Passage to Cuba

Nighttime sail-check. Crossing the gulf stream-check scopalamine is the wonder drug-check
Forecast lies-as always

We headed out a little late so Tim could conquer another project at work, and of course, shit had to start acting up on the boat.  First it was our fridge, which caused me to have to rethink our entire provisioning plan.  But us rebooting the thermostat controller seemed to get that back in order.

Second was the LP controller for the stove.  Wound up being an easy fix, a fuse burned out on that.  But since it's a boat, even simple fixes usually mean tearing up  floor boars, access panels and longer than it should take to fix.

We cleared the reef, got our sails up and before long we met up with the 3pm departures in the rally fleet.

A couple of the rally boats off on the horizon.

Started out to be a beautiful trip, watched the sunset, and I went below to get our dinner heated up.  And then it started getting rougher-my pot holders for the stove were not behaving themselves and I am surprised that I didn't set myself on fire.

And being down below got the queasiness started.  Great.  But my crew got fed.
And the water started getting rougher.  Earlier we had decided we wanted to be reefed for our night sail, and we would motor sail in order to arrive when expected in Hemingway Harbor.


We got settled into our watch rotation,  our girl is a heavy boat, our new Raymarine rocked, we had installed the new SmartPilot and she was tracking beautifully even when the waves tried to skew us around.

So our forecast of 10-15 kt winds from the ESE and 2-4 foot seas wound up being 20 kts winds and 6 foot seas with some bigger waves once in a while.  And the wind clocked around so it was running straight against the current.  Confused seas all around.

The chatter started up with the other boats struggling to get reefed and we found out later that one of the boats' autopilot stopped responding over and over and they got spun 180 at one point.  (I guess the boat decided we are going back to Key West). One boat delayed departure, and one boat turned back and came in the next day.

I finally got my queasiness abated, I did have a crew member toss his cookies when he went down below, but he was fine after that.

It was a long night (damn Gulf Stream was more than 35 mi wide also).  Good practice in picking out ships lights.

Finally at daylight everything finally started calming down.  Perfect timing.

On approach to Hemingway Harbor, you are supposed to start hailing to let them know you are here.  None of the boats were getting a response.  It turned out that the marina had set up guide boats to bring us in to the customs dock.  They were doing that as we were leaving also, so maybe its a new practice.

We were 11th or 12th boat in since we decided we weren't going to be sailing purists and we wanted to get through the Gulf Stream as quickly as possible.

Later on in the afternoon, boats were lined up about 7-8 deep at the entrance marker to the channel.  Glad we beat the rush.

As always, there were things that could have been done better, and we will do better next time.