The Azores

After a month at sea, coming across these islands feels like a miracle. It’s as if we went to sleep and began dreaming, but they are true and real! 

Eight of the islands in the chain are volcanic in origin, and they are really just the peaks of massive underwater volcanoes that just managed to break the surface a few times. The slope of the mountain continues underwater unchanged, making them very deep, just off the coast. When we approached the islands, it was 16,000 feet deep, the it dropped to a mere 4,000 to 6,000 feet deep within the island chain. As you approach the islands themselves, the bottom will rise up and be only a few hundred feet deep as you enter the harbors.  

The bottoms are just as treacherous to anchor on as they are deep! Since all the islands are formed from volcanoes and lava flows, the surrounding sea bed is comprised of large boulders and rocks. Anchoring with anything is questionable, and a fisherman’s anchor seems like the best choice; although not a wise one! 

Entering these magical dream lands is best done by entering the marinas and paying an unnaturally small fee. We are used to paying around $90 per night to tie up our 45 foot sailboat, but in the Azores, a slip cost us a mere  €24 per night!

Once you come ashore, you are greeted by the most kind of peoples, further propagating your fanciful ideas that you are still dreaming, only to discover that everything in the Azores is inexplicably inexpensive. My wife and I would get breakfast for under  €6, dinner for under €14. Fancy coffees cost €0.85 instead of $7 at Starbucks. 

The Azores truly are a dreamland and have made it feel as if we have never awoken from the dream of sailing across the Atlantic.  

Sunrise

Dawn is a beautiful thing that I honestly try to avoid. I like to wake up early in the morning, but I like to be woken up by the early sunlight. This means I like to still be asleep when the sun comes up over the horizon! 

When we were crossing the Atlantic, someone has to be at the helm at all times. Maddie would always do the first watch of the night, from 5pm to 1am, and then I would do the second watch of the night, from 1am to 9am.  

This meant that every morning, as the night sky would begin to glow with the dawn early lights, and the first rays of the sunlight would peer over the horizon, I would be there watching. 

Watch from 1am to dawn is anything but enjoyable. These are my peak sleeping hours! But when you are out at sea, the night world around you is filled with wonder and mystery, and watching the sky change from black to purple to red to blue to light blue is a beautiful experience! Looking off into the distance, listening to unknown and unseen sounds can spark your imagination into a whirlwind of fanciful ideas about what is out there. This keeps my mind working to keep me awake during the night, but all that dreaming comes to an end with a blazing display from the sun. 

Dawn! 

How to Kill a Drone

The marine environment will kill your drone eventually. Either it will die a slow death from corrosion, or a quick death from a splash landing. It will happen, and then you will have to buy your drone again!

One of the easiest ways to kill your drone is to fly your drone from your boat while you are sailing. Drones have a nifty feature where if they get disconnected from the controller, they will automatically “Return to Home”. The idea is, you are standing right where the drone took off and as it returns, the signal will be restored and you can regain flight control once more. If you don’t reconnect, the drone will automatically land where it took off.

This is a great feature when flying your drone from land, because it means that it will return to the same spot for recovery should it get disconnected. Now, picture this: You launch your drone while sailing at 6 knots to get some awesome shots of you on a broad reach! The waves are spraying as your bow slices through the seas. Everything is AWESOME!

Then you get an alert on your screen saying that the drone has lost signal and will return to home. You would hope that the drone would return to the controller, but instead it will return to where it launched, way WAY back there in your wake. Now you have to quick circle around and get there fast because the drone is flying straight back to where you launched it and if you want to save your drone, you better be under it when it auto lands! Truth is, drones fly home at speeds of around 6-10 miles per hour, and you have to come about and tack upwind to get back there. The drone is going to win this race and then lose everything.

That’s right, all will be lost because drones don’t float, and they will sink with your SD card and all the cool footage you had captured. All lost to the depths of the ocean!

Long story short, if you want to prolong the marine environment caused death of your drone, never launch it from your sailboat. Always launch your drone from shore.

It is fine to fly your drone over water and get great shots of the anchorage, because should it get disconnected, it will return to the beach and land safely on a flat, dry surface.

Marina Rainbow

The Azores are notorious for having a lot of rain in the winter. The odder part is you will have rain on days with blue skies!  

We were walking back to the boat after lunch and it started raining on us, even though the sun was out and the sky was pretty clear.  

The splendor of a strong sun with rain is the resulting bright and powerful rainbow that formed. Luckily, from our vantage point, we were able to see the full arc! 

Then, in true Azorian fashion, the rain stopped completely only minutes after it started.  

Best Drones for Cruising

Drones are awesome, there is no denying it. They can get to the perfect vantage point, and we all love the drone footage in our favorite YouTube videos! While drones may seem awesome at first, sailing with one may feel a little different.

Being a cruising YouTuber has it’s perks, first you get to meet other cruising YouTube channels and compare notes on different camera gear and techniques. The second perk is your toys will pay for themselves because the videos you make with these toys produce revenue.

But, as always, life isn’t always as easy as it may seem, and sailing with a drone can be a hazard (to the drone). There are a few important points that should be considered when looking at a drone for cruising with. First is size, then capabilities, then price.

DJI Phantom

Drones are often barely seen up in the sky, but when you get up close to them, you begin to notice how big they really are. Big, is never a good thing when you need to stow it safely in a sailboat!

One of the most famous drones, the DJI Phantom, is HUGE! Yes, it has incredible range, films in 4K, and flies at blazing speeds, it is still really big.

Our friends Jessica and Ryan from Jessica and Ryan Adventures have this drone and we got to see it in action first hand. It was amazing!

They would launch it and send it high up into the sky where they would get amazing images of the entire anchorage they were in. They could also fly it around the neighboring islands to see what looks like the best place to go explore by dinghy. It served as more of a reconnaissance aircraft to scout out hidden gems in the islands, and it did this task beautifully!

The drone flight sequence starts at around 4:50 seconds. This drone is fast, and the images it captures are unreal. How else could you get an effortless birds eye view?

So we know that this is the drone that most YouTubers use because it gets the best video from the most powerful drone! But what happens when you are not flying the drone? What happens for the other 99.9999% of the life of the drone when it is NOT flying?

Well it takes up space! Being a big drone, it takes up a lot of space. The body of the drone is larger than a square foot, and the propellers extend making it even bigger. The powerful propellers do not fold, so unless you remove them, it’s going to take up a lot of space.

That being said, if you have the space a budget for a Phantom, go for it! Our friends, Jessica and Ryan have a catamaran, giving them plenty of space to store the drone on a flat surface without fear of the surface tilting while under sail and the drone falling off. If you have an old monohull like we do, maybe think about this purchase a little harder.

All drones have a specially built carrying case, and the phantom is no different, but the phantom’s carrying case looks like a carry-on bag for a flight.

DJI Mavic

The next step down in size is the DJI Mavic. This drone offers similar performance to the Phantom, but in a more “travel friendly” package. The controller is smaller, the drone is smaller, and the drone also folds to make it stow tighter. To round up the whole “smaller package” concept, it’s carrying case is a backpack.

It still offers 4K video, almost a half hour of flight time, and a 3 axis gimbal for the camera, just like the phantom, but in a folding package that can stow more easily in a space limiting environment, like in a sailboat.

This gives you a nice compromise between space and performance, saving you a bit of space while only reducing the performance a slight amount.

DJI Spark

Now, if space and price are both limited, welcome to the smallest and cheapest of the “good” drones: the Spark.

This is the drone we went with, as it is tiny! The Spark is the size of a cell phone, and the propeller fold up to make it stow neatly in a tiny bag smaller than a purse.

This lets it safely live in a padded and protective bag, in our closet (while at sea) or on our navigation station next to the radio on a small shelf (while in port).

So, what are you sacrificing with the Spark to get the tiny size? A few things.

It won’t shoot in 4K, only up to 1080p. It won’t fly for a half hour, only about 12-15 minutes (depending on how fast you want to fly and how windy it is where you are flying), and it won’t fly as fast (6-8 mph in normal mode, low 20s mph in sport mode). Oh, and you are also giving up on the high price tag!

This was one of the biggest points that we considered when we bought our drone! We know the salt air is going to kill the drone. We also know that one day it might fall into the water and die! Losing a drone sucks, but it would suck a lot more if it was almost $1000 that went in the water!

When we bought our Spark, we inquired about the replacement cost of “just the drone”. Not the controller, and the case, and all the other parts that come in the kit, and we were very pleased to hear that it was only around $300. With this wonderful knowledge, we decided to upgrade our YouTube channel with the purchase of our new drone, the DJI Spark!

It fits in our narrow old monohull that we are sailing around the Atlantic without taking up too much space, and it gets great shots from the air! Yes, the flight time is rather short, but this just means that you need to plan your flight before you turn it on. We typically have an idea in mind, send the drone up, capture it, and then bring it back down. Having two batteries means we can do this multiple times on hikes and excursions.

Sadly, video editing is a long process, and the shots with the drone haven’t been reached yet at the time of this blog post (we started flying our drone when we made it to Horta, Azores), but in the channel trailer, at the very end, there is a drone clip filmed with the DJI Spark.

Drones are awesome, and they can take your cruising to a whole new level by showing you where you are from an entirely new perspective. We get used to thinking that sea level is the only way to view new anchorages, but a drone will show you the majestic and magical place you are anchored in, making you appreciate it all the greater!