on Friday (tomorrow). I have a speaking engagement on Saturday so I have written that day off for productivity. The homemade frozen lasagna gets packed on the way out the door to the airport Sunday morning.

In the continuing spirit of being over the top I looked, as I usually do, at the Great Ciricle. I did this but didn't report on it on S/V Magic.

A straight line on a chart, which is almost always a Mercator projection, is a line of continuous bearing between two points. The distance between those points on our planet, as you can see as fourth graders do (or used to) with yarn on a globe, is shortest along a Great Circle which is usually a curve on a Mercator projection chart. I say "usually" because the closer you are to a course directly North or South the less curve there is and the smaller the distance between the rhumb line and the Great Circle. Crossing the Atlantic this makes a significant difference. You can see this in airplane routes to Europe. It is most interesting looking at routes from the San Diego to the South Pacific as the Great Circle bows away from the equator so the shortest course is S-shaped. See Wolfram Demonstrations Project . Of course wind, ocean currents, and other bits of reality all have an impact.

From 18°21.8'N 064°50.7'W in the Middle Passage to 36°55.4'N 075°38.2'W the Chesapeake Bay safe water buoy is about 1,250 nm. As it happens our course will be close enough to N-S that the difference between the rhumb line and the Great Circle is a whopping 1.8 nm. Accordingly we'll steer as close to 335°T as we can (favored tack) and correct every few days. Note magnetic variation will be close to 0° in the beginning and a bit over 12° in the end. I usually steer to true. If the owners have their instruments set for magnetic we'll shift all the instruments over and then shift them back.

Aren't you glad to know this? Aren't you really glad I didn't share all the trigonometry with you? Trigonometry is beautiful.

To quote Captain Ron "if we get lost, we'll just pull in somewheres and ask directions." To quote me "it's pretty hard to miss a continent."
 
#18 · (Edited)
That sounds like an awesome trip! Please keep me in mind for future trips. I am an Airline Captain (judgement, navigation, weather, and working in a crew), am very safety conscious, and have owned, lived on, and single-handed from 25' up to 50' sailboats. I've only been sailing since 2007 and have never done a long passage, but have done several 2-3 overnight, 250-300NM sails double-handed on my own boats. And I can travel for free, so getting someplace is no problem. I can usually get time off with a week or so of advance notice. I live South of Washington D.C., so I can fly out of any of the DC airports.

I am looking to get bluewater experience and, being used to working within a crew environment, so I fully understand Chain of Command. There is only one Captain. Feel free to PM me and I can give you more details as well as get to know you, if you are interested in future crew.
 
#19 ·
Feel free to PM me and I can give you more details as well as get to know you, if you are interested in future crew.
I've had pretty good experience with airline people on boats, except for when we returned to a charter boat on my honeymoon to find *two* Interline Regatta boats rafted up to us. Bugger all.

Which airline? I have a number of friends who fly or flew for AA. I am a million mile flier on United including my Continental miles. I think Southwest owes me an airplane. This trip I'm flying 2/19 BWI-MIA-STT on AA 1737 and 943.

One of the cool things about pilots is being able to talk about 500 mb charts.

BWI, IAD, and DCA are all good. ORF can be a big help and sometimes I hop from BWI to ORF on WN (nonstop (ha!) not usually routed on the aggregators) and on from there. Sometimes a one-way car rental is better.

I'm more than happy to put you or anyone on my crew list. It's an email list (about 600 people) and there is no charge. You don't have to send me a resume to sign up. I bet half my subscribers are dreamers who will never sail with me or anyone offshore. The rules are simple to respond to an opportunity. Don't expect me to remember who you are. Fill me in, include your most current sailing resume, and your specific availability when you respond to an opportunity. Put me on your email whitelist. Please don't write me to say you'd love to come but can't. Please.

I sort through all the applications and schedule phone interviews for the most likely candidates (I've posted about this before). I try to get back to everyone but once in a while someone falls through the cracks, especially on a high season trip to somewhere beautiful on a spiffy boat. Everyone that gets a phone call gets feedback - I don't think I've ever missed one of those.

Send a request to me at dave@auspiciousworks.com and I'll add you manually or just email auspiciousdeliveries-subscribe@lists.skolnick.org from the address you want on the list and you'll be subscribed. There is a confirmation email so check your spam filters if you don't see it in a day.

All delivery notices have a subject line that starts with OPPORTUNITY: Crew get to and from the boat on their own and ALL costs on the boat are covered by the owner. I do my best to help with local transportation but can't promise anything. There are a very small number of paying mate positions but you must have sailed with me to be a candidate and the people in that category know who they are. I think there are five. I do have some other skippers I share work with. If we haven't sailed together I won't recommend you unless you have sailed with someone I trust implicitly (a VERY short list).

I'm more than happy to make friends and get to know people. Look through my SailNet posts and that will give you a head start. Second Saturday of each month I'm at the SSCA lunch at Leeward Market in Eastport (Annapolis MD) from 1230 'til 1500 unless I'm traveling. The lunch happens whether I am there or not. Follow the Seven Seas Cruising Association on Facebook for reminders.

I hope this helps.
 
#20 ·
Thanks Dave,

I am a 767 captain now with United out of DC. If you have flown us a lot out of Dulles its possible you may have flown with me. I've been there 21 years now. I'll shoot you an email tp be put on your list and look for your opportunities. Hopefully I can go along on one, as I would like to get some good blue water experience.
 
#21 ·
Everything is packed except the frozen lasagna that goes in at 3a tomorrow morning when we head out the door for my flights. Janet must really love me to get up that early when she has a full day of her own.

Weather is looking good, if a bit light on day 2 out.
 
#25 ·
SPOT Shared Page

That should give you the spot link.
It looks like SVSuspicious is on a boat moored or anchored in the harbor off Charlotte Amalie.

Dave,
Charlotte Amalie Harbor is nicer? than Red Hook?

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, expertise and spot with this forum.

Looking forward to watching your progress.
 
#26 ·
It looks like SVSuspicious is on a boat moored or anchored in the harbor off Charlotte Amalie.

Dave,
Charlotte Amalie Harbor is nicer? than Red Hook?
Yes - we're anchored in the harbor. Provisioning today by dinghy. Yippee.

I meant that the Spot showing in Charlotte Amalie is nicer than showing the location of my basement door.
 
#28 ·
We got all the provisioning done yesterday, ferried out to the boat by dinghy, picked up the last two crew members, returned the rental car, back to the boat, outboard off dinghy and stowed, dinghy in davits and lashed in place. Boat orientation for final crew and late dinner. Combining the tired faces around the table with winds on the nose and a chance of showers and I decided to leave this morning rather than midnight last night.

We should be underway within an hour.



The lasagna, carefully wrapped, made it down here still frozen solid. It is in the boat freezer. I expect it to take a couple of days to thaw so I'll pull it out on Thursday and cook it Saturday or Sunday. An hour with the oven running is better scheduled toward the colder end of the trip.

Boat is fine if a little worn. Catamarans have so much space and watch standing in the salon is perfectly appropriate. Cool.
 
#34 ·
I would have the same question. The departure to the east of Charlotte Amalie would require care in navigating Government Cut, but it would be clear sailing through Middle Passage and then quickly into off soundings. Going west from Charlotte Amalie would require dodging hard stuff for several miles, which might be a concern for the skipper if a new and untested crew were on watch. Still, it would only be a matter of hours to clear sailing.
 
#36 ·
The Spot link is in CalebD's post #25. They went around St. Thomas to the east and out Middle Passage, extrapolating from their track north of the islands. Their course may have been determined by the prevailing winds at the time--I didn't check that.

Having sailed between Culebra and St. Thomas, you can tell you are less protected than to the east of St. Thomas in Pillsbury Sound, but it shouldn't matter that much if you are heading north as you are out into the deep ocean in a matter of hours.
 
#39 ·
...snip...
I'm bringing Lagoon 42 Heaven from St Thomas (yes I know I was just there) to Annapolis (yes I know). I'm leaving in about a week and a half. The trip should be about 8 days, weather permitting.
D'oh. Attention deficit disorder. Thanks midwesterner.

Projected 8 day transit time would be quite a bit quicker than SV Magic took to get to St. Thomas.

There is a gale warning off the east coast of Florida that may make this trip interesting as they head north.
 
#40 ·
There is a gale warning off the east coast of Florida that may make this trip interesting as they head north.
On the other hand they might have a quick run north. I was in Culebra last January when winds backed around from the south (water visibility went to hell and so did the chances of snorkeling :( ) I was was trying to figure out why the normal easterly winds switched so strongly from the south. Checked the winds and it was the winter storm Jonas all the way up in the Northeast U.S. that was sucking those winds north:
THE BIANKA LOG BLOG: RIDERS ON THE STORM
Would have been a great wind to head north from St. Thomas though that is until you need to go west. :)
 
#41 ·
#42 ·
Well, they have already altered to a more northwesterly course, presumably to allow the worst of that low to pass ahead of them while avoiding some areas of larger swells. And yes, the wind may very well clock around to the north on them.
We shall see.
 
#43 ·
Yeah with the winds now off the portside northwest makes sense.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#curre...hographic=-67.21,23.49,278/loc=-69.515,26.770

Tomorrow and tomorrow night does not look like much fun out there. I think they may head on more northerly track to avoid the headwinds:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2017/...hographic=-67.21,23.49,278/loc=-69.515,26.770

After getting through tomorrow and tomorrow night I think they will head west or northwest again.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2017/...hographic=-67.21,23.49,278/loc=-69.515,26.770

After that it looks like a couple of real nice days of southerly winds to ride up the Gulf Stream and into the Chesapeake
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2017/...hographic=-67.21,23.49,278/loc=-69.515,26.770

Well at least that's my prediction from the cozy confines of the dining room table here in Washington DC. :) Severe thunderstorm warning here for this afternoon as a cold front sweeps away yesterdays 75 degree F temperatures. I think that is what they will run into tomorrow and tomorrow night. Things should improve out there after that.
 
#45 · (Edited)
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