Curtis spent 5 weeks sailing in the Atlantic in Fall 2013, crewing on a friend’s Pacific Seacraft 34 from South Bristol, Maine, to Sint Maarten in the Caribbean. Here is his report on the first leg of the trip, followed by separate posts of his log entries made while on passage.
BACKGROUND
We met Bob and JoAnn Steneck at Bittersweet Landing Boatyard in South Bristol, Maine, in the summer of 2012. Sue and I were working and living on Cilantro in the boatyard, and the Stenecks' PSC 34, Alaria, was Cilantro's “sister ship,” stored in the same building each winter. We were introduced to sailing on a Pacific Seacraft that summer when Bob invited us to go sailing on Alaria. That’s how the friendship and discovery of mutual interests began.
Bob is a marine biologist and professor at the University of Maine in Portland. He had been planning a research project to study the health of the Caribbean reefs on his sabbatical over the 2013-2014 winter. In order to have a mobile "laboratory" and living quarters during his research, he decided to sail Alaria down to St Maarten in October with a four-man crew. When one of his intended crew had to drop out, Bob invited me to go along. I had no experience with offshore passage making, so I was thrilled at the opportunity, especially on a boat very similar to Cilantro.
The route was to take us from Maine through the Cape Cod Canal, then down to Norfolk, VA, then out to Bermuda, and finally a long leg south to St Maarten, the Dutch-owned half of the Caribbean island known as Saint Martin/Sint Maarten. We would be coastal cruising until we had the right weather window and sea state to sail each offshore leg safely and efficiently. October is still hurricane season and weather for the trip could have been bad or good: many East Coast cruisers wait until the threat of tropical depressions and hurricanes is past before heading to the Caribbean. As it turned out, however, the weather systems that affected our trip came mainly from the continental US: one, a tropical storm remnant that turned into an extra-tropical coastal low as well as several cold frontal passages.
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| Alaria - Pacific Seacraft 34 in S Bristol, Maine |
MAINE TO NORFOLK
Alaria departed South Bristol the morning of October 2nd with five aboard: Bob, Ansley Sawyer, David Conover, Rob Hunold, and myself. In Onset, MA, David and Rob departed and were replaced by Paul Calder, completing our long-haul crew of four. We spent two weeks making our gradual way to Norfolk, VA, via the Gulf of Maine, the Cape Cod Canal, and Long Island Sound. We mostly anchored out every night and traveled on inshore waters as much as possible to avoid the ocean swells that would have made our passage uncomfortable.
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| Cape Cod Canal |
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| Entering Oyster Bay near Huntington, NY with Sailing Regatta in the background |
Our transit of the East River alongside Manhattan was well-timed to catch a strong ebb tidal current that had us zipping along at 7 to 12 knots (kn). We managed to wave at Bob's sister, who had come down to a shoreside city park to watch us pass by. As we headed down the Hudson River toward open ocean and coastal New Jersey, we dodged cargo ships, ferries, and tugboats, and then spent a bumpy night motoring into 15-18 kn winds and 7-10 foot swells off the NJ coast.
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| Manhattan Battery Park |
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| Jackson Creek Anchorage Deltaville, VA |
END PART 1 OF 3
