The Atlantic (2,124nm) – post IV

Happy New Year! Please find below the final entry from our Atlantic crossing series, and unfortunately we are all out of guest contributors so normal service has had to be resumed. As with our other Atlantic posts, we start with all our responses to my (Alec’s) question for the group before moving onto the post.

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“What most surprised you about the passage?”

Katherine: This will sound a bit silly, but it was the fact that the boat never stopped moving. Ever. Think of an average daily activity. Cooking. Peeing. Putting on clothes. Now, think of trying to do those activities except your house is constantly moving in unpredictable directions at unpredictable magnitudes every second of every hour of every day. I’m not super sure what I was expecting, but I didn’t fully fathom the reality that yes, the boat will be moving the entire time. The second surprising piece of this puzzle is that ultimately, your body is like “this is my life now” and gets used to it. First, I stopped getting sea sick, then I learned how to sleep, then I figured out how to balance and move around in most boating scenarios. So despite the boat always moving (and waves causing you to drop an entire bag of flour into dirty dish water), there is something amazing about how quickly your body recalibrates and adapts.

Laura / Parker: The amount of life in the ocean really surprised me – there were SO many flying fish. We saw them every few minutes, every day and every night, through the whole passage. I was also surprised by how vengeful and aggressive they are. I mean, not in general, but towards me. I was directly hit by flying fish on 5 separate occasions during my night watches. I honestly don’t know what I did to piss them off. They didn’t bother anyone else. So, I’m still trying to work that one out…

On a more serious note, what surprised me most were the realities of downwind sailing. I’ve spent most of my (relatively short) sailing career attempting to go upwind, or at most across the wind. I can probably count on one hand the number of times prior to leaving Gibraltar that I’d sailed a broad reach or below on Serenity. After the Canaries we exclusively sailed between 120 and 180 degrees (very downwind), and it was a lot different than I’d expected. The three things that stuck out:

1. Speed: I have been used to 5 knots as our target speed when going upwind. Now 7 feels a bit slow. Heck, we hit 14.1kts for a few (slightly terrifying) seconds on a particularly gusty day in the Atlantic surfing down the waves.
2. Stability: Our most-used downwind sailing tool has been goose-winging (main sail on one side, genoa poled out on the opposite side), which has the sails set up such that they only provide a little opposing force to the waves. That means it can be really roll-y. I’d been used to living life on the wonk with upwind sailing, but not so much on the rock!
3. Direction: Normally, when we sail upwind, we can at best do about 50 degrees to the true wind. Downwind, with enough breeze, we can sail pretty much directly downwind. Actually, we can even sail up to about 150 degrees on the wrong side of the wind when goose-winging, which is pretty cool! As a result, our track across the Atlantic was a lot more direct than on upwind passages.

Ballin: I was really blown away at how well Alec and Laura rolled with the punches during the passage. We had a number of challenges that came up, some that seemed pretty serious. They approached each problem with a level-headedness honed over the months of training and repairs that they’ve experienced since purchasing Serenity First. The leak in our fresh water system epitomizes this. When we determined we definitely had a significant leak somewhere, there wasn’t a major freak out (well I was pretty concerned, but I didn’t see it from Laura or Alec). Laura started inspecting and checking off sections and locations where the problem could exist. When the immediate possibilities were eliminated with no success, she engaged Alec in a brainstorming session to identify second and third tier possibilities, and then they divided and conquered. Within just a few hours we had gone from a mysterious leak wasting precious fresh water to a located leak, fixed to the extent that the passage would allow, and beers on deck. That was just one example of how cool, calm, and collected they are in a challenging situation.

Alec: Two things stand out as genuinely surprising for me on the passage. The first is how few fish we caught despite our Mediterranean successes. I was expecting fresh fish to be a feature every few days, but we only managed a small sea bass and a couple of dorado (one of which we released due to Mahi Mahi fatigue), and most days passed without a single bite. The second was how difficult it was to sleep, as previous passages had normally yielded reasonable rest after a 1-2 acclimatisation period. Unfortunately, the increased sea-state combined with the reduced stability in downwind sailing conspired to make sleep elusive and I often felt like Goldilocks working my way round the different available berths on Serenity until I became exhausted enough to pass out.

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I still feel…

I decided to give myself a good amount of space after arriving in Martinique before writing this post, in part to let the experience settle in, but mostly because I was struggling with what I should say. It’s now been close to four weeks and seeing as I still didn’t have much in the way of ideas, I sought advice from Laura. She gave me a wry smile and announced “surely your post will be easy to write… just talk about how you feel after achieving your biggest dream!” That sounded like precisely the sort of thing my subconscious was trying to avoid, but I’ve long since learnt the benefits of listening to my wife and so decided to give this approach a try.
Unfortunately the primary feeling that I kept coming back to when considering the passage as a whole was a sense of being somewhat underwhelmed, which didn’t seem like a particularly positive subject for the blog. Digging a little deeper, I realised that this feeling stemmed from the reality of the passage being significantly easier than what I had expected, and this in turn could be explained by four underlying factors:

1. Building it up: Having had ‘sailing across an ocean’ as a goal for so long, I became guilty of building the experience up in my mind, which included my expectations of both the positive and negative aspects of the passage. As a result, the challenges we faced were an order of magnitude lower than what I had braced myself for.
2. Preparing for the worst: Following on from this, Laura and I took a super cautious approach in preparing Serenity for the passage, with the result that she was more than ready for an ocean passage (although we ended up working significantly harder that we expected in the build up to the passage as a result).
   
3. Luck: As will all good outcomes, we certainly had our fair share of good fortune, primarily with the weather. The trade winds were remarkably consistent this year, and the squalls were both rare and minor. This limited the stress and effort needed to sail the boat, as well as the repairs on broken equipment.
4. Good fortune: In addition to our luck on the trip itself, Laura and I count ourselves incredibly fortunate to have been born into the lives we have, as so much of what we have achieved can been traced back to the never ending support we have received from our families and friends.

Reflecting further on the final point, I realise that we have a debt of thanks to a multitude of people for reaching this milestone. Whilst I hope that we get an opportunity to thank you all in person (or least more personally that via blog), I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who had a hand in helping us get across the Atlantic – including those that first got me into sailing, that developed that passion into reliable skills, that gave us the life and career opportunities which paid for the boat, that advised us as we chose and upgraded the boat, that read the blog and sent us messages of encouragement along the journey, that came to visit us in the Med, that accompanied us on the longer passages, that provided emotional support when things went wrong, and that celebrated our wins (however large or small).

Considering this litany of amazing people in our lives, I’m pleased to realise that my feelings of being underwhelmed are transformed into overwhelming gratitude. Having something turn out easier than expected is a good thing, and please know that you all played your part in helping that to happen.

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Lows and highs

Whilst the passage as a whole was easier than expected, that is not to say that there weren’t aspects that were tough. As I mentioned in my answer to the ‘surprise’ question, I found sleeping really tough for the first time on a passage, and was left with an ever present level of fatigue that undoubtably made everything else harder in varying degrees. Another challenge was defining where my responsibilities as skipper ended, as I often found myself trying to deal with things outside of my remit or control – as the other crew mentioned previously, we all had good and bad days on the trip, but I frequently found myself frustrated by my inability to make every day a good day for everyone. These two factors added unneeded pressure to my experience; my preference in these sort of circumstances is to seek personal space in which to recharge, which itself was a rare commodity on a 43ft boat in the middle of an ocean!

However, these lows were comfortably outweighed by all the positive of the trip. Reading through the other posts, I can’t help but smile at the fond memories that Laura, Katherine and Ballin have captured in their posts: finding a bird had joined me on the cockpit floor for a night watch, Ballin’s never ending dance performances (often without any audience), Katherine’s delicious baking that tested her seasickness stoicism to its limit, Laura’s willingness to deal with issues during the night without waking anyone else up, and my opportunity to recreate my favourite scene from Any Given Sunday (adapted to the nautical environment by replacing “inch” with “winch”).

In fact, the greatest high of the trip for me was the group of people I got to spend it with. Whilst I was skipper in name, I was lucky enough to be sailing with a team of people who learn fast, work hard but also find the fun in every moment, and they each reduced my workload significantly by taking initiative wherever they could. It provided an environment where already close friendships could strengthen and deepen in ways that I hadn’t expected, and I think Katherine summarised best when she observed that “I no longer feel I need to pretend with this group – we’ve all seen each other freak out over nothing and still been accepted afterwards – and it now seems like we just have permission to be ourselves, which doesn’t happen very often.” Creating the space for experiences like this was one of our greatest hopes for our time on Serenity, and Ballin and Katherine repaid our faith tenfold by joining us for this trip.

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The place beyond the goal

I now find myself in a strange place, one that excites and worries me probably in equal measure. Laura and I consciously decided that we wouldn’t talk about future plans for Serenity until January, and so I’ve gone from having a clearly defined and tangible goal of sailing the Atlantic to a world where I don’t know what is coming next. The scale of potential opportunity in exploring the Caribbean is invigorating, but as stands I don’t have a yardstick that allows me to assess our achievements in a given day.

I’m pretty sure that this uncertainly is good for me in the long run, as it might help us slow down a bit and better appreciate the world around us. Slowing down was the advice that Phil gave us as he left Serenity in Lanzarote, which in itself is a reminder to remember the name we gave our boat. Trusting in the path to unfold in its own time is one of the hardest things for me to do, but I am going to try this prescription from the Spinnaker Doctor and will share the results (and our future plans when we get around to them) over the coming weeks.

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