The Hardest Part of Crossing an Ocean

Those who have crossed oceans will all have different forms of advice. Some will recommend eating extra to gain weight that you will inevitably lose while crossing, others will declare infinite storm preparedness. I have much simpler words of wisdom.

My advice is this: Setting sail across an ocean is easy, the hard part will be returning to the world of civilization. On the ocean, direction doesn't matter. At times we were 200 miles north of our course, yet our heading was unchanged because the ocean is so vast. If a storm was passing by, we would change course and sail the wrong way for a good distance to avoid the weather system. Once we were clear of it, we would then resume our previous course. There is nothing to run into, no reefs, no lee shores, no anything.

Today is day 22 from Bermuda to the Azores and we have seen a grand total of 4 ships! Night watch is more focused on watching the weather as we have never seen navigation lights on the horizon.

All that is going to change as we are nearing the end of our voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.

In 40 nautical miles, we will pass Corvo, the first island in the archipelago. Tonight's watch is not only focused on the weather, but also on traffic and land.

We are reaching the other side, and soon, 10 miles off course can put you on a rock! Just as a lee shore can limit your ability to sail around a weather system.

Most of all, landfall means the return to civilization. No longer will it be only Maddie and me in the world of the visible horizon. We will be able to venture off away from Wisdom and walk for miles over land. We will meet new people and new cultures, and we will have made it to the other side.

This may sound wonderful, but we have been living in a bubble of "just us" for over 3 weeks. I have come to know Maddie in even deeper ways and she is my entire world out here. There has been no stress of timelines or schedules. We have no meetings to get to, no due dates for our work. It has been a wonderful escape from the hectic world we live in, where we can sit back and appreciate every single unique sunset and watch the stars come out in the sky.

I sit here on night watch and look at the moons light glittering a beam of light ahead of us, the shadow of our tanbark jib blocking out a section of this moonbeam, and the water rushing past. We have no cares or worries, but we are rapidly driving ourselves forward towards the end of this bliss.

Landfall means that this blissful world we have lived in for the past month will stop. That is the hard part of crossing an ocean to me, having the journey end!

Speediest Comfortable Sailing Angle

When cruising, times will come when other matters need to be attended to. Cruising is not only about sailing, you need to cook, do the dishes, bathe, sleep, etcetera. Remember, this is not only a sailboat, it's your home!

We have found that following seas are gentle, but rolly. Beating is just plain unbearable! And a beam reach can give you a good roll to leeward every so often. So far, none of these sound like the ideal situation to be standing by a sink or stove!

Our favorite sailing angle is with the true wind a few degrees aft of the beam. Here the apparent wind will be just ahead of the beam, giving you great wind through your sails while keeping the seas gentle as well. The seas approach on the stern quarter first and slowly lift the yacht as they pass, setting you down on their back as they go on. Since the bow is on the back as you ride down the wave, you won't roll to leeward as it drops you.

At this point of sail, we also move along at our quickest. This makes the keel very effective at keeping us straight. The forces of the keel and sails are balanced in such a way that the wave simply lifts and lowers us, no rolling around.

When we are cruising and find ourselves on this point of sail, we get all the housework chores taken care of. If this point of sail only adds a few miles to our next destination, we will take the distance penalty and enjoy an easy ride. Lastly, if this is not our direction but we desperately need comfort inside, we will assume this course.

This has been the case after a week of beating. The dishes were pilling up and something in the sink was starting to smell bad. Neither of us could stand inside while we were beating, so we changed course for an hour and got the boat put back in order. After we finished, we bid goodbye the gentle motion of this point of sail and returned to our course.

When out in the ocean sailing to a distant destination, you will find that doing something like this won't even change the heading to your destination by a single degree. This means there is no penalty to the respite of this comfortable point of sail while you get chores taken care of.

Which Tack Will Produce a Change in the Wind?

There is a simple method to find the center of a low pressure system. Face the wind and hold your right arm straight out to your side, then point. You are now pointing at the center of the low pressure system that is causing the wind you are experiencing. Inversely, perpendicularly and to your left is the center of the high pressure system in your immediate area. This simple trick works in the Northern Hemisphere thanks to the Coriolis Effect. If you are in the Southern Hemisphere, this trick would work with, just using the opposite arms for the low and high.

To answer the original question, which tack will produce a change in the wind? The answer is either tack!

You can not sail directly into the wind, so you need to choose starboard tack or port tack. Port tack will have your bow facing the low pressure system that is causing the present wind, and therefore would eventually lead to more wind.

Starboard tack will have the bow facing the high pressure system that is opposing the low, eventually leading to calmer winds.

There is a way, however, to stay in exactly the same conditions, and that is to sail on an absolute dead run. Here you will simply spiral around the highs and lows without ever moving closer or farther from any of them.

When you are crossing an ocean, just remember the effects that your tack will have in a few days. Starboard tack will produce more wind, port tack will produce calmer conditions.

The giant flaw in this theory is that weather systems move, so if you sail in a straight line towards a low, it might not be there by the time you reach the spot where the center was. So, keep this in mind and be sure to keep an eye on the weather!

Finding Land

LAND HO! 

After a long time at sea, land might become more of a distant memory than something that you think is out there on the horizon. You have been sailing for weeks and are heading towards a new land, but what will it look like as you get closer? Will land just jump out over the horizon? Will you even notice it off in the distance? 

Land on a clear day is visible far off on the horizon as a grey haze. After weeks of sailing, the land will appear as an oddity on the horizon rather than appearing as "land". Upon, closer inspection, you will then realize that you are looking at your destination!

While you might think it will jump out at you, the truth is, land will silently hide on the horizon. It will not call out to you, and it will not attempt to make its presence known, unless you know what to look for. Land, especially tall land, will usually have a permanent cloud cap. After a long voyage, you will be accustomed to looking at the clouds and determining which direction they are moving. This has been your method for spotting and tracking storms for the entire passage, and by this time you will be an expert at watching clouds. Clouds over land will call on your attention because they will not move! 

You will notice a permanent and stationary cloud that does not move on the horizon, long before you will see the land beneath it. As you sail closer to it, the landmass will appear from over the horizon.  

Once you get closer, the outline of the land will become clearer and you might even be able to make out identifying features of the terrain.  

Land will make itself clearer as you continue to sail closer to it, but spotting it from a distance can be an entertaining challenge! Most islands out in the ocean have mountains or other high features that will make them visible from a distance; some islands will try to hide in the misty edge of visibility by laying low to the seas surface with no identifying features. 

The Bahamas are famous for having very flat islands that are difficult to spot at a distance, but they do offer another trick to finding land. The shallow turquoise waters of the island chains will shine up into the clouds, giving the bottom of the clouds a turquoise tint. The islands in the Bahamas are very low and hard to spot, but this will give you the indication of their presence hundreds of miles away! 

The Goal of Celestial Navigation

GPS is a wonderful creation that has raised our expectations in positions to unrealistic but attainable levels. It is not uncommon to see a GPS touting an accuracy of a few feet! You might want to achieve these same results with a sextant, only to have your dreams dashed in the waves.

The goal of accuracy for a sextant is 25 nautical miles. Yes, not feet, but miles. While a GPS is considered good if it can place you within 10 feet of your true position, a person calculating their position with a sextant on a boat at sea is considered good if they can calculate their position to be within 151,903 feet! 

This might sound ridiculous, but the reasoning behind it is rather sound. Celestial Navigation is not to plot your position and get you to slip between a reef and a wreck on a chart, that is the realm of visual navigation. Celestial Navigation is to get you to your next landfall. Land can be spotted from very far away, and if you can get close enough to see it, you can then sail towards it, letting visual navigation take over from there. 

When calculating your position, you can use very VERY precise measuring techniques which will let you calculate your position down to under 400 feet. The problem is this sort of refined measuring is done on land, which is not moving, and at rest, which is not sailing. The measurements can then be repeated daily to finally work down the exact numbers and find your precise position. 

On a yacht, you are sailing forward, so your measurements are off to begin with. Next, you are on a pitching deck, being rocked side to side as you ride up and down waves. You have to hold a sextant perfectly stable while being tossed around as your altitude changes constantly!  

If you take a course on celestial navigation or read about it in a book, it will typically have the calculations carried all the way down to the second (of time and location). 1 second of time is 1/60th of a minute. 1 second of latitude & longitude is 1/60th of a nautical mile in latitude, and 1/60th of a nautical mile at the equator to nothing at the North Pole. If you try to carry your calculations down to the second, you will find that your not going to gain much in accuracy for the amount of additional work you need to put in. It is best to take all of your recordings and calculations down the the minute (of time and position). 

Think about it, when you take your noon site and record the time. If you record to the second, you will then have a very accurate reading. If you take it to the minute, you could be off by as much as 59 seconds! But what does 59 seconds come out to be in the grand scheme of things? The boat is moving, you are pitching around, and if all you need to do is get a general idea of where you are, why do all the extra math?! 

If you take your noon site at 16:00 vs 16:01, the difference in your longitude will be minimal

 16 : 00
  -12 : 00

   4 : 00
x15 x0.25

60*0'W 

 16 : 01
 -12 : 00

  4 : 01
x15 x0.25

60 + (0.25x60) 

60*15'W 

What this means is that your longitude is going to be calculated as one of these two positions. If you were to measure the time of the noon site down to the second, your answer would fall somewhere in between 60*0'W and 60*15'W. Yes, that would be a much more accurate calculation, but you can assume that your true position is somewhere between 0' and 15', which means that you are not that far off!  

Imagine that the true time of the noon site was 16:00:30, this would mean that the true position would be around 60*07'30". Your calculations would only have been around 7.5 nautical miles off. Not bad for skipping an entire section of calculations! 

You might be wondering how you can verify what your true position is out at sea and how you would then calculate your error, and the answer just makes it more logical to stop the calculations at the minute. You check your calculated position with a GPS reading of your present coordinate at that time. The GPS, which is accurate down to a few feet, will tell you where you actually are; so why go through all the extra headache and math to figure out your position to a few miles closer when at the end of it all, you will verify it with a GPS? 

In practice, I have found that I am usually within 4nm of our true position. This is far lower than the acceptable 25nm radius of error, and this lets me know that should all the GPS's in our yacht fail, I can trust my calculated coordinates to get us to land. At first, you might find that you are way off, but with practice, you will zero in on a very accurate noon site while only taking your measurements and calculations down to the minute.