It's always fun to meet another ship at sea. This is not so often the case on the route from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, because as a sailing yacht we stick to the old sailing routes and the trade winds, while the container ships tend to take the direct route. Up here between Bermuda and the Azores, on the other hand, it's all hands on deck. Especially this week. Without being warned, we have been in the middle of a regatta since last night.
"There's a boat coming towards us from astern," Cati calls, looking at the AIS. It's just after midnight, changing watch. "Class B." So a pleasure craft. "What's the MMSI?" - "Starts with 211..." - "Hey, a German yacht! What a coincidence!". An hour later, the system spits out even more information. The "Garlix" is 13 metres long and is banging towards us from behind at 7 knots high in the wind, while we are only travelling at 4.5 knots. "From the name, it's probably an X-Yacht," I surmise. The ship is also travelling about 15 degrees higher than us. It quickly overtakes us upwind and disappears from the AIS a few hours later.
This morning the AIS screen is full of ships. We count seven of them, most of them from Europe, all heading for the Azores. Between 12 and 14 metres long and therefore much faster than us. We sail bow to bow with the yachts for hours until they eventually leave us in their wake. "Oh, I know where they come from so suddenly," I remember. "The ARC must have left Bermuda for the Azores yesterday!" So we're right in the middle of it. But we'll probably be the last yacht to arrive.
"I can't believe they've already caught up with us," says Cati. We had already sailed past Bermuda a day before their start, but didn't really make much progress afterwards. The wind had shifted to the east, giving us an insane cross course. As a large area of low pressure was approaching from the Atlantic on Thursday, we wanted to keep as far south as possible. We've heard that the yachts in the Transat race further north have already had a lot of problems with this. However, if we stay south of Bermuda, we shouldn't get more than 25 to 30 knots of wind.
But staying so far south is not easy at all, as there is a current to the east of Bermuda that we first had to fight our way through. The course high on the wind gave us the tacking angle of a square sailor: 160 degrees from high on the wind to high on the wind, that was the best we could do against the current. So we could sail due north or course 160 degrees. Almost due south with a slight easterly component. So that's what we did all day long to get out of the current.
Only when the wind turned a little more southerly in the evening were we able to tack and set a course of 40 degrees. It's just as well that our tracker on zu-zweit-auf-see.de doesn't offer real-time tracking - otherwise it would probably look like we'd gone mad. That's why the time taken over the last 24 hours doesn't really give a clear picture of our progress. Although we have travelled 102 miles, we have only made up about 30 towards our destination.
Since Wednesday, we have been on course for our destination again. But we are curious to see how the low pressure area will reshuffle the cards tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the ARC fleet has almost completely passed us by. Only with the stragglers, two 12-metre boats, can we compete to some extent, sailing eastwards in a race. It's nice to know that we're not the only ones out here for a while.
Jochen Rieker
Herausgeber YACHT
