The Burnetts are happily underway again! After two days and two practically moonless nights of bad weather and Calamity, Jerry has had enough of being the North Atlantic’s punching bag. Greg and Mel too. In fact, Mel’s whole body hurts. But her abs are probably spectacular.

This has been a “shakedown“ cruise for Jerry. A shakedown cruise usually occurs shortly after one buys a boat. It’s an offshore in Sporty Weather to find all the weak spots. The resemblance between the word “shakedown“ and “breakdown“ should not go unnoticed.

Sailing Philosopher Mel has realized that a lot of the mantras that she learned in her medical training and then tried to instill in her medical students and residents apply well to this voyage.

1. An optimistic signout is a bad signout.
   When doctors transfer care of a patient to another doctor so they can take care of neglected human needs like urinating and sleeping, it is called, “signing out”. Good practice when signing out is to anticipate calamity and give the covering doc an action plan. On this trip, Mel has learned that her captain is an optimistic signer-outer.
   Greg, signing out: “Winds are decreasing and they should shift soon in our favor, so turn more upwind in an hour.”
   Mel, one hour later while Greg slumbers in the berth, “The opposite just happened. Time to improvise. Oh look, I’m sailing us to the Arctic instead of Bermuda. Well, at least I am comfortable.”
   Greg, 3 hours later, “OMG! Where are we going???”
   Mel will work on her new first mate task of instilling in Greg her robust ability to catastrophize. That way her decisions will match his. Because when she improvises, it is clear her priorities do not match the Captain’s.
2. Sometimes the best decisions do not result in the best outcomes.
   After “resting“ on our para-anchor for 12 hours, calamity struck. Details are forthcoming, but Greg and Mel then had to do something called “heaving-to“. (Heaving is a good choice of words. Everything in sailing is so well named, isn’t it?) This maneuver helped Jerry (and Mels fragile flower of a psyche) make it through winds up to 55 kts and seas from three different directions up to 20 ft? high. See photo above. Even though those relaxing moments on the now departed para-anchor (RIP) ended up equating to an $1800 one-night Italian getaway, it was an excellent decision to deploy it, and do it before weather got bad. We followed protocol. No one can fault you for following protocol.
3. Giving yourself time to think IS taking emergency action.
   Those who watch medical TV dramas may not realize this, but not all doctors spring to immediate, confident action when their patients crash. If the situation is unusual and does not obviously call up a standard checklist treatment protocol, many of us have to weigh the multiple management options each novel situation presents. This takes a minute, and taking that minute is the safest thing to do. Not exactly gripping for TV drama. But thinking, not reacting, saves lives. One thing both Mel and Greg had to get used to is that addressing problems while sailing has a more relaxed timeline than flying or medicine. Even when the problem is really, really noisy. After the para-anchor calamity, we quickly hove to and then relaxed to think of the next action. During that thinking time, we realized that Jerry was not unhappy at all in that state, and so the next action was just to leave well enough alone. Sometimes, doing nothing is doing something.

Lesson over! We are merely making our way to Bermuda, by way of the Arctic, at least when Mel is on watch. Supposedly we will arrive sometime tomorrow. Happy wakes, Mel

Today was a good day. Initially. Winds got down to 15-22 knots apparent at 150 degrees downwind. Waves were 12’ but mostly behind and calmed down to 6-8 ft by the afternoon. We had just the jib out, as we have a broken car on the main and we might as well be tender with it. Looks like we made 200 nautical miles in 24 hrs between 9am and 9am this morning. Little birdies visited us and everything.

But wait, Mel remembered something from her last trip. They had birds visit them back then, but because of what always seemed to happen afterwards, Mel named one of her visitors The Little Birdie of Shit Weather.

And so imagine Mel’s chagrin when Greg relieved her from a nice, uneventful watch and said, “I want to deploy the para-anchor, and we should do it now, while it’s nice and daylight.”

Well, dammit! Some sailors, both men and women, when faced with bad weather one cannot outrun, relish these moments. Aha! A true test of one’s wit and fortitude! This is living!

Mel loves that for them.

Mel, however, is of the ilk whose stomach knots up when she visualizes all the fiddling with lines and canvas and walking about on a tossing boat that has to happen in bad weather. I mean, to her, the medical ICU was her most stressful rotation in her internship — there was a lot of fiddling, and a lot of dying anyway.

Fortunately, the stakes are much lower with this particular sailing conundrum. Greg can describe the situation better, but this is what Mel understands it to be. Tonight, winds are going to increase to up to 40 knots, be more on our beam, and we might get big beam seas. What this means is a lot of tossing and turning side to side. Our catamaran might even heel. Ewwww. So we could either run downwind, not necessarily towards Bermuda, for up to a couple of days, possibly hand-steering the autopilot at times, and climb up and down the 12-20 ft waves. Or— we could deploy our sea anchor and “rest” for a couple days. Ah, much less macho, and it has the advantage that Captain Greg can try out a sailing gadget.

This sea anchor thing is a very expensive parachute and 500 feet of line. You throw it off the front of your boat and it is supposed to allow you to just sit in the ocean without any sails or engine on. At least Mel thinks you do that, as she was at the helm the whole time trying to keep the boat pointed into the wind in big waves while she heard Greg, on the trampoline and out of view, huffing and puffing on the headset for 2.5 hrs. Our first deployment didn’t work for some reason and so we had to haul in all 500 feet of line, redo something, and then send it out again. Mel would ask Greg what exactly happened, but he is passed out in the bunk at the moment. And right now the front of the boat looks like it does when we are on a mooring ball, with ropes on cleats, headed out into the darkness in front of the boat.

Boy, this would all be a lot less scary if we had a moon and could see the outer space around us.

Doing this has successfully kept Mel awake during her watch. She is now just sitting in the saloon, exhausted after gunning the engines with a helm wheel that won’t lock anymore, watching the boat move nowhere on an iPad. Mel wouldn’t say the boat is not moving at all, however. There are lots of waves coming from all directions and we are bouncing around just like we were before. The para-anchor is supposed to neutralize some of these waves with “eddies”. Hmmph, says Mel. I’ll believe it when I see you actually show up, Mr. Eddy…

Blow comes through at two or 3 AM tonight. Will keep you posted. For our family tracking our progress, don’t worry if the boat doesn’t move. It’s supposed to be like that. I know it’s weird.

So we have rested a bit and had time to contemplate our crossing.  This post features a really long video.  For those willing to stick it out, you will have a sense of what it is like to cross the Atlantic.  Just watch it 1836 more times to equal how long it actually lasted.  Allie’s commentary: “The video is good, Mommy, but you sound exhausted.”

Here’s some stats, for those interested:

Breakages:
Boom hangar  (Welding problem)
Mainsheet winch  (User error)
Parasailor blowout  (User error (Sheeted too tight? Up in too rough conditions?), plus spinnakers are just fragile)
Hydrogenerator failure (Sending back to factory, if they ever get back to us)
1 fouled prop with giant fishing line, cleared
Dometic fridge got pooped, stopped working, working now it is dried out
Generator impeller was fried somehow and needed changing, done in Bermuda
Generator cooling line broke and was fixed when at anchor in Bermuda

Lessons learned:
We got up to 18 kts surfing the waves before we deployed the warp, which slowed us down during the surfing but didn’t impact our overall speed so much.  Warps also help reduce turning to weather and therefore help the autopilot — our main use for them now.
Gibe preventers, while not entirely necessary due to the mainsheet bridle system, help secure the boom better so it’s less bouncy
Motoring at 1700 rpm resonates the cabin; pick another rpm
Putting three turns in the jib when going downwind helps stop the jib flopping between 150 and 180 degrees
Putting the first reef in at 18 kts apparent instead of 20 makes for an easier ride
Reefing the main when going way downwind doesn’t cost you much because it allows you to move it closer to the spreaders
iPhone charging cables can’t handle saltwater at all
Bungees are actually useful
Mel provisions with too many snacks
You should really test out a new TV Series first before using up all of your data and downloading a whole season on your iPad
You should download a walkthrough of any adventure games before you don’t have internet anymore
Seasickness really does disappear after 3 days, but it comes back if you are more than three days on land
Don’t expect to bond with the other person if you are double-handed; you hardly see them
Mel can be irrationally scared for days at a time and not die
Greg and Mel (and Marvin!) can survive hand-steering in 2 hour shifts in 18 ft seas and 40 kts of wind!

At 10 am Central time (4 pm here in Portugal,) the Burnetts set foot on mainland Europe. We have officially crossed the Atlantic!!

Now Mel just needs to figure out where to put that on her CV! Howabout “Miscellaneous Badass Accomplishments”?

The Burnetts are 24 hours outside of Lagos. This means that 35 tankers and cargo ships are between us and Europe right now. Fortunately, none seem to be coming close to us. Mel hopes their giant engines are clearing away all of the fishing nets as we approach Portugal. Most of the ships are bound for New York to live the American dream. You know, the one where we import everything.

Going offshore is quite cleansing. One has no choice other than to eat home-cooked meals, so no more large restaurant meals spiked with secret salt and sugar. One doesn’t have any alcohol or caffeine, as it upsets the stomach. If one get seasick, the diarrhea and vomiting gets rid of some fluids. Then there is the crapping of oneself in the gales and giant waves. Of course, Mel has never bought into the whole “cleansing” fad anyway. After learning the incredibly complex and stunning way the kidneys, liver, pancreas, and intestines all work together to “cleanse” the body in medical school, the thought of contributing anything significant to this amazing process with the ingestion of a magic milkshake (which is pooped and peed out per this thing called “homeostasis” anyway) seems preposterous to her. Nevertheless, the cleansing industry is huge. So there’s another moneymaking idea for cruisers: chartering for the offshore cleanse. Just make sure your heads are maintained.

The other thing you cleanse yourself from is the internet. No Facebook or Google. The Google thing is actually the hardest to live without. Of course there is the “Where have I seen that actor before?” torture we go through as we watch DVD’s. But there is a more important need for Google out here. Greg swore he saw little crabs floating on the surface of the ocean this morning that scurried out of the way of our bows. We were 200 miles offshore. Mel would like to look this up, because the lunchmeat Greg has been eating is getting a bit old now and she needs to know if this vision was bad-ham-induced. Of course, we may know soon enough. Listeria is very cleansing.

Boat stuff: Made 153 nm in 24 hours. After motoring through a dead calm last night the wind has moved north and we are now motorsailing in 13 kts of true wind on a port tack for the first time this trip. Mel likes this. Gives the other jibsheet a rest. We don’t really have to have the motors on, but we want to make Lagos by nightfall tomorrow. The waves are up our nose at the moment and are only 3 feet, but Marvin is bucking a bit as they are quite frequent.