David’s Voyage Blog

Publish Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Location:  St. Augustine, Florida
Coordinates:   29° 53.529′ N  81° 18.548′ W

Tomorrow morning we head out into the Atlantic Ocean and point the bow towards New York (direct to Cape Hatteras, and then up the coast to New York Harbor). It will be a 5-1/2 day voyage, and we’re all really looking forward to the experience. We expect to get into New York Harbor on Monday.

The main preparation for this trip involves evaluating the weather. We needed to plot our course and timing, and then assess the weather along the way for the expected time we’ll be in each area. We have four sources of weather that we used for this trip: NOAA (National Weather Service) for general forecast; Passage Weather for wind and waves; Chris Parker’s Bahamas forecast, which outlines passages north; and Commander’s Weather, a cruiser’s weather routing service. All of them are in agreement that the weather window over the next week looks excellent for cruising north.

I also spent some time getting our new AIS system hooked up to our backup navigation system. I’m still getting to know the AIS system, but it looks like a great addition to our toolkit. I’m looking forward to passing the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay and entering New York Harbor with this active. By the way, our backup navigation system is a Macintosh running GPSNavX, and I’ll blog about using a Mac as a navigation computer one of these days (in summary, it’s GREAT!).

Kathryn went to the grocery store today to get some fresh produce and meat. We would be okay eating beans and rice the whole time, but it will be much better to have fresh food. Kathryn is AMAZING in the galley, and I continue to marvel at the meals she prepares with whatever we have available. Last night it was fish curry with mahi-mahi we had gotten while in the Bahamas. Yum!

A few other preparation items:

• Disconnect and stow the second anchor from the bow.
• Fill the fresh water tanks. We can make water underway, but it’s always nice to start with full tanks.
• Stow the folding bikes that we normally keep on deck.
• Inspect and rearrange all the main storage areas to make sure items won’t shift too much in large seas. We hope to not have large seas, but we have to be ready for them if they arrive.
• Set up the correct weather information e-mails to be delivered to our satellite phone e-mail address. This will allow us to get daily weather updates while offshore.
• File a “float plan” with our friend Bobby O, who is our mission control.
• Clean the interior of the boat so we have a nice cruising environment for the next five days.
• Download a few movies that we can play to pass the time.

So that’s our plan. We will be updating our position daily on the web site, so if you’re interested in seeing where we are you can look at the live map (there’s a link to it on the home page).

Bon voyage!