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! 

Living on the Hook

After living aboard in a marina for 5 years, dreaming about living on the hook, going cruising (and subsequently living on the hook) felt like a dream come true.

Living aboard was fun, but it was still just a “floating apartment”. I didn’t really feel the freedom of living aboard until we left our daily lives behind to go cruising. Suddenly, we were as free in our lives as the boat was in relation to the anchor. 

Everyday starts when we feel ready for it to begin, and everyday ends when we want it to. One of the best reminders of this freedom comes when we would dinghy back to our boat at sunset. To see it floating all alone, independent of any structure around it made us feel equally free. 

We didn’t have to worry about things like anchor dragging or debris floating into us because we chose our anchorages carefully. We would always pick an out of the way spot with good holding to drop the hook. We also have oversized ground tackle, so we could sleep easy knowing it would be hard to make us budge. 

Secondly, with unlimited time, you can find the best place to hang out and relax there as you explore. Then brainstorm where you want to go next and pop over to that port. All the dreams I had about living on the hook were realized when we went cruising, and all the worries of daily life vanished at the very same time! 

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.