As promised, the winds returned. Our little break from sailing was much needed as we were a bit tired from all the watching and movement of the boat. Just the act of sitting in a sailing vessel is strenuous as you are constantly moving your core to maintain yourself straight and steady. Sleep is not as deep because you are listening for the on watch person should they call out for you to assist them.
Having a break in the middle was actually really nice because it let us recharge and regroup. We ate, we rested, and now we were ready to go once again.
With the winds back, we were moving along quickly at our old pace, covering more than 100 nautical miles per day.
Friends on shore were giving us coordinates for where the wind is located, and we had plenty of time to play with the symbols on the screen.
The skull and crossbones is the location of a Hurricane, the windmill is the waypoint where the wind is located (based on weather routing software), the little boat is our Australian friends who left Bermuda a few days before we did and were a few hundred miles ahead of us as a result.
This little map is the closest thing we have to an electronic chart of where we had been and where we are going. You can see the marks as we traveled down the coast of the United States, some of the points off of Georgia were “far out to sea” in our opinion at the moment. Now when we look at this map and see how we just rocketed away from the shore and shot straight out to sea, we begin to wonder what we were thinking.
What changed in our minds that let us point directly away from land and head straight out towards an empty horizon? We have charts and know that land is out there, but what about the first explorers who were setting out blindly? They had no idea what or where land was located, and simply ventured out over the horizon to lands unknown.
With all this knowledge, we were still scared to actually let go of land and head out to sea. Now we are out in the middle and not even thinking about looking back. We are cruisers and we are crossing the ocean; the best way to do that is to head straight towards your destination!
