The Atlantic Ocean Is Trying to Return Us to Sender
New video: Atlantic crossing safety prep, provisioning, emergency drills and life aboard before leaving St. Thomas for Bermuda. Back when we thought this adventure looked romantic and not like two exhausted adults and one traumatized dog living inside a maritime washing machine.
Day 4 of our passage…
Thanks to Starlink, I’m finally catching up on editing what seems to be 14 years of unedited footage. This latest one is a collection of some of the things we did to prepare for our passage before leaving St. Thomas for Bermuda.
Looking at that video now, as I sit in a dark pilot house somewhere in the Atlantic, with the wind whistling outside at 30 knots and huge waves breaking over the bow, it’s strange to watch us laughing and frolicking in the warm Caribbean water and goofing around with our emergency whistles and inflatable life jackets. At the time, emergency equipment felt almost theatrical. A novelty even. And then the Atlantic Ocean happened.
Here is a video about our preparation for this journey…
i truly hope I never have to wear the PFD in anything but warm Caribbean water.
Fast forward to now: I’m writing this wedged into a pilot house chair because standing has become an ambitious life choice, and suddenly those same safety devices feel a lot less recreational and a lot more like an astonishingly meagre survival plan. The Atlantic has an excellent way of clarifying the purpose of your on board safety equipment. But lets hope I don’t have to use the penis catheter that a well meaning nurse friend gave us as a donation to our first aid kit.
In hindsight, I am deeply grateful that Ken insisted on running me through all of those seemingly over-the-top safety drills before we left.
Well… most of them. I am still psychologically scarred from the Parrot Anchor incident, which was left on the cutting room floor where it belongs, but you can read about it here
I am also thankful that I spent some time preparing meals in advance of our passage. Tonight I tried to boil a saucepan of water and potatoes. Let’s just say that the galley floor is now the only clean part of the boat and we had air fried potatoes and floor grit for dinner.
Ken has just casually informed me — in the same tone one might announce that we’re already low on the posh biscuits — that our pleasant calm weather has now abandoned us entirely, and the remainder of the passage will apparently involve motion comparable to living inside a washing machine with a sack of hammers. Another eight days of feeling like a monkey on roller skates just became reality. We even discussed whether to turn around and high tail it back to Bermuda…but that seemed far too sensible.
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