Sailing Across Greece

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Posted on July 23, 2016 by Jamie

Sophie has been anchored in front of my brother David and his wife Goga’s house in Kotor, Montenegro for the last week. Our current location is 42°27′.934N, 18°45′.704E, which places us at the same approximate latitude as the Rogue River in Oregon (for those of you keeping track at home.) Our arrival here is one of the happiest accomplishments of our sailing adventure, one of the reasons we decided a year ago to come to the Med via the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. We are in a good place.

In order to get to Montenegro from Turkey, we spent 6 weeks sailing 500 miles across Greece. It was a spectacular experience which we were lucky to share with our friends Randy and Susan (joining us in the photo above.) If we weren’t on a schedule to meet up with family, we could have easily spent months or even years in Greece.

We could write 30 blog posts and post 1,000 photos and still not entirely capture the full extent of our experience in this country. This blog post is my initial attempt and focuses on the harbors and anchorages we visited during our passage. Jenna will be following up with her beautiful photos, as usual.

Rhodes
We cleared out of Turkey in Marmaris and made the 25 mile passage to Rhodes in half a day. We were able to secure one of the last available berths in the Mandraki Harbor in the port of Rhodes, but it took us 45 minutes to med-moor on the quay due to the 25 knot cross-breeze. It was not fun, but we later learned that 2 other bats had tried to moor in that same spot and gave up. That made us feel a little better. Our berth was at 36°27′.054N, 28°13′.600E. After securing the boat, our entire family made the pilgrimage to the Port Police, Customs, Immigration, and then back to the Port Police. We stopped for our anniversary dinner at our first outdoor Greek taverna in the middle of this process. and eventually everything sorted itself out. We were finally in the EU! The Port of Rhodes is centered around an old town and fort that was built by the Knights of Saint John during the Crusades. The museum is excellent, as is the ancient Greek stadium and amphitheater. Unfortunately, the Colossus of Rhodes is long-gone.

Tilos
After Rhodes we went to Tilos for an overnight stopover. We anchored on the south side of the island at 36°25′.753N, 27°20′.894E in 30 feet of water. On the way to Tilos, we caught an actual tuna fish, proving once and for all the the Med is not completely fished out. The anchorage provides good shelter from the prevailing northerly meltemi wind, but we woke up to a southerly and exited the harbor at first light.

Astapálaia
Our next stop was Astipálaia, an island off the beaten tourist track that had a reputation in the middle ages for being a haven for pirates and smugglers who hid their boats in Astipálaia’s many coves. We anchored in a little harbor by ourselves in the middle of the south coast at 36°34′.416N, 26°23′.234E in 25 feet of water. I brought my bike to shore and struggled over the little mountain range to visit the main town of Skala. Later we all had dinner in our anchorage at a cute taverna with brightly colored chairs and an interesting mural of a pirate wench sporting an ouzo-firing submachine gun.

Jenna just sat there, shaking her head. It was a very quiet and relaxing island to visit. We stayed two nights.

Santorini
This is the famous Greek tourist island with the iconic blue-domed, white painted houses perched on the cliffs of a massive ancient volcano. Even though Santorini is 10 miles long and is visited by four cruise ships a day, it only has one small harbor, Vlikhada, located at its southern tip. Fortunately we were able to cajole our way into a berth there and used it as our base in Santorini for a week. 36°19′.997N, 25°26′.136E. The anchorage is very small and very shallow; upon our exit we wrapped a mooring chain around one of our propellers as we navigated the channel in 6 feet of water. Oh my goodness, Santorini was a special place! Our friends Randy and Susan flew in from Seattle and joined us here for the start of their 2 week Sophie Adventure Cruise. We toured the island in a rental car for a couple of days. We did the famous walk along the cliffs from Thira to Finikia. We visited the preserved ruins of one of the oldest archaeological sites of pre-Hellenic Greece. We toured a wine museum with underground animatronic displays of 19th century wine making. We ate great food, drank good wine, and even discovered a bakery with an outdoor, self-service kegerator. Birthplace of civilization, indeed!

My personal favorite was sitting in a taverna above the Vlikhados harbor at sunset and watching the ballet of 25 charter catamarans all coming in to a narrow, 200 meter-wide harbor after sunset. It was quite a show!

Folégandros
After the hustle and bustle of Santorini, it was nice to sail over to Folégandros, a quiet island with a chora (Greek town) on a cliff overlooking a broad expanse of sea. We anchored in the main harbor and hiked up the road to have dinner and watch Eurocup football in the town. At one point I even rented a quad 4×4 to make it easier for a hungry, post-school Hazel to make it up the hill to dinner. This was a great spot. We anchored at 36°36′.791N, 24°57′.050E in 12 feet of water.

Milos
Our next stop was Milos, which has some of the best beaches in all of the Med. It’s also the home the famous statue “Venus de Milo”, which was found by a farmer in a field here and “sold” to the local French consul in the late 1800’s. (The more I tour local historical sites of ancient civilizations in this part of the world, the more angry I become that so many of the local treasures are now housed in museums in London, Paris, and Berlin.) We anchored in the southeast corner of the big harbor of Ornos Milou at 36°41′.475N, 24°26′.735E, which gave us the best available shelter from the meltemi. The were some boats on the other side of the bay that were getting smashed against the town quay in the 30 knot winds and 3 foot waves. We were safe. Jenna took our guests and the kiddies in the rental car for a day of beach excursions while I stayed on Sophie and did some Jamie work. Randy always wanted an upside-down backwards Speedo shot, and on Milos he made it happen. It was a great day for all of us.

Sifnos
We really liked Sifnos and anchored in the double harbor of Faros on the south coast at 36°56′.341N, 24°44′.766E in 12 feet of turquoise water. Our anchorage only fit 5 other boats, including a big charter boat with a bunch of older French men and their “granddaughters.” We spent 2 days at Sifnos. The grownups enjoyed swimming, the kiddies enjoyed motoring around in our little “Baby” dinghy, and we all enjoyed eating at the local beachfront taverna 2 nights in a row. At this point we were really getting into the Eurocup football tournament and watched games both nights.

Paros
After Sifnos we sailed our way over to Paros and anchored in the Ormos Plastira bay at 37°07′.475N, 25°13′.070E in 15 feet of water. We spent a few nights here enjoying a local beach with weird rock formations, a good local taverna for football, and excellent swimming. We also met the Lockharts, an English family that was taking a year off to explore the world. They have two boys, and it was great to see the kiddies have some playmates their own age.

Mikonos
We spent 8 days in Mikonos, partly to enjoy the nightlife and partly because we were pinned in by a strong northerly meltemi. Randy really wanted to experience the nightlife on Mikonos, and the island didn’t didn’t let him down (although we did miss Lindsay Lohan’s 30th birthday party here by ten days.) Mikonos has multiple anchorages along its south coast, all providing some shelter from the meltemi, but the wind coming off the mountains can really pick up. We spent our fist nights in the bay opposite the beach club Super Paradiso (above) at 37°24′.761N, 25°22′.226E anchored off the beach in 40 feet of water. The beach club had over a thousand people along with a club dj playing boom boom house music. We rented a couple of beach umbrellas and soaked in the scene.

Later that night the four grownups hitchhiked, walked, and cabbed around a headland to the nightclub Cabo Paradiso and stayed out until 4:00 AM! We definitely weren’t in Indonesia any more. Later that morning we moved east 3 bays to Kalafatis and anchored at 37°26′.436N, 25°25′.392E in 30 feet of sand off the beach. The beach clubs here were more family-oriented, we got to watch some some world-class windsurfing, and we celebrated some school milestones at an excellent Italian restaurant nearby. Later in the week we motored over to the main harbor of Ornos and encountered meltemi gusts of 40-50 knots along the way. We were worried we had made a big mistake as we entered the harbor, but found an anchoring spot in the lee of a cliff at 37°24′.922N, 25°19′.183E.

We could see big whitecaps 50 meters away from us in the main harbor, but we were sheltered in our little anchorage spot. We said our goodbyes to Randy and Susan, who pretty much had the best-ever Sophie Adventure Cruise of any of our guests over the last 3½ years. We then stayed tucked up against our nice cliff for another four days as we waited for the wind to die down. (Diva, the Bintang t-shirt is for you. Enjoy Indo!)

Delos and Rinia
When the meltemi finally subsided, we made a 5 mile trip on Sophie over to an anchorage on the east side of the island of Rinia (37°24′.521N, 25°14′.175E) from where we could take the dinghy to the amazing archaeological site at Delos. Delos is the mythical birthplace of Artemis and Apollo and served as the economic and cultural capital of the eastern Mediterreanan for 500 years. During our tour of the extensive and beautiful ruins, Hazel slipped and scraped her foot pretty badly, so I took her back to Sophie in the dinghy. The chop and wind had picked up significantly as we crossed the bay back to Rinia, so Hazel and I took Sophie right over to the day anchorage at Delos (37°23′.646N, 25°15′.788E), and collected Jenna and Leo after their tour.

Kythnos
After we were all back onboard Sophie on Delos, Jenna and I decided to make to the 40 mile late afternoon run over to Kythnos instead of spending the night on the south side of Rinia. For our first night on Kythnos, we anchored in the port of Loutro on the east side of the island in a quiet harbor with two other boats. We anchored at 37°23′.716N, 24°27′.494E in 50 of water with a lot of chain out. The next morning we motored around to the west side of Kythnos and dropped a hook in Ormos Fikiadha at 37°24′.823N, 24°22′.827E in 12 feet of sand. It was a wonderful, protected anchorage with a sand bar beach. At times there were 30 boats there, but that was OK because the swimming was excellent. There was a family taverna on a small cliff overlooking the beach, and a mile away was another bay with a taverna that showed football. We joined the Germans one night (above) and the French the next. Jenna and I even went on a date by ourselves at night with the dinghy to the town 3 miles away! We could have spent a month here on Kythnos and cannot wait to return.

Sounion
We eventually and reluctantly had to leave Kythnos to continue our journey north to visit with family in Montenegro, and we randomly picked Sounion as a halfway stop between Kythnos and Athens. What a halfway spot! Sounion is located at the southern tip of the Attic peninsula and features the Temple of Poseidon, one of the great preserved temples of ancient Greece. We anchored under the temple and wandered up the hill for a visit. Afterwards, a squall with 40+ knots of wind came through just as we were getting back on Sophie. We found ourselves anchored a little too close for comfort right under base of the cliffs and the temple. So we moved the boat to the middle of the harbor, with plenty of swinging room, and let out all of our chain in 35 feet of water. We survived the night and have a newfound respect for the god of the sea. Our final anchorage was at 37°39′.183N, 24°01′.327E.

Athens
After Sounion we motored the 25 miles up to Athens and took a berth at the Zéa Marina in the Pereaeus district on the waterfront. There were over 40 superyachts in this 1,000 boat marina, but the marina staff tucked us onto a quay in front of the police station next to a collection of other cruising boats. We didn’t do much in our three days in Athens except visit the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Erechtheon, the Theater of Dionysus, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the Areopagus, the Temple of Hephaestus, the Ancient Agora, the Stoa of Attica, the National Archaeological Museum, the National Gardens, the Zappio Megaro, Hadrian’s Arch, the Temple of Athena Nike, the Monastiraki District, the Plaka District, and the Temple of Olympian Zeus. We also squeezed in a playdate with the Lockharts at the local playground and wound up staying out all night with the parents watching the Eurocup and then dancing until dawn. Afterwards we took the subway with the kiddies to a mall and watched the film BFG. My personal Athens highlight was wandering into a marine chandlery with Hazel and discovering that the store had the best inventory of Jabsco marine toilet spare parts I have ever encountered in my entire life! Better than Fisheries, better than West, better than any place in New Zealand. We’re talking electric Quiet Flush discharge ports right on the rack, right next to Pumpguard prefilter replacement screens! (No more finger cuts from cleaning worn out Pumpguard filters for me!) And the guy behind the counter knew his stuff. Indeed, Athens was a special place that we will never forget. At some point I assume Jenna will share a photo or two. 37°56′.062N, 23°38′.950E.

Galaxidi (Via the Corinth Canal)
After an early departure from Zéa, we motored the 25 miles to the entrance of the Corinth Canal, a 3 mile long cut through a cliff that would save us 100 miles of beating against the meltemi if we went on the outside of the peninsula. We tied up to the Canal authority pier, paid our €280 transit fee, and then proceeded in a mini convoy through a 100 foot wide trench with 200 foot cliffs on either side of us. It was pretty cool.

After we exited the canal, we motored another 40 miles through the Gulf of Corinth and settled upon the little town of Galaxidi at 38°22′.863N, 22°23′.401E on the north side of the gulf. What a lovely little town! We anchored in 20 feet of sand off of an impromptu beach club at the tip of the village where a dj was spinning house music and families were enjoying their Saturday afternoon. There were three other boats in the anchorage, fifteen boats on the quay, and all of the tourists in the little town were Greek. We wound up spending three nights here and could have stayed a month. Jenna and I spent a night in the only taverna in town that showed football, and we were the only non-Greeks in the crowd. We made a day trip up into the mountains to visit Delphi, the holy site of Hellenic Greece, and soaked in the majesty of ancient civilizations. We swam in tranquil waters surrounded by mountains. It was yet again another special place.

Levkas
After we left Galaxidi, we exited the Gulf of Corinth, rounded the corner into the Ionian Sea, and made our way north to the island of Levkas for an overnight stop. We anchored in the big bay past town, surrounded by 50 other boats in 25 feet of water at 38°41′.344N, 20°42′.397E. We didn’t go to shore, but enjoyed a post-passage swim in the warm water. As we entered and exited Levkas, we passed by the private island of Skorpios, which used to be owned by Aristotle Onassis. He married Jackie Kennedy there in the 60’s. The island is now owned by the daughter of a Russian oligarch who made his money by consolidating control of Russia’s potash industry during the rise of Putin. He must be a clever man. Potash.

Paxos
After our night in Levkas, we continued our northing to Paxos, where we anchored in another tourquoise lagoon at Lakka on the northern tip of the island. On our way, we transited Levkas Canal, a mile-long cut through a salt marsh. The canal is blocked at its northern tip by a ferry that serves as a bridge between the mainland and the island, and every hour the ferry sounds a horn, turns sideways, and lets the waiting boats pass by. It was pretty funny. When we arrived in Paxos, we wall-tied to a cliff in 15 feet of water in a small harbor with 50 other boats at 39°14′.259N, 20°07′.910E. At this point, Jenna and I were beginning to feel pretty good about our med-mooring and wall tying skills. There is a big charter industry in the northern Ionian, which explains the number of boats in the harbor, but the charter boats cleared out in a couple of days in order to return to their bases for the weekend transition to new clients. Apparently Thursday night in Lakka is Greek dancing night at one of the waterfront tavernas, but most people skipped that to watch Germany lose to France in the Eurocup. (Grrrrr). We spent 5 days in Lakka and loved every second. At this point, we had become comfortable sending the kiddies into town in the Baby in the mornings by themselves to buy bread and produce. It’s a significant point of pride and responsibility for them. We also became friends with a Spanish family with 10 year old twins (boy and girl), and the kiddies spent two days swimming back and forth between our boat and theirs. It was the sort of experience Jenna and I assumed we would encounter all of the time during our circumnavigation, and in Paxos it actually happened. We spent 5 days here and could easily spend an entire summer in the Ionian. Perhaps next year.

Corfu
Our last stop in Greece was Gouvia Marina in Corfu, where we spent 2 nights hanging out and checking out of the country. This was another 1,000 boat marina, and they unfortunately lost our reservation as we approached, so they parked us at at 39°39′.002N, 19°50’887E on the far fringes of their docks, about a kilometer from the marina office. We weren’t able to see much of Corfu, but Jenna and I were able to see the Eurocup final at one of the marina bars. Hazel enjoyed the marina pool. We spent two nights eating at Harry’s Taverna, an excellent spot 4 blocks from the marina.

So that wraps up my initial summary of our trip across Greece. We are now stuck in Montenegro, surrounded by mountains, warm water, family, and a rich cultural history. Last night we participated in the annual ceremony where locals take their boats out to a man-made island in the bay and throw rocks into the water to continue to build up support around the church where my brother David and his wife Goga were married. It was part religious ceremony …

… part water fight.

We threw our rocks into the water and avoided any unnecessary splashing.

Have I mentioned lately how lucky we are?

Reflections: Maldives

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Jenna

Here’s a post about our experiences travelling to the Maldives during January and February 2016.

From Thailand to the Maldives

It was hard to say goodbye to Thailand after five months, but we looked forward to sailing again on the open ocean. We celebrated our last night at Coconut’s in Phuket, with the chef/owner Phen and cruising friends. Hazel took orders and delivered everyone’s food. She loved helping out in the kitchen. We all miss Phen!

Jamie’s brother Richy, our neice and nephew Katie and Nic, and our friend Travis joined us for a 10-day crossing to Male, Maldives.

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We blogged about the crossing in real time (Sophie is Wicked Fast Again, Sailing Along Quite Nicely, Bay of Bengal, Ohhhhh Halfway There, Crossing a Highway, Beneath the Subcontinent, Current-aided Run to the Barn, and Made It!), so here is a glimpse of the pictures from our adventure:

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Land Ho!

We had one of the easiest and most fun passages of our entire journey. Even so, there is nothing better than the feeling of seeing land at the end of a successful ocean crossing.

Male is a daunting sight with tall buildings covering almost every square inch of the island.

After anchoring in the deepest waters since Jayapura harbor in Indonesia, checking in with our agent and the government authorities, and moving to a shallower and more protected anchorage for the night, we celebrated.

After picking up a few veggie provisions for the weekend, we got an early start out to one of the nearby atolls for some snorkeling and sun while awaiting our formal cruising permit.

Anchored next to a handful of super yachts, Sophie felt quite small. We didn’t mind the view, though.

The next day, we headed back to Hulhumale to pick up Jenn and a few more provisions before heading out in search of manta rays and some more remote anchorages.

We only had a couple of days with Richy and Nic so we made the most of our time together, snorkeling, swimming, diving, a few games of Shotzee!, and Leo lost another tooth.

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It was so special to have Richy, Katie and Nic together on Sophie. Sigrid, Stephen and Danny we wish you could have been here too!

After Richy and Nic departed, we sampled some local food and made a grocery run during a torrential downpour, discovering a broken jar of pickles on our way home, then headed out for a week of fun in the sun.

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Resorts in the Maldives are beautiful, but appear to be quite the velvet prisons. The Maldives government encourages tourism to resort islands, where they grant exceptions to many rules such as dress code or alcohol, but tourists are generally separate from locals on village islands. As cruisers, we had more freedom to travel around, although we probably experienced the least amount of cultural interaction in the Maldives compared with the other countries we’ve visited.

Water Sports

We spent a week island hopping through the Fulhadoo, Goidhoo and Male atolls and saw the most colorful fish since Indonesia and some early signs of recovering coral.

These photos hardly do justice to the incredible hues of blue and turquoise against white sugar sand beaches.

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We encountered sea turtles nearly everywhere we stopped.

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Discovering our own private sand island was another highlight of the week.

As with Richy and Nic, our time with Jenn, Travis and finally Katie ended too quickly. We loved every minute with you all.

Quiet Family Time

For the final two weeks of our stay in the Maldives, we explored the Ari Atoll, focusing on Sophie School, preparing the boat for our crossing to the Red Sea, and a little play time too. Hazel and Leo loved riding the rapids on their castaway raft.

Hazel’s science project.

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One afternoon, we had a bit of excitement watching a funnel cloud start to form behind us. The weather definitely shifted toward the end of our stay, with stronger winds and storms passing through more frquently.

Back in Male, the Indian Navy came to town, a showing of friendly force in the neighborhood.

One month in the Maldives only allowed us a glimpse of all the beauty here. We wish we could have stayed longer, but the Red Sea weather window beckoned. We will fondly remember the warm days, crystal waters, deep blue skies, and white sugar sand. What an adventure! Have we mentioned lately how very lucky we are?

Reflections: Holly Bali

Posted on June 22, 2016 by Jenna

Now that Sophie School is on a brief holiday, I’m catching up on my backlog of photos and stories. Here’s one reflection about some of our adventures in Indonesia last year.

Ambon, Indonesia

In February 2015, my cousin Holly sailed with us from Ambon, Indonesia to Labuan Bajo on Flores Island, and we also made a short trip to Bali.

Ambon

On Holly’s first and only night in Ambon, we took her to our favorite restaurant there, Dua Ikan, to sample some local delicacies including Pepeda, which you are meant to slurp out of your bowl without using silverware.

We had planned to spend a few days in Ambon in order to watch the Patriots win the superbowl, but our plans changed when the weather forecast changed by the next morning and a good window to cross west opened up if we departed right away and then there wouldn’t be another one for about a week. We said hasty goodbyes to friends on Per Ardua, Ocelot and Guruca Cat, called the Moore and Connor families by phone, and pulled up the anchor.

We had a great view on the way out of Ambon Bay.

Even the dolphin helped to send us off.

Sunshine, light winds and calm seas. This had the makings of a perfect day.

Later that morning, while Holly and I were on watch, almost out of sight of land, two squall lines appeared on either side of the horizon and both appeared to be moving in our direction. The systems merged right on top of us, and within minutes, we were motoring into 40 knot white-out conditions. The storm lasted for less than an hour, but it took most of the afternoon for choppy seas to subside in its aftermath. Holly’s easy introduction to overnight passages ended up being a bit more aggressive than we expected, but it was the only weather we saw during this crossing. We had light breezes and calm weather the rest of the way there.

Wakatobi

From what we read, we expected to be off the grid for our stopover in Wakatobi, but as soon as we anchoraged off Hoga Island, a small fishing boat with the local divemaster stopped by to welcome us and point out provisioning stops in the neighboring village, excellent snorkeling spots with moorings for our dinghy, and directions to find the restaurant on shore. We also had 4 bars of cell service. So much for cruising off the grid.

Hoga is one of the most beautiful islands we saw in Indonesia. It is fringed by white sandy beaches and has one of the most colorful reefs, teeming with little fish. We spent a couple days snorkeling, beachcombing and playing games.

Leo and Hazel also practiced many dives off Sophie.

We also watched some spectacular cloud formations.

We experienced great weather at Hoga, and then we left just in time.

We had almost a full moon for this leg of the trip which helped tremendously at night to spot FADs before hitting them. In this area, they were not small homemade fish traps, but 10 foot square floating platforms sometimes with small huts on them. We had a couple near misses, but managed to dodge them before it was too late. There is a good reason to avoid sailing at night in Indonesia, and we only did a handful of nighttime crossings during more than 3,000 miles sailing there.

Flores Island

We made landfall again in the 17 Islands Ruing Marine Park off Flores Island in the East Nusa Tenggarra region of Indonesia. This is an uninhabited national marine park with pristine beaches, coral reefs and very few visitors. We anchored in 25 feet of sand off a small island that the kids dubbed “Sand Dollar Island” after the thousands of sand dollars we found lining the beach.

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“Sand Dollar Island” in 17 Islands Riung Marine Park

On our second night there, Hazel developed a high fever and complained of body pains, so we made the decision to leave at first light for Labuan Bajo, the nearest city, 80 miles away. After an uneventful trip, Holly, Hazel and I flew on the first available flight to Bali while Jamie and Leo looked after Sophie. We took Hazel to the hospital late that night where she braved a very big needle for blood tests and a thorough exam before we checked into our hotel to await the results. By morning Hazel’s fever broke and we were relieved to learn she didn’t have dengue, malaria or other serious tropical illness. With one day left of Holly’s vacation, we spent a leisurely day at a resort.

We had so much fun together on our mini girls’ holiday and loved every minute of our time with Holly in Indonesia. We are such a lucky family!

Turkey is Not Southeast Asia or the Pacific

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Jamie

Sophie is currently moored in Sarsala in the Skopea Limani area of Turkey’s Lycean coast, just 5 miles south of Göcek. It is a pretty bay with a beach and a stunning view of nearby mountains. It feels like Desolation Sound back in British Columbia, except there are more tourists here. We will likely stay in the Göcek area for a week, focusing on Sophie school and boat projects. It’s quite a pleasant location.

Now that we have been cruising in Turkey for a couple of weeks, it’s time to share with you some early thoughts on how cruising here is different from cruising in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. We will also update you on some new additions to our home.

Cooler Weather Makes Our Machines Happier
The ambient temperature here is 20 degrees F lower than in Thailand, and this makes a big difference for how efficiently our machines work. As I’ve mentioned before, Sophie is simply a collection of different systems packaged together, and if the machines in these systems are happy, then Sophie is happy. We use Victron energy charger/inverters to charge our main battery bank, and they now run with up to 50% more efficiency in the cooler weather here, producing a peak charge of 180 amps (at 12 volts) compared to 110 amps in Thailand. The photo above shows 180 amps flowing into our main battery bank. This NEVER happened in the Pacific or in Asia. Never. The Victrons have internal sensors that reduce their charge when the machines get hot, and these sensors are apparently enjoying the cool Turkish spring. On the load side, our batteries are lasting longer between charges because our 2 refrigerators and 1 freezer aren’t working as hard in the cooler weather. Fewer people are opening up the fridges for cold drinks, and the machines’ compressors don’t have to work as hard to maintain their temperatures. Our watermaker also appears to be quite happy in the cooler weather, with less growth gunking up its filters. In Thailand we had to swap out the external filters every 2 weeks due to algae growth, but we haven’t had to change a filter since we passed through the Suez Canal. Our water tastes much better as well!

No Tuna, But Plenty of Turtles and Goats
We have been trolling for fish since we left Cyprus but have experienced exactly zero fish action. We have not seen any offshore fishing boats, either. There are some small fishing boats using hand nets right outside of harbors, and the tourist restaurants all serve grilled fish that look like little sea perch. The village retail areas also have fishing stores that sell $500 fishing poles and buckets of lures to the tourists who come here to pursue their dreams. But there are no big pelagic fish. None. There are, however, thousands of sea turtles along this stretch of coast. No one ever told me that we would see more sea turtles in Turkey than in any other country on our adventure so far. Turtles are everywhere here. We have to dodge them in the dinghy. Some of them are big suckers, measuring more than a meter across. Apparently June is turtle egg-laying season, and there are many egg-laying beaches nearby. There are also goats on every hillside of every harbor and every bay. They seem to enjoy eating right next to where we tie our shore lines. I haven’t seen any gnaw marks on our lines yet, but I remain alert to the danger.

Fewer Cruisers, More Boats
There are a lot of boats out on the water here in Turkey, but almost all of them are charters or tour boats, and the people who charter boats use them every day. From our anchorage right now I can see three boats out sailing in the afternoon breeze. By comparison, I think we saw three sailboats during our entire passage across Indonesia. But we haven’t met any long-term cruisers since we were in Israel. It’s still off-season, and we are hopeful we will connect with some fellow cruisers soon. It was easy for us to do so in places like Thailand, because when you walk into the cruisers bar by the marina, there were … cruisers there! But it doesn’t seem to be the same here, at least so far. Also, most of the charter boats here in Turkey are US-flagged, because apparently our country is a tax haven for people who purchase and operate charter boats in Turkey.

Our Lawn is Gone!
For the last three years we’ve had a patch of bright green seaweed growing at the end of our our stern transoms. Apparently the extra weight of all our systems, machines, and batteries pushes the last bits of transom into the water, and in the tropics the resulting warm water pools sitting in the bright sunshine become perfect growth environments for sea grass. This stuff was a bane of my existence throughout the Pacific and Indian oceans. All the scrubbing, scraping, chemicals, and antifouling in the world couldn’t prevent this stuff from continuing to grow. We lovingly referred to these grass patches as our lawn. But now that we are in the Med, the lawn is suddenly … gone! Our transoms are bright and shiny. We hope this is due to the colder temperatures and not to the presence of some new type of poison in the water.

Dust in the Wind
When we transited the Suez Canal, the boat became covered in a heavy layer of brown grit that blew in from the nearby desert. We assumed at the time that this was a minor price we had to pay for the convenience of sailing directly into the Med. However, we’ve been in the Med for a couple of months, and there is STILL a layer of brown dust that blows in from the nearby hills. Now that we are out anchoring, it seems crazy to run the watermaker for a couple of hours to produce enough fresh water to rinse off the boat if the boat will become covered with dust again in two days. It briefly rained last week, and the raindrops contained dust. In the Pacific, Sophie’s deck was clean due to the frequent rain, but Sophie’s waterline and back porch had a layer of green growth. In Turkey, the boat is dirtier due to dust-born wind, but the waterline and back porch are sparkly white. I am not sure which is better.

We Finally Filled Our LPG Bottles!
We use LPG for cooking in our galley and on our barbecue. We use US-compliant LPG bottles, but unfortunately every nation has its own standards (meaning non-US compliant) for the fittings used to fill LPG bottles. This wasn’t a problem for us in the Pacific because the presence of so many American boats guaranteed that every port had the correct gear to refill US LPG bottles. We also didn’t use LPG as much due to the tropical climate. 100 degrees of ambient heat in the cabin is a great motivator to not bake. In Southeast Asia, it was more of a challenge for us to fill LPG but we always seemed to find a way. However, no one in Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, or Eastern Turkey could fill our LPG bottles. We were starting to worry, cutting back on our barbecues and use of the oven. I wandered Turkish ports with an empty LPG bottle in my backpack, visiting different shops hoping someone could help us out. For two weeks I had no luck. But I finally found someone in Göcek who could help (on my third stop of the day, no less!), and we now have enough cooking gas to get us to Italy. I think the girls plan to bake later today.

No Dinghy Covers
In the Pacific and Southeast Asia, EVERY cruising dinghy has a canvas or Sunbrella cover over it’s tubes to protect the material from sun exposure. Here in Turkey, no one does this. It makes Sophie’s tenders stand out in a crowd.

Produce is Cheap, But Marinas and Restaurants Are $$$$$
We can go to a produce market here in Turkey and fill a big blue Ikea bag with just-picked tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, mint, basil, lettuce, peaches, green beans, and cherries for just 3 Euros for the entire bag. A loaf of fresh bread from a bakery costs 50 cents. On the other hand, a night on a dock in a marina costs over 100 Euros, and the nearby restaurants can charge that much for a meal for the 4 of us. Needless to say, we are enjoying our fresh produce while floating at anchor.

We Love Love Love our Big Yellow Shorelines
When we lived in Seattle, we purchased a length of 20 mm floating polypropylene rope for stern tying to shore when we cruised Desolation Sound, the area back home that looks just like this anchorage. Specifically, I went to Fisheries Supply and asked to buy 100 meters of this type of rope. They had a brand new spool of 200 meters and offered to sell me the entire spool for an extra $25 dollars. I agreed, used the rope for a summer cruise in Canada, then buried it in Sophie’s forward lazarette for the next 6 years. Well, Turkey is shore tying country, and we are putting our 200 meters of floating rope to good use, doing so with a great deal of love and respect. It is quite easy to work with, especially when shore tying in a strong crosswind like we did the other day. We secured the line to a bollard on the cliff, had 100 meters of slack in the water while the wind blew Sophie parallel to the cliff, got the line onto one of our big genoa winches, and then cranked Sophie snug up to where she was supposed to be. It was awesome.

Well, that should give you a sense for how cruising in Turkey compares to cruising in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. It’s not better or worse, just different.

Here is an update on some of the projects we’ve been working on this past week:

New Pasarelle
A pasarelle is a fancy name for the gangplank sailors in the Med use for getting on and off their boats when they are stern tied to a pier. Since all boats in the Med stern tie to piers while in harbor, pasarelles are mandatory equipment for cruising boats. For Sophie, we purchased and installed a 2.6 meter carbon fiber folding pasarelle made by GS-Composite in Slovenia.

Its features include a nonskid surface, carbon fiber rails, a weight under 8 kilos, and a compact carrying bag for storage.

We installed a stainless steel mount for the pasarelle on one of our port transom steps and then spent some time playing geometry with the supporting halyard to make sure that the windmills don’t chop away at the halyard during a sudden wind shift. Hazel would like to use the pasarelle as a diving board.

Bilge Pump for the Big Dinghy
Our friends (and fellow successful Indian Ocean and Red Sea passage makers!) Terry and Christine on Tekanova have the same model Highfield dinghy we have, and they installed an electric bilge pump on theirs. Jenna and I realized that we should probably do the same.

While we were back in Seattle last month, I found a low profile Rule model that fits in the dinghy’s bilge without having to permanently prop open the dinghy’s little bilge grate.

I did the wiring and installed a switch the other day. The new pump works great, and it means we will have a cleaner dinghy, because we will be more willing to hose it out when it’s in the water.

Raymarine GPS Woes
Since we left Israel, we have been intermittently losing our GPS signal on our Raymarine G Series multifunction displays. These are our primary navigation computers, and this new problem is annoying. We have multiple backup GPS units on board, including a redundant set of Navionics charts on Jenna’s iPad, so technically this is not a dangerous situation for us. Our overall Raymarine system is 8 years old, and we increasingly find ourselves having to reconnect various connection points on the proprietary SeaTalk and SeaTalkng networks that connect all of this stuff together. (The more I cruise, the more I realize that marine electronics problems are usually due to a faulty connection somewhere.) We’re still tracking down where the bad connection is for this problem, and I even disassembled the Raymarine GPS antenna and replaced its lithium battery, but that does not seem to have completely fixed the problem.

The Fleet is Out
Now that we are back in slow cruising mode, Jenna and the kids continue to focus on making great progress on Sophie School, and I continue to work through my list of boat chores and projects.

At this point we have our entire “fleet” of cruising toys out on Sophie’s deck and ready to use: both paddle boards, both kayaks, both dinghies, and all four bikes. We call our small dinghy “The Baby”, and we haven’t used it since Thailand.

In Europe, The Baby will be the main vehicle the kiddies use for getting to shore on their own, most likely starting today once school is over.

Next Steps for Sophie
We plan to slowly move ourselves along the Turkish coast for another couple of weeks before we meet some Seattle friends in Greece. We will spend a month in Greece, then head up to Montenegro and Croatia for July and August. We would like to spend the fall and winter in Italy and will try to get visitor visas for Italy to avoid the restrictions of Shengen visas (where you can only stay 90 out of every 180 days in most EU countries.)

As usual, time seems to be going by way too quickly. We are very very lucky to be spending our lives doing this. It’s all good.

From Egypt to Turkey

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Jamie

Sophie is currently anchored in Üçaĝiz harbor in the Kekova Roads on Turkey’s southern coast. Our location is 36.11.64n, 029.50.58e. This is our first anchorage since the Maldives, a very distant 12 weeks and 3,100 miles ago. We have made additional stops in Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, and the United States since then.
We have covered a lot of ground. It feels great to be back at anchor, like our life is finally returning back to normal. Sophie School has resumed, the water toys are out, and Jenna and I just completed a paddleboard circuit of the harbor, accompanied by turtles, fishies, and goats. I even got to fix a toilet and a bilge pump since we arrived here the other day.

Back in March we rested in Port Ghalib, Egypt for a couple of days after our long passage across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. There were 5 other boats there that had completed the Red Sea passage around the same time we did. Other than being able to connect with fellow cruisers, there wasn’t much to see. Port Ghalib is a destination resort that is suffering a 90% reduction in tourism due to the terrorist attacks in Egypt. Most of the businesses there had stopped paying rent to the resort’s absentee Kuwaiti landlords.

Our Red Sea guards departed Sophie a couple of hours after we arrived. The German bar that I had been looking forward to was a bit of a disappointment. They didn’t even serve German beer!

The resort maintains a sailboat that had crashed up on the rocks ten years ago as a reminder of how treacherous the local waters can be. They are proud of it, while all of the cruisers view it as a very bad omen.

On the positive side, Port Ghalib offered a very protected harbor, an easy government check-in process, and diesel fuel pumps right on the quay. It was an excellent stop after our long passage. We do not regret having made the long push to get here.

After Port Ghalib, we made an overnight run to Port of Suez at the entrance to the Suez Canal. For the first 6 hours we slowly motored into a steep chop, but the wind soon swung around to a southerly as forecast, and we had an uneventful trip for the rest of the way.

We stayed at the Suez Yacht Club, which 15 years ago had a restaurant, bar, and swimming pool. Fleets of 50 sailboats at a time used to stop there as they cruised up and down the Red Sea. Now the yacht club is reduced to a single plastic floating dock with no facilities other than a security guard. We were just the second sailboat of the year to call on them, after Egoiste, a Jeanneau 56 that left the Maldives three weeks before we did. The yacht club’s facilities have been handed over to Egypt’s military, which now uses it as an Army and Navy Club.

Our dock was just 100 meters to the entrance of the canal, and it was a little weird to see 1,200 foot container ships passing us as they made their way into the desert.
Our agent met us on the dock and took care of our paperwork. He also arranged for us to take a taxi into town and have dinner at a traditional kebab restaurant. It was our first real exposure to local middle eastern food. No one in the restaurant spoke English, and as a result we ordered way too much food, including chicken, lamb, pita, humus, tahini, salads, and sweets. We had some excellent leftovers.

The next day a tour guide took us in a van into Cairo where we toured the Cairo Museum and then visited the pyramids at Giza. It was a stunning experience, made all the better (and sadder) by the complete lack of tourists in the city. There were no lines at the Cairo Museum, and we were able to take photos of the Pyramids with no people in the background. Apparently this is the first time someone had done this since Napoleon visited over 200 years ago.

Some people question whether we are taking big risks visiting places where there have been terrorist attacks within the last year. Our view is that if we don’t visit countries that depend on tourism to support their economy, then the terrorists win. We will never do anything that we consider unsafe for our family, and we did skip visiting some other aras of Egypt this time. Cairo is no different than Paris or Brussels in terms of safety right now. The local people rely on income from tourists to survive, and we believe it is our role as world travelers to help them.

After a couple of days in Suez, we picked up our pilot and transited the first half (40 miles) of the Suez Canal, making an overnight stop at the yacht club in the port of Ismalia. It was surreal taking Sophie through the desert. All we could see were mounds of sand on either side of the canal, with army forts and emergency floating bridges every couple of kilometers. During the ’73 war, the Egyptian Third Army was trapped and surrounded on the wrong side of the Suez, and apparently the country never wants that to happen again.

We even had to stop for 20 minutes during the tail end of a floating bridge staging exercise. Each bridge section had diesel engines attached to it, and the entire bridge swung like a door across the canal. Later on during that day we passed by a couple of tanks that were crossing the canal on motorized rafts. There was a lot of military activity.

The only other thing I remember from that first day of our canal passage was how cold it was, how very very cold it was. Jenna stayed below doing Sophie School with the diesel cabin heaters running at full blast. I was up top with the pilot, and I was wearing a puffy insulated coat over 3 layers of sweatshirts. I even had to loan the pilot my Gill sailing jacket, and he was a little disappointed when I had to inform him at the end of the day that it was not a gift.

We made it to Ismalia by mid-afternoon and docked at the yacht club there. We caught the tail end of lunch at the restaurant, which was mostly serving a business crowd, and then went to bed.

The next morning we met out new pilot and quickly proceeded on our way. Once again it was cold, and once again our pilot assumed my loan of the Gill sailing jacket was a gift. He spoke no English and spent most of his time quietly praying. We offered him tea and kebab for lunch, which he was finally willing to accept once we convinced him that it was halal. At one point he even made pig oinking noises in trying to communicate to us that he couldn’t eat pork. But it all worked out, and he enjoyed his lamb, hummus, and tahini.

During this leg Jenna climbed to the top of the mast and took some pretty awesome photos of Sophie driving through a trench of water in the middle of an Arabian desert. Surreal.

By early afternoon we reached Port Said, and a pilot boat pulled by to disembark our pilot. We suddenly found ourselves motoring into the Mediterranean sea on a cold and sunny afternoon. We were greeted by some of the fattest dolphins we’ve ever seen. It was quite a moment for us.

We officially cleared out of Egypt back in Port Suez, so we had no need to stop in Port Said and headed directly for Herzilya, a port in Israel 15 kilometers north of Tel Aviv. It was an easy overnight run, highlighted by my 3:00 AM interview over VHF with Israeli Defense Forces. Even though we had contacted them in advance, they wanted to know the name, birth date, and passport number of every soul on board. The discussion took an hour.

Later that morning when we were 10 miles out of Herzilya, an IDF patrol boat roared out to greet us. They did a big circle around Sophie and then stopped 100 meters off our port side. They didn’t say much on radio, other than requesting that all passengers and crew please come up on deck. In Southeast Asia and in the Pacific, when military patrol boats greeted Sophie, the military on board whipped out their mobile phones and took selfies with Sophie in the background. The Israelis were all business and had a 50 caliber machine gun pointed at us the entire time. We also assume they had an infrared camera on their boat to see if we had any people hiding below. But they were super friendly and after a minute said “We hope you enjoy your stay in Israel” and roared off.

An hour later we docked at the marina in Herzilya. After we stern-tied to the pier, a couple of millennial guys in civilian clothes came up to us, said they were with the border police, and asked if they could search the boat. They were quite polite, and I wasn’t worried at all that they were going to ask us for a bottle of wine like the customs dudes in Tonga had done. When they were finished searching, they asked me to accompany them off of the boat, where we were joined by two young women who asked if I minded if they could ask me some questions. I had been through this drill during my previous visit to Israel, and it was fascinating to go through it again. One woman smiled and asked all of the questions while the other three watched me. Where were we from, what did we do for a living, did we carry any packages for people from the Maldives of Egypt, did we ever leave the key to the boat with anyone, what did I do for a living again? It was all super friendly and super competent, and after 20 minutes they smiled and said “Welcome to Israel. We hope you enjoy your stay!”

Herzilya is a luxury, modern marina, unlike anyplace we had visited since our stop in Singapore a year earlier. The marina complex included a Ritz Carlton hotel, a mall, and 20 outdoor tourist restaurants along a broad waterfront promenade. We stayed there for 10 days, making side trips to Jerusalem, Jordan, and Acre. We also reconnected with the Sagiv family, friends from Seattle whose children had gone to daycare with Leo and Hazel before we left on our adventure and they moved home to Israel.

We loved our stay in Israel, and we hope to return there before we leave the Mediterranean.

After Israel, we made an overnight run to Paphos on the western tip of Cyprus and stayed there for over a week. Paphos is a tourist town built around a small fishing port that doesn’t have a big marina, but we were able to obtain a stern tie berth on the police dock. The location was spectacular, with a small Crusaders castle across a courtyard from Sophie, and a bike trail led to Greek and Byzantine ruins just 500 meters away.

By the time we reached Cyprus, were beginning to master our new Mediterranean cruising lifestyle, and we liked it: stern-tie in an ancient harbor, visit local Egyptian/Greek/Roman/Byzantine/Ottoman ruins, avoid the waterfront tourist restaurants, and wallow in the Mediterranean “mezze” cuisine: eggplant, tomatoes, hummus, cucumbers, mint, yogurt, lamb, fish, olives, sparkling water, and dry red wine. Using Paphos as our base, we toured the entire island and feel like we barely scratched the surface during our ten days there. We plan to return to Cyprus during our cruise.

After Paphos we made yet another (and potentially our last) overnight run for a while and went to Kemer, a harbor with a marina next to the Taurus mountains in Turkey. Jenna and I had decided that after 3 and a half years living on Sophie, it was time to cut the ties and rent out our house back in Seattle. We needed a safe place in Turkey where we could park the boat for a couple of weeks while we flew back to the states to clean out our house and get it ready for tenants. Kemer fit the bill: a big, safe marina just 40 minutes from the airport in Antalya.

So we spent just 2 days in Kemer and then locked up Sophie and headed to the airport. Before we flew to the states, we made a 3 day stop in Istanbul, which is a spectacular city. We visited all of the big mosques and took a cruise on the Bosphorus. Jenna took 10,000 pictures. Our list of cities we plan to re-visit continues to grow.

Then it was off to Seattle for a 2 week visit that combined work and pleasure. We were able to pack up all of our stuff, move it into storage, clean up the house (almost), and get it ready for rental. We were also able to visit with our great friends back home. Leo and Hazel had multiple sleepovers, and one family even loaned us their brand new Beneteau 455 for a weekend rendezvous with our Seattle boating community friends. It is really important for us to maintain our roots back home, especially for Leo and Hazel, and this was a great visit.

After our 2 weeks in Seattle we flew back to Antalya and then cabbed straight back to Sophie. After being on a dock in Port Ghalib, Suez, Ismalia, Herzilya, Paphos, and Kemer, we really wanted to cut the dock lines and get back to anchoring. The Herzilya and Kemer marinas charged us us over 100 Euros per night for moorage, and for us that is not sustainable over the long run. So after one day in Kemer we saw we had a weather window and motored 50 miles around the corner to our current location.

We are now free swinging on anchor in a big protected harbor at Oçagiz. There are 8 other sailboats here. Yesterday, it was dead calm all morning, and then the wind picked up to 25 knots right after lunchtime until evening. This is apparently the weather pattern here. Within 4 kilometers are 2 castles and multiple Byzantine underwater ruins which we plan to explore with with the big dinghy. All of our systems are working, the kids have settled into their school routine, and the local produce is fresh and inexpensive. We are going to try to go three months without docking.

Once again, we are really grateful to be on this trip and feel incredibly lucky to be exploring the world on our boat.

In Praise of Fuel Bags

Posted on March 28, 2016 by Jamie

In order for Sophie to cover the 2,900 miles from the Maldives to Egypt, we decided to augment our 250 gallons of on-board fuel capacity with additional fuel bags that we lashed to our deck. This blog post explains how we did it.

Many cruisers use 5 gallon plastic jerry cans arranged around their deck in order to add fuel capacity, but Jenna and I are not big fans of this approach. In order to avoid having to make stops in Aden, Djibouti, or Sudan for fuel, we figured we needed another 250 gallons of capacity on deck. That would mean 50 jerry cans, which would likely become a permanent installation on Sophie once we were done with the Red Sea! That was too much plastic for us. I also had multiple bad experiences refueling Sophie via jerry cans when we were in Indonesia, and I wanted no part of repeating that messy scenario again.

So instead we decided to try out a series of 52 gallon flexible fuel tanks that we would arrange on deck. They are manufactured by Nauta, and we purchased one from Defender.com in October and had some friends bring it with them to Thailand when they came out for a visit. These portable fuel tanks are made from neoprene and seemed sturdy enough for our passage, so we purchased four more from Fisheries Supply in Seattle when we went home for the Christmas holidays.

The bags come without any fittings, so we also ordered a 2 inch fill pipe (above) along with a 3/8 inch drain pipe for each bag. I called Nauta’s technical support, and they told me that for our scenario we did not have to vent the bags.

When we returned to the Thailand, my brother Rich was kind enough to attach the fittings to two of the bags that we were going to test on our Thailand-Maldives passage. This involved cutting circular holes in the neoprene, inserting the lipped nipple of the fitting through the hole, and then tightening down an attached gasket. There is a good YouTube video explaining how to do this, and I urge you to check it out before attempting your own installation.

To extend the fill pipe, we attached a 6 inch length of flexible hose with a PVC cap on the top. I purchased the PVC cap at a building supply warehouse in the US.

For the drain pipe, I used some spare half inch valves I had onboard Sophie. We attached these with a short length of 1/2 inch flexible hose and hose clamps.

In theory, we would be able to fill the bags through the fill pipe using a standard marina diesel pump and nozzle, and then while underway pump the fuel from the bag on deck into Sophie’s main fuel tanks.

In Thailand we filled 2 of the bags, and after Rich received a couple of diesel face splashes, we eventually got the hang of how to do so. We felt comfortable with only 45-48 gallons of diesel in each bag. We also had to really tighten the hose clamps and bag fitting gasket rings, but once we did so the bags didn’t leak. We tied the bags down to the deck with ropes tied to grommets on the bag corners. They remained remarkably stable while underway. We also had to train Hazel to NOT WALK ON THE BAGS as she went up to the trampolines for her gymnastics exercises.

We purchased a portable diesel fuel pump to move the fuel from the bags to Sophie’s main fuel tanks. This system worked surprisingly well.

For a fuel transfer while underway, we located the portable pump right next to the fill pipe for Sophie’s starboard diesel tank and then ran a short length of 1/2 half inch hose from the pump to Sophie. The fuel pump has a 12 volt motor and some power cables, and we attached these to a power source on Sophie’s starboard engine. Since Sophie has an internal fuel pump that transfers fuel from her starboard fuel tank to her port fuel tank, we only filled her starboard tank with fuel from the external fuel bags. This kept the system relatively simple and consistent.

We then snaked a 10 meter length of 1/2 inch hose from the portable fuel pump to the drain valve on the fuel bag we were going to use, attached the hose to the bag valve with hose clamp, opened the valve, and turned on the pump. Apologies for the dirty deck. That’s fish blood.

Quite frankly, we were shocked at how well it worked. For our test on the Maldives run, we ran a hose from a fuel bag on the port deck around the aft cockpit and to the portable pump by the starboard engine. We could see the fuel line fill in about 10 seconds, and it then took 10 minutes to transfer the 45 gallons from the bag into Sophie. We never spilled a drop.

The bag collapsed on itself as it drained, similar to how a camelback water container drains, and Rich aided the process by holding one end of the bag up to expedite fuel flow.

When we were done, we simply tied the fuel bag up in the air, let it dry out for a day, and then put it away. We only needed to use one fuel bag on the Thailand-Maldives passage, but the test was a complete and total success.

I am really glad we ran the test on the Maldives passage, because it gave us one less thing to worry about as we prepared for the run to the Red Sea. Two days before we left the Maldives, we arranged for a fuel barge to come alongside Sophie. We filled both internal tanks to the brim, along with 3 bags on the starboard side.

We also filled two bags on the port side. This gave us around 480 gallons of fuel for the passage. We located each bag over a bulkhead and secured them with ropes from each bag corner to cleats or hard points on deck. For two of these, I potentially had to run a rope from one bag under another bag and instead used a canvas strap to reduce potential friction.

I asked Lagoon if we had to worry about all of this weight on deck, since each bag weighed about 310 pounds. They said it was the equivalent of having 5 fat guys hanging out on a charter and shouldn’t pose a structural issue for Sophie. We never experienced any additional squeaking during the passage, although Jenna and I felt like the boat was heavy when we left Male.

The bags were stable on deck throughout the passage, including when we were surfing down 5 meter seas in 50 knot winds and when we were pounding into 2-3 meter seas while motoring. We transferred all of the fuel while underway without incident, including a couple of transfers in 25 knot winds. It is important to transfer all of the fuel in a bag in one process and to not leaves bags partially full. When we were done with a transfer, we simply left the bags tied in place on the deck and continued on our way.

Once we reached Port Ghalib, we cleaned up the bags, let them dry in the sun for a day, rolled them up, and put them away in a locker. I assume from now on we will always have at least one bag on deck every time we do an ocean crossing. And with the new portable fuel pump, I swear that I will NEVER SYPHON FUEL AGAIN!

Life keeps getting better, and this is one of the best systems we have ever put together on Sophie.

3,200 Miles From The Maldives to Egypt

Posted on March 13, 2016 by Jamie

This may come as a bit of a surprise to many of you. Sophie has just covered 3,200 miles in the last 3 weeks, sailing from Male in the Maldives to Suez in Egypt. We plan to transit the Suez Canal this week and then spend the next 2 years cruising the Mediterranean Sea. This was obviously our most important passage since we crossed the South Pacific from the US to the Marquesas 3 years ago.

Look out, Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, Montenegro, Croatia, Italy, France, and Spain: Here Comes Sophie!

This post describes the first leg of this passage, where we covered the the 2,900 miles from Male to Port Ghalib in 17 days and 23 hours, averaging 6.7 knots. Most of this involved calm sailing over flat seas and under sunny skies.

We were extremely fortunate on the trip. We never saw any pirates. We hooked 2 big marlin while underway and surfed through sustained 50 knot winds for hours after passing the Bab el Mandeb. We sailed alone, but there were 4 other sailboats in Port Ghalib that had also successfully completed the passage. Another sailboat arrived ahead of us in Suez. Our daughter Hazel celebrated her 8th birthday in the middle of Captain Phillips country, and our son Leo stood watches for 2-4 hours a day. Nothing of significance broke, and we ate really well.

It was a heck of a passage. Here is the story.

The Challenge
Jenna and I always assumed that we would sail around South Africa as part of our circumnavigation. Piracy and war had closed off the northern Indian Ocean and Red Sea for cruising sailboats. The only option was to go around South Africa via the Cape of Good Hope. That’s not necessarily a terrible option, but it meant that circumnavigators like Sophie that wanted to visit the Med would have to cross the Atlantic Ocean three times to do so (two crossings to get to Europe, and then a third to get back to the Americas.) And the Southern Indian Ocean passage to Africa is hazardous: one writer estimated that out of 100 boats that attempted the passage in 2015, 5 sank.

Our family schedule complicated plans for South Africa as well. There is a relatively narrow 10 week window from September to November when boats have the best chances for a safe trip from either Madagascar or Mauritius to the northeast South African coast. My daughter Sara is planning to get married in the US on September 3rd, followed 4 weeks later by my son Max’s US wedding on October 1st. That meant we would have to ditch Sophie at a marina in north Madagascar for 6 weeks and then hope that we got lucky with the weather while making the 1,400 mile sprint down the Argulas Current before the big summer southerlies with their vertical 30 foot waves kicked in. The weather can get quite nasty in that part of the world, and quite frankly, Jenna and I had no idea how we were going to make it all work.

The Plan
So last summer, we started reading with great interest reports from boats that successfully made the passage through the Red Sea and into the Med in 2015. The best time to do so is between January and March, and we believe 20 boats successfully completed the passage at that time last year. We spoke with several of them, and they all said that they would do it again.

All commercial vessels that now travel to and from the Suez Canal do so with armed guards on board, and as a result there have been no reported piracy attacks in the area for 3 years. That doesn’t necessarily make the area safe.

The 20 boats that made the passage last year all pursued different strategies. Some hired guards, which are expensive. Others brought their own weapons, which assumes you have the skill and willingness to use them if required. There was at least one convoy, which is a qood way to split the costs for guards and provide safety in numbers, but can be difficult to keep in formation from a sailing speed perspective. Everyone needed a plan for extra fuel, because the winds can die in the Gulf of Aden, right in the middle of Captain Phillips country, and then the Red Sea can have prevailing northerlies requiring the use of your motor. One boat last year even built a coffee table in their salon out of two 50 gallon drums of diesel!

Then there is the question of routing. Boats last year made stops in Oman (for fuel), Aden (for repairs), Djibouti (fuel and provisions), Saudi Arabia (repairs), Sudan (fuel, provisions, diving), and Egypt (the same). The spread of ISIS in the region since then actually clarified choices for us, because none of these ports seemed like good options.

Sailing to South Africa involved risks, and sailing to the Red Sea involved risks. So Jenna and I weighed all of the options and finally settled on a plan for taking the Red Sea route: we would hire guards; we would not go in a convoy; we would leave from the Maldives with a lot of fuel; we would head straight for the Red Sea; we would do everything possible to make sure Sophie wouldn’t break along the way; and our destination would be Egypt, most likely Port Ghalib. Sophie might be big, but she is relatively fast on long passages. We are pretty good about maintaining her systems, and having 2 engines gave us a level of redundancy that monohulls do not have.

We put a lot of work into our plan, and we felt good about it. Not in a cocky, “Woo Hoo, we are going to do this!!!” kind of way. We were methodical and planned for a lot of contingencies.

The Guards
We talked to three companies last fall and wound up hiring a company called AllMode, which provides security services for superyachts. They were the most expensive, but in our view were going to provide the best guards and the highest level of service, including getting weapons into Male, which can be difficult.

The team consisted of Chris and Gordy from the UK and Tomasz from Poland. They are all ex-special forces with combined combat experience in the Falklands, Northern Ireland, Sierre Leone, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They were all trained marksmen at 300 meters, which is outside the range of pirates with their AK-47s. They had each made this run dozens of times. Their kit consisted of four AR-15s, 700 rounds of ammo, 4 sets of helmets and body armour, binoculars, and a night vision scope. We had formal rules of engagement for dealing with potential threats and daily contact with the military coalition patrolling the area.

Most importantly, they were all gentlemen who helped out with the sailing and were great with the kiddies. We couldn’t have imagined having a better team. We felt safe and comfortable with them on board.

Once we were underway, after their initial equipment check, the team secured and stowed the unloaded guns out of sight for the rest of the trip. The guards were more like watchmen than soldiers.

The Preparation
We really didn’t want anything to break on Sophie while heading across pirate country, so we spent a lot of time and effort in Thailand preparing different systems for the passage. For our Yanmar diesel engines, we replaced the cone clutches on the saildrives, rebuilt the water pumps, adjusted the valves, and had a complete servicing. We remounted our genset to the floor of it’s compartment and replaced all of its sensors and hoses. We removed and serviced the membrane to our watermaker. We had Sophie’s rigging inspected and her sails repaired. We catalogued and updated our inventory of spare parts. We even bought an Iridium Go! satellite modem for improved communications.

To increase our motoring range, we configured a network of fuel bags on deck that doubled Sophie’s fuel capacity to 500 gallons. I loved this arrangement so much that I will write a separate blog post about it. Stay tuned.

From a provisioning perspective, we knew we needed to feed the four of us plus three grown men for up to a month. Unfortunately, the best supermarkets and fresh markets in the Maldives are located in Male, one island away from Sophie’s anchorage. We worried we would have to schlep bags of food on 3 or 4 separate ferry rides between islands, then transfer the bags into our dinghy and back to Sophie. It could have taken 2 or 3 days. Fortunately, our local agent arranged for a speedboat to ferry our mound of food from the jetty in Male directly back to Sophie.

It saved us days of work, and the kiddies had a blast.

The Need for Security
As far as we can tell, none of the 20 boats that made the passage last year blogged about their experience in realtime on the Internet or on social networks. We decided to do the same. No Facebook or blog updates during the passage.

This was hard for me personally because I love to write daily blog posts while underway. So instead we decided to send daily emails to our family back home, with the intention of publishing them in a big blog post when we reach the Suez. Those daily emails are included below.

We didn’t want to include our daily position reports in the family emails, so instead we sent a coded list of waypoints to our family in advance of our trip. When the guards saw this list, they asked if any of us were ever in the military. It is apparently a best practice. The code names are pulled from the ranks of Boston Red Sox baseball players, tough guys in movies, powerful women, and the cast of the film “Lawrence of Arabia.” One waypoint is named after a US presidential candidate.

Here is the list:

Jim Rice 05.28.930n 071.10.989e
Fred Lynn 06.45.386n, 068.49.564e
Carlton Fisk 08.01.893n 066.27.827e
Luis Taint 09.18.774n, 064.05.433e
Bill Lee 10.35.374n, 061.42.766e
Dustin Pedroia 11.52.195n 059.19.546e
Mookie Betts 13.08.381n 056.55.223e
Bernie Sanders 14.19.655n, 053.33.390e
Johnny Depp 13.38.278n, 050.54.278e
Clint Eastwood 12.46.994n, 048.18.641e
Robert De Nero 12.19.885n, 045.36.381e
Uma Thurman 12.36.155n, 043.22.821
Beyoncé 14.52.110n, 041.54.516e
Rihanna 17.07.696n, 040.25.108e
Taylor Swift 19.25.557n, 039.00.529e
Rachel Flotard 21.54.258n, 037.55.956e
G R O N K ! 24.13.505n, 036.29.583e
Peter O’Toole 26.29.887n, 034.56.586e
Omar Sharif 28.36.293n, 033.04.824e
Sir Alec Guinness 29.53.970n, 032.33.088e

We also modified our AIS signature to state that we had armed guards on board. This is a common practice for passages in the Red Sea, but we do not recommend doing this on your boat in Puget Sound.

Hopefully all of this provides some useful context about our passage. The rest of this blog consists of the daily updates we sent out on the 2,900 mile leg from Male in the Maldives to Port Ghalib in Egypt.

We hope that you all enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed living it …

Day 1: Sophie Update
Hello everyone. We departed the Maldives safely yesterday, pulling up the anchor at 12:05 PM after loading on the security team and their equipment and then clearing customs. Our guests are delightful.

Sophie sailed like an oil tanker through the night, moving slowly in the light southwesterlies (!). We had full main and jib up through 5:00 AM, then dropped both for the spinnaker so we could get back on our rhumb line. We switched over to full main and gennaker an hour ago and are making 6-8 knots in flat seas.

Current position is 43 miles east of Jim Rice. You know, if he hadn’t broken his wrist at the end of the 1975 season, the Red Sox would have beaten the Reds in the World Series that year.

We caught a tuna the size of Leo’s foot last night and threw him back. We also passed within 50 feet of a sleeping whale at 3:00 AM. It was the size of Sophie but looked bigger. In hindsight it was a terrifying experience.

Dinner last night was coq au vin. I have been told I need to catch a tuna and serve it for dinner tonight. It’s all good. More tomorrow.

Day 2: Rolling Along
Things are going really well on Sophie. We covered 163 miles on our 24 mile run and are currently 42 miles east of Fred Lynn.

When Fred Lynn departed the Red Sox and signed as a free agent with the California Angels, he said one of the reasons he left New England is because he didn’t like the beaches. They had shells in the sand that cut your feet, unlike the sand in the beaches in California, which was way better. I had no idea what he was talking about until I moved to California. Then I understood.

We’ve been sailing under full main for the last 24 hours, alternating between the jib and the gennaker depending on the wind speed. An hour before sunset last night, both reels wizzed simultaneously with tuna hits. We boated an 8 pound blue on the starboard pole, but failed in successfully executing the double takedown due to a father-son net handoff breakdown on the port side. We all gasped as we watched this fat ten pound yellowfin slowly bounce off the bottom step, smile up at us, and swim away.

We served dinner 30 minutes later: grilled tuna accompanied with grilled cauliflower, eggplant, and peppers. Jenna has a new recipe for grilling cauliflower, where she coats it in pepper and olive oil, wraps it in tin foil, and throws it on the barbecue for 30 minutes. It has become a staple.

Tonight I think we will serve gingered beef stew with potatoes and green beans.

Last night was uneventful. A pod of dolphins joined us at 3:00 AM, dancing off our bows as the light from the full moon reflected off the gennaker. It was pretty cool. At sunrise a pod of 100 dolphins joined us on the bow, and Hazel pointed out to me whom each one was. “That one is the pod elder.”

“That one over there is obviously the mother of the brother and sister swimming together there. Actually, it is clear to me now that this is three pods that are temporarily swimming together.” The dolphins then broke off into three groups and swam off in different directions. That was pretty cool, too.

Day 3: More of the Same
Things are going really well on Sophie. We covered 163 miles on our 24 mile run again and are currently 32 miles east of Carlton Fisk.

Carlton Fisk was the beloved Red Sox catcher who hit the dramatic Game 6 home run in the 1975 World Series that the Red Sox would have won if Jim Rice hadn’t broken his wrist. The next year Fisk signed as a free agent with the Chicago White Sox after the Red Sox were 3 days late in mailing him a new contract. Sigh. He played for another decade in Chicago, prolonging his career by soaking his entire body in an ice bath after each game.

We’ve been sailing under full main for the last 24 hours, alternating between the jib and the gennaker depending on the wind speed. An hour before sunset last night, I informed Tomasz, one of our guards, that his watch duties included monitoring the two meat lines trolling behind the boat. He turned and said “Look, there is a fish jumping!” right as a mahi mahi hit our big green squid lure on the 20 meter line. The fish did 20 furious windmills above the water as we all watched from the back steps. We were waiting for her to tire out before we brought her near the boat, but she spat out the double hook and swam away after she realized the hooks were barbless. I have since replaced the hook with with one that is properly barbed and am quite encouraged that we had our first meat line fish hit since Papua New Guinea. We have caught a lot of fish with that squid lure and plan to do so tonight. The fish are hitting at sunset on this passage.

Dinner was smoked paprika and ginger beef stew served with basmati rice and stir fried broccoli. We had an uneventful evening with little wind. We did see 2 dolphins do a Sea World high jump right off the bow in the 3:00 AM moonlight. That was pretty cool.

We’ve been sailing at 7+ knots with the gennaker and full main since breakfast. The seas are gentle and the skies are blue.We haven’t motored since our departure. The weather forecast calls for more of the same for the next few days. We should reach Bernie Sanders in 5 days, at which point we will turn left and begin our fun run.

This is a great passage so far. More tomorrow.

Day 4: Things Are Getting A Little Better
The situation is actually improving on Sophie. We covered 169 miles on our 24 mile run (7+ knots!) and are currently 22 miles southeast of Luis Tiant.

El Tiante was a large Cuban man who could smoke an entire cigar in the shower without getting it wet after pitching a game for the Red Sox. None of his teammates could figure out how he did it. When pitching, he would sometimes stare straight up into the sky just as the ball released from his hand. It would freak batters out, causing them to wonder “what the heck is he looking at?” as they swung and missed at his fastball.

Jenna and I realized yesterday afternoon that at this course and location, the gennaker makes a wonderful sunshade for the entire boat, keeping the deck and cabin cool from the afternoon heat. We’ve had the jib up for the last 10 hours, though, since the wind has shifted more to the north. The boat is making 8 knots, and we are all enjoying a gentle, sleep-inducing motion.

For the third evening in a row, we had a major fish strike at 5:30 PM. It’s like clockwork. This time it was both poles wizzing away with tuna, each making multiple runs as they tried to escape. The boat was sailing at 8 knots with the gennaker and full main up and we had a little difficulty slowing down. I lost the fish on the starboard pole, but Chris, who used to wear a red beret for a living, persevered and landed an 11 pound bluefin after a 20 minute fight.

Bill Walker, please consider your reel officially christened. We will sear the fish for lunch today, serving it with lemon and capers.

We didn’t eat the fish last night because dinner was already prepared: baked mac and cheese with steak, chorizo sausage, garlic, onion, peppers, and cauliflower all mixed in. It was excellent.

We will hit the halfway point for this leg later tonight. We still haven’t motored, yet we are moving fast for such a heavy boat. The faster we go now means the faster we can go later. It’s a space-time thing, and it’s all good.

Day 5: Flat World
The law of averages caught up with Sophie with our 131 mile run over the last 24 hours, placing us 51 miles southeast of Bill Lee.

“The Spaceman” Bill Lee won 17 games for three years in a row for the Sox but was then traded to the Montreal Expos for Stan Papi, a lifetime .230 hitter. Lee’s offense? He described his manager Don Zimmer in the press as a gerbil. Today Bill Lee is in his 60s, still plays semipro baseball, and is beloved throughout New England. Don Zimmer will forever be known as a gerbil.

Sophie keeps ghosting along at 5 knots in flat seas under sunny skies. I think we are getting a push. We still haven’t turned on a motor. The weather forecast after Uma Thurman is starting to look pretty good, and we are saving our fuel so we can blast all the way past GRONK! with our peddle to the metal and both engines on.

We had tuna for lunch and dinner last night, and no one complained of food monotony. We caught a 1 pound bluefin last night but let him swim back to mommy. I think we will do a chicken curry tonight.

We have covered 750 miles in 5 days. The crew and the boat are happy. So far, so good.

Day 6: Pulled the Plug (So to Speak)
Immediately after I filed our update yesterday, Jenna and I looked at our latest weather forecast. It called for very light air for the next 24 hours, followed by a 10 knot easterly for the following 2 days. So as much as we wanted to sail all the way to Bernie Sanders in order to conserve fuel for our run to the left, we decided to turn on a motor. We think it was the right decision: we covered 164 miles in our 24 hour run, which included 21.5 hours of running a single engine @ 2000 RPM. At that speed we burned a gallon an hour, using up ~4% of our fuel.

As predicted, the westerly kicked in around 10:00 AM this morning and we turned off the motor. We are now making 7.5 knots under jib and full main and hope to be able to sail the rest of the way to Bernie.

At our noon report we were just 47 miles southeast of Dustin Pedroia.

Ah, Dustin Pedroia. The current Red Sox second baseman, Dustin is a former American League MVP. He is a short man and probably the only player in Major League Baseball whose wheelhouse is above his head. When he hits a homerun, he looks like a toddler swinging at a tree with a hatchet. His nickname is Lasershow.

Turning on our motor was the highlight of our day yesterday. We had a nice school of 50 dolphins swim with us in the afternoon, and I was able to take a lot of photos while Jenna slept. We had our first morning fish strike at sunrise today. It ran off 250 meters of line on the new reel even with the brake all the way closed. I was worried we would run out of line. Leo was able to slow the boat, but the fish spat the hook when it finally stopped. When I reeled in the line and checked the lure, I saw that the barb was gone. We are having serious barb problems on this trip. I have one remaining heavy duty stainless steel double marlin hook from the South Pacific, and it is now on this big hoochie that keeps getting hit. This baby looks like a witch’s claw, and the barbs look like fangs. We’ll see what happens.

We’ve had to do some boat projects while underway, mostly involving plumbing. The sump pump in our shower failed because the protective filter failed, so I had to rebuild the pump for the second time this month. We had no spares for the prefilter, so I swapped it out with the filter that protects our salt water intake pump for our toilet. It means we will be forced to flush our toilet with fresh water until I can buy a replacement filter, but Jenna said she was good with it. The next day the macerator pump for our toilet failed, causing the toilet to leak. I was able to rebuild the pump – a task that now takes me about 10 minutes – but we have no more toilet spare parts. That’s it. We’re done. I am feeling quite exposed and am now at amber, as the guards would say. We also had to replace the bilge pump in our starboard hull this morning, but we have four spares and it was a quick fix. I am fairly certain all of these problems are somehow related.

We started seeing commercial aircraft last night and saw two commercial vessels this morning. I assume this activity will increase. We are also registered and are being tracked by the multinational vessel tracking system for this area.

Dinner last night was grilled chicken with barbecue sauce with a smoky pasta salad and a cucumber salad. Jenna is baking bread, and we will grill up some burgers for dinner tonight.

Just as I am typing this, we passed a spectacle of dolphins attacking a school of very large tuna. The tunas look like they are up to 100 pounds, and they were being tossed into the air by the dolphins. Huge fish, flying around. It was over in 10 seconds. We’ve never seen anything like it. I assume our lines will now be silent for the next couple of hours.

By midnight we will hit the 1,000 mile mark for the passage. So far, so good.

Witch’s Claw: Addendum I
20 minutes after we trolled the witch’s claw behind Sophie, a 500 pound marlin hit the lure and jumped 6 or 7 times right behind the boat before snapping off the 80 pound test line and swimming away. Actually, it jumped 2 more times after the line broke. No photos, but everyone who was awake saw it. Wow. All I can say is Wow. I am trembling. We put another lure back in. More to come.

Day 7: Ripping Along
Sophie has moved another 163 miles (!) in the last 24 hours, all under sail. Since sunrise we have been ripping along at 8-10 knots with full main and gennaker with a 10 knot breeze on our quarter. We have covered 1,077 miles in our first week, running one engine for just 21 hours during that time. Our great start continues. We are just 44 miles southeast of Mookie Betts.

Mookie! He is the current 22 year-old right fielder for the Red Sox and is already one of the best outfielders in baseball. He is a potential superstar. In the off-season he is also a professional bowler. It’s always nice to have a career to fall back on if your dream doesn’t come through. Or to have a job that could potentially pay you $20 million a year so you could pursue your dream of achieving bowling perfection in the winter without having to worry about money. Either way, “Nobody messes with the Mookie!!!” (with a finger wag for emphasis)

Our wildlife adventures continued after the lure strike by that underwater bull of a marlin yesterday afternoon. Thirty minutes after the strike, whales swam within 30 meters of Sophie and then followed our lures for a while. The whales were all black and the size of orcas. I really didn’t want to lose any more fishing line, but they soon swam away.

Later that night, Gordy (one of our guards) was up on the flybridge and felt someone swat him in the arm. His initial reaction was that a colleague (or Hazel) had snuck up behind him and gave him a poke. But then he looked down and saw a flying fish right next to him. That’s the first time we have gotten a flying fish to hit us with such elevation. An hour later, I woke up for my 1:00 AM watch and thought that our room smelled like fish. Did everyone else catch and clean a fish without telling me? I told Jenna about this, and she wasn’t too happy at the idea of going to bed in a fishy-smelly room until she discovered three (THREE!!!) flying fish resting on the screen above her side of the bed. I subsequently discovered two more fish in the nearby vicinity on deck. Our room quickly aired out, and we all feel a little sorry for the lost squadron of fish that made the mistake of flying into a French catamaran.

Man that marlin yesterday was big! I still can’t get over it.

It is getting cold. We are now wearing fleece and sweatshirts at night. It is the first time we have had to do that while sailing in 2 years.

Dinner last night was spaghetti and meatballs. The meal was devoured. But we all really want to catch another fish.

Hazel celebrates her 8th birthday tomorrow. It would make Hazel really happy if everybody, including our friends in Seattle, could send her a short email with your happy birthday wishes for her. If you send them on your Saturday to our email address, we can have them printed out for her when she wakes up on Sunday morning. Please DO NOT reply to this email, and please don’t try to send photos, attachments, gifs, emojis, or jibjabs. We won’t get them. But we will get a very happy girl who loves you all very much.

Witch’s Claw: Addendum II
We just had our second marlin hit. Same pole on the port side, this time with a small hoochie tuna lure with a bigger pink hoochie pulled over the whole thing. The lure was trolling 20 meters behind the boat when the marlin hit, and 6 of us saw it. The fish ripped off 200 meters of line while doing 6 spectacular belly flops parallel to Sophie. I was running out of line (again) and applied a tiny bit of drag to see if I could slow this big baby down, but the fish bent the hook, did one more victory belly flop, and swam away. It was a different fish from two days ago, with a lighter blue color and a white belly. I’m calling it 350 pounds.

All we want is a 20 pound tuna. Not flying fishes or 1 pound baby tunas or mahi mahis. Not 350-500 pound marlins. Just a 20 pound yellowfin. Is that too much to ask? Please?

Day 8: Happy Birthday Hazel!
Our beloved Hazel turns 8 years old today while sailing across a magical Arabian sea, surrounded by loved ones and protectors.

Today is easily the sunniest day of our trip, and by the time the two-day celebration ends, we will be almost halfway to our destination.

It is a two day celebration because Hazel decided that her birthday falls on February 28th AND the last day of the month. Clever girl.

Jenna is pouring her heart into making this a special day for our not-so-little-anymore Hazel, baking bread, chocolate banana nut muffins, double layer lemon cake with strawberry filling, and dragon cakes. There are crepes for breakfast, cucumber sandwiches for lunch, and make-your-own pizza for dinner.

The salon is decorated with balloons and hand cut-snowflakes. In fact we are about to sit down for a proper tea party for lunch. Needless to say, we have a happy little girl.

We have a happy little daddy as well, due to the 17 pound yellowfin that we caught an hour ago. Starboard pole, small red tuna hoochie, strong hook. That baby is now cut up and in the freezer. Now if we can only boat about ten more…

The weather feels like we are at the equator. It is very hot with bright sunshine and little wind. We covered 154 miles in our 24 hour run, and we turned on a motor around 1:00 AM. We are currently making 5.5 knots under a single engine and the mainsail. If we get another knot of wind, we will roll the gennaker back out. To think we were sailing at nine knots 24 hours ago!

Bernie Sanders is 95 miles away, and my guess is that we will turn a little left before we get there. Why not?

We are now in a shipping lane and have commercial traffic on our radar and AIS on a nonstop basis. Some of the container ships are 1,300 feet long.

If you haven’t had a chance to do so yet, it would be great if you could send some birthday wishes to Hazel via our sailmail account. We will print them all out and give them to her in a little book at bedtime tonight.

We are so lucky to have Hazel with us on our little adventure. So lucky.

Day 9: The Birthday Celebration Continues
Day Two of our Hazel Birthday Celebrations continues under sunny skies and flat seas. Sophie covered 137 miles on our 24 hour run, which doesn’t include the big sloping curve to the left we did way before we got to Bernie Sanders, something that America should do as well. Who needs single payer health care when you can have NO payer healthcare? We are 117 miles east of Johnny Depp (he was in movies about pirates, get it?), and it’s just 560 miles before we are right in the middle of Uma Thurman. We’ve been motorsailing the entire time and still have the five bags of fuel on deck.

Hazel’s birthday was a grand success.

The two Brits on our crew could smell the cucumber sandwiches from across the boat and were delighted at the formal tea Jenna pulled together for lunch.

An hour before dinner, we landed a 22 pound mahi mahi.

This fish has now been processed into 10 meals that are bagged in our freezer.

The make-your-own pizza party was fantastic, the lemon cake was devoured, and Hazel loved the big drone her parents gave her as a birthday gift. She said it was her best birthday ever. We will give her the printed book of birthday wishes tonight.

We are running parallel to a shipping channel with two-say traffic lanes and a 1.5 traffic separation lane in the middle. There is plenty of marine traffic, including convoys, using the channel. The ships are visible on the radar and through our binoculars. Our plan is to cruise down this separation lane over the next few days. It will be like walking down a highway median with the permission of the many state police cruisers driving in either direction. We’ve been hearing military radio traffic since midnight and feel quite safe. I assume we will be talking to them once we are in our own little lane.

Right now there is a Maersk container ship 11 miles behind us, cruising along at 21 knots. 1309 feet LOA with a 197 foot beam and a 51.5 foot draft. It looks like an island on the horizon.

Jenna is making hummus and roti for lunch, and dinner will be seared yellowfin tuna accompanied with grilled eggplant and basmati rice. We also plan to barbecue s’mores this afternoon.

If we have another couple of fishing days like yesterday, our freezer will be full for the summer. Nice problem to have.

Japanese Navy: Addendum I
Just after sending out our latest update, a Japan Navy aircraft broadcast a securité announcement (a standard, non-emergency announcement on VHF radio) stating that they were patrolling the skies above the shipping lanes, were here for our protection, and that all vessels should call them if they see any suspicious activity. They ended the broadcast with a very happy “We wish you all fair winds and following seas. Japan Navy aircraft 41, standing by.”

We all smiled at each other, saying “Japan Navy, way to have our backs!”

5 minutes later, we spot a 4 engine, low-flying aircraft that starts to bank around us. “Sailing Yacht, sailing yacht, this is Japan Navy 41 … can we please have your vessel name … uh, what country are you from … are you practicing safety procedures … can you please spell out your vessel name?”I responded “Hello Japan Navy! We are the sailing yacht Sophie … We are a US vessel … Sierra Oscar Papa Hotel India Echo … We have seven souls onboard, including 3 armed guards””Yacht Soe-Phee, this is Japan Navy 41. Very Good. Please call us on channel 16 if you ever need any assistance. Thank you very much, and have a pleasant day.”

They wound up circling us three times, and we are not sure if it was because Sophie looked awesome with her blue and white striped gennaker in the midday sun, or because Jenna was wearing her short shorts while waving at them from Sophie’s roof. Probably both. But we are definitely on their radar and will have air cover for the next four or five days. We assume every aircraft patrol will fly by to, for lack of a better word, check us out.

Day 10: Happy March 1st
Sophie is celebrating the beginning of March today by doing pretty much nothing. It is a nice change for us after the two-day Hazel festival. Jenna and I really needed to catch up on our sleep. Leo is now doing 3-5 hours of shifts a day, and that is a big help. We’ve covered 147 miles in our last 24 hours, motoring on a single engine the entire time. We are in the median of the highway between shipping lanes, with convoys passing us every hour on either side. Some of the ships are massive. The sun is hot and the seas are flat. There have been no fish since the mahi mahi 2 days ago.

We’ve passed Johnny Depp, and Clint Eastwood is just 130 miles ahead. For this particular trip, we are not talking about the “Paint Your Wagon” Clint Eastwood, or the “Any Which Way But Loose” Clint, or the “Talking to the Empty Chair” Clint, or even the spaghetti western Clint. For this trip, we are most definitely talking about the “Dirty Hary” Clint, complete with plaid wool sportcoat, sweater vest, and big gun. If you haven’t seen the movie in the last 20 years, please go do so. It’s quite funny, and he makes that outfit look good.

We are now heading straight downwind, but the wind is not strong enough yet for us to sail with the spinnaker. We just tried but the sail hung limp. So we pulled down the sock, and the spinnaker remains rigged and ready to go. The forecast is for the wind to slowly strengthen over the next 72 hours and will be blowing 30-35 knots by the time we get to Uma Thurman. That is typical for this time of year, and we wouldn’t want it any other way. I assume we will be sailing without the motor by sundown, and we may not need to motor again for the next 600-700 miles, all downwind. Please keep your fingers crossed. Or as our Brit friends would say, touch wood.

We are looking good from a fuel perspective. We transferred the first of the deck fuel bags into the main tanks this morning, and the operation went flawlessly. We REALLY like the fuel bags. I guesstimate that we have 220 gallons of diesel in the main tanks and another 170 gallons in the four bags remaining on deck. If we do indeed resume engineless sailing later today, then we will be in excellent shape for the last leg of our passage. We also have 92 eggs remaining. Like I said, excellent shape.

Please admire my restraint.

We had the yellowfin tuna last night for dinner, and it tasted like steak. Some of the best fish I’ve ever had. Today we will do leftovers for lunch and then eat the the second prepared smoked paprika stew for dinner. We showed Hazel all of the birthday greetings we received so far, and she gave the pages from her brother Max and her sister Sara a warm hug. It was pretty cute.

More tomorrow.

Day 11: Running Before the Wind
The wind finally filled in last night. We opened up the chute at midnight and turned the motor off at 1:00 AM. We are now sailing under spinnaker alone at 7+ knots, and based on the latest weather forecasts, we will enjoy straight downwind sailing for the next 400-500 miles. The wind will slowly accelerate to 20-30+ knots at Uma Thurman, and we have decided that we will take down the chute and switch to the jib when we hit 15 knots apparent wind. All of this wind will be coming from our stern, which will be a safe and comfortable wind angle for us. We are running before the wind and loving every second of it.

Carol Hasse and the team from Port Townsend Sails made this chute for us 8 years ago, and it still looks great. Who knew back then that this sail would someday help us speed past danger in the Gulf of Aden?

We have covered 144 miles in our 24 hour run, and we assume that number will be higher in tomorrow’s report. We are past Clint Eastwood and will likely pass Robert DeNiro tomorrow morning.

We learned from our guards that there IS no boathouse at Hereford. Not only did Robert DeNiro ambush Sean Bean with a cup of coffee, he totally punked him as well. That’s why the next waypoint in pirate alley is named after Bobby. And if you have no idea what the heck I am talking about, then please go watch the film “Ronin.” It is a Sophie staple.

Hazel loves her new drone and keeps trying to fly it in the salon. She plans to bring it to her siblings’ weddings this fall so she can get an aerial video of the kissings of the brides. Just try to stop her.

I think we had a group of sharks attack one of our lures yesterday afternoon. We had passed some sharks earlier, and then 30 minutes later we had a massive strike with lots of splashing and fins in the water. The reel ran off line for two seconds, but then there was no tension but still a lot of splashing. I started to reel in and they hit the lure again in the same way. When I slowly reeled it in a third time, we could see a big black fin following the lure. I didn’t want to lose fishing gear to sharks, so we called it a day.

We had goulash with mashed potatoes and green beans for dinner. Jenna thinks she will make eggplant parmesan for dinner tonight. The kiddies are back into their school routines and are doing well. We’ve got a nice routine going. The days pass by quickly.

By the time we get to Beyoncé, we will be out of pirate danger. That is less then 3 days away. Also, the risk mitigates significantly when the wind exceeds 20 knots. Slowly but surely, we are getting there. And we still have SO MUCH DIESEL!!!

Day 12: Get Ready Uma, Here We Come
Sophie covered 177 miles in the last 24 hours, averaging a scooch under 7 knots. We had the spinnaker up for most of the night in 15-25 knot winds and averaged 8+ knots until we took it down at 3:00 AM. While doing so, the spinnaker sock control rope lifted one of the guards, Chris, a few feet of of the deck. Chris is a big fella, and the wind can sometimes do impressive things. But we got the sail down OK, rolled out the jib in a downwind configuration, and turned on a motor for balance.

At noon we opened up both engines to 2600 and are making 9-10 knots on a rhumb line for Uma, who is a little over 100 miles away. We understand it’s best to approach her at night, and we will do so.

Why did we name this particular waypoint after Uma Thurman? Kill Bill, Volume One. Yellow track suit. Sword. Hundreds of Assailants. It’s perfect.

We executed our second fuel transfer of the trip this morning. It’s like watching Sophie earn credits in a video game. Both internal tanks are now full, and we still have three bags remaining on deck. From a fuel perspective, it’s definitely a best-case scenario for us.

Jenna made an enormous amount of eggplant parmesan last night, and it was devoured. Tonight we will be in offshore passage mode with 30 knot winds, so I think we will go with some coq au vin from the freezer.

We have less than 300 miles to go before we exit the High Risk Area. It should be tomorrow night. We also realized that at some point in the last 3 days we passed the GSM (Great Seattle Meridian.) According to our GPS, for every mile we travel, Seattle now becomes one mile closer. I guess that means we are coming home.

Get ready.

Day 13: An Epic Sophie Adventure Cruise
Sophie exited an ocean and entered a sea at 1:00 AM this morning as we blew past the Uma Thurman waypoint at a speed of 11 knots. Our little floating condominium covered 222 MILES in a 24 hour period — a new record for us — starting out with 35-45 knots of wind on a clear night with excellent visibility. The waves were WAY too rough for pirates, and the commercial traffic hurried along in neat and orderly rows on either side of the highway. For us it was the perfect Uma Thurman scenario. We came within 3 miles of a country experiencing a civil war and could see lights on shore. A Croation warship was on the radio, and the Japan Navy flew above us. Arigato!

At 12:30 AM we saw a freighter a mile ahead of us douse their navigation lights and light off a white flare. At another point Jenna was hit in the thigh with what we thought might have been shrapnel, but it was a flying fish. She said it hurt.

What a night!

We felt a profound sense sense of shared accomplishment when we hit the Uma waypoint. Jenna soon went down to sleep.

And then it started to blow. For the next 6 hours we had sustained wind of 40 knots with gusts to 50. We were heading straight downwind with both engines running @ 2000 RPM. The weather was too squirrely for even a scrap of jib. At 4:30 AM we saw a red crescent moon rise over the Yemeni desert.

At 7:00 AM the main popped out of its sailbag. We needed to wake up Jenna so she could steer while I tied down the main. Soon I went down to sleep.

And then it started to really blow. Jenna had sustained winds of 50 knots for over an hour. At sunrise she saw land for the first time in 2 weeks. Another boat fired off a flare, but we assume it was for practice. The waves were up to 5 meters. “Anti-piracy weather” grinned our guard Tomasz. There were no other boats out except for us, the commercial vessels, and the warships.

Of course we were trolling the meatlines throughout the entire night. It was too rough to bring them in. Jenna saw a big fish hit one and snap the hook off.

Since noon we have seen sustained winds of 35-40 knots with the occasional wave reaching 5 meters. We had four waves splash into our aft cockpit, drenching everything. This is the first time this has happened in 30 months, since our Bora Bora-Rarotonga run.

As I write this it seems to be finally calming down. It is actually kind of gentle in the cabin. The kiddies are watching movies.Sophie has been awesome for this entire passage, especially for the last 24 hours. She is a good boat.

Beyoncé is just 30 miles ahead of us. According to the coalition that polices piracy here, the High Risk Area formally ends at Beyoncé. The pirates do not dare go past her. We feel safe, at this point, and our guards will formally go off duty when we reach her. Queen Bey will watch over us instead.

This is a night we will all remember forever. I am glad that Jenna and I shared it together. Sophie Adventure Cruises, indeed!

I am now going to make a pot of chili.

Addendum: The Rock and Roll is Over
Hi everyone. It’s midnight here. Everything has calmed down. We are sailing gently along at 6 knots with the full jib and no motors. No more crashing waves! Initial damage report includes 4 broken coffee mugs, a broken kitchen clock, 3 wet cabins from open hatches (!), 1 broken pair of counterfeit Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a very drenched aft cockpit.

All major systems are go! We love you all, more tomorrow.

Day 14: It’s Good to be Boring Sometimes
Sophie is way more boring today, and that is good. We’ve covered 165 miles in the last 24 hours, running almost entirely under just the jib with no motors until an hour ago when we put up the chute. We are currently making 6-7 knots in gentle seas. We are running lots of laundry, desalting, and putting the boat back together. Jenna got 9 hours of sleep last night as I took one for the team and let everyone else sleep after midnight until Leo took over for me at 7:00 this morning in the dark. He has been taking on more responsibility in the watch department, and it is a big help.

We are 60 miles from Rihanna. In the film “Battleship”, she plays a US Navy gunnery mate who operates a chain gun on the bow of a RIB. She also fires an 18 inch shell from the battleship Missouri at an alien encampment in Hawaii, whispering the word “boom” as she does so. She earned her waypoint and totally has Beyonce’s back.

After we pass Rihanna, we head to a stationary tugboat called an armoury where we will drop off the weapons and tactical gear. The guns have been out of sight since Male, but the boys are all in the aft cockpit right now cleaning weapons and packaging up bullets. I do hope everything is accounted for.

After the Armoury we will head straight up the Red Sea to a port on the left to drop the boys off. We have an excellent weather window and are going to go for it.

Saudi Arabia is now to our left, and Eritrea is to our right. Kind of weird. It will still take us another couple of days to process what just happened. We are all definitely having a good time. Laters!

Addendum: Fuel Bags
The wind has completely died and we are motoring across a lake at 7 knots on one engine @ 2400 RPMs. We just did a fuel transfer, and I am SO HAPPY to say that both of Sophie’s fuel tanks are completely full with a reserve of 45 gallons in one remaining bag on deck. This is after 2,300 miles of passage making with only 600 miles to go. The fuel bags have been a fantastic addition to our cruising life. Even during yesterday’s storm, they remained stable on the deck. They wiggled a bit on the big bounces, but there is nothing wrong with an occasional wiggle.

Also, now that I have gotten a little more sleep, I am pleased to report that Saudia Arabia is to the RIGHT and Eritrea is to the LEFT. My bad, and I hope that you found my observation to be more amusing than worrying.

Day 15: The Armoury
Sophie pulled up in the dark alongside a floating armoury at 18N in the middle of the Red Sea and offloaded our weapons and tactical gear. It was quite an experience.

The Armoury is a 120 foot tugboat owned by a Spanish company that provides a convenient way for vessels making a run through pirate alley to pick up and drop off weapons without having to bring them into a port and declare them. It is a clever system. This particular armoury is called Sea Lion and was surprisingly busy as we approached, with four tankers and container ships hovering nearby in the darkness. But the big ships scattered right before we pulled up alongside, and a RIB with 2 guys wearing hardhats came up next to Sophie in the 1.5 meter chop and wrestled four pelican cases off of our boat with the help of our guards. Just like that they were done and we were back on our way.

Sophie covered a respectable 144 miles in our 24 hour run. The northerly we were expecting has kicked in, and we are motoring at 6.5 knots with no sails and both engines running @2000 RPM. There is a 10-15 knot (true) northerly, and our ride is somewhere between comfortable and not quite bone jarring. We are deliberately trying to caress the waves while avoiding mindless pounding. Sophie likes it better that way. The wind is expected to slowly subside over the next 24 hours, then cease to exist for a day, and then switch to a southerly. Our destination is 500 miles away, and we plan to be there by Wednesday afternoon. I envision truck driving music in my immediate future.

Today is Mother’s Day in England, and we are celebrating at noon by rolling our clocks back 2 hours to Standard Arab Time (UTC +3.) Jenna is also celebrating right now by using a brush to remove Hazel’s mermaid hair.

Jenna has been at it for an hour, but we are having a pleasant time in the salon listening to music and getting thrown up into the air by a wave every minute or two.

Yesterday was cathartic. We did 8 loads of laundry, totally cleaned up the storm mess, and relaxed in the sun. At one point we even had a billfish (small marlin or sailfish) running off line on one of the reels, but the last thing I wanted to do at that moment was land and clean a fish, so I yanked the hook out of her mouth and let her go.

Jenna cooked the best meal of the passage last night, a Thai-style fish curry with some of the mahi mahi. It was really good. Later on, each of the guards took a 2 hour watch since we were motoring and they no longer had to be on guard duty. That meant that everyone, especially me and Jenna, could enjoy a full night’s sleep. It was wonderful.

Right before I want to bed, one of the guards, Tomasz, gently knocked on our door and very politely uttered my favorite words on Sophie:

“Jamie, we seem to be having a problem with the toilet.”

Ugh!

Thomas has been sharing Hazel’s room with another guard, Chris, which means two grown men have been using Hazel’s toilet for 2 weeks. This is the same toilet that I had spent hours and hours repairing and augering out while in the Maldives. I was expecting the worse when I approached, but to my surprise and delight I saw that the toilet was experiencing an input problem, not an output problem. Instead of finding a clogged bowl of smelly guard mess, I found a scene straight from the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: the toilet had turned into a fountain flowing fresh water out onto the floor. It turns out the switch is broken and won’t turn off the electric flush. Easy fix, I closed the valve for the time being and will clean out the switch once we stop bouncing.

Dodged a bullet.

I also had to replace a fuel filter on the starboard Yanmar last night after it started to clog. I think we got dirty fuel in Male, which is the first time this has happened to us on the entire trip. Other than that, not much to report. Jenna baked bread. People are watching movies. Leo slept until 10:00 AM. We are in the Red Sea. And Taylor Swift is just 70 miles away, which is good, because everyone on this boat loves Taylor Swift.

Day 16: The Truck Driving Music is ON!!
Jenna is down below taking a nap. Leo just snuck into our cabin to flush the watermaker, and Jenna lifted her head from the pillow, looked at her son with loving eyes, and said “Tell your dad it’s time to punch it.”

I put a smile on my face, opened both diesels up to 2500 RPM, and threw on the truck driving music we listen to whenever we start motoring fast at the end of a passage. Six(teen) days on the road and I’m a gonna see my baby tonight. (Hazel thinks Dave Dudley sounds like Elvis.)

Sophie has responded in kind, surging up to 7.5 knots as she shoulders aside the remaining sea slop. We are finally letting her punch her weight, and she is loving every second of it. Our ride is smooth, and cheeseburgers are going on the barbecue once I send this out.

I have a grandmother buried in New England, and she has a ball of yarn with crossed knitting needles carved on her tombstone. If I were to die today, I would want a picture of a diesel fuel bag tied to the deck of a sailboat carved on mine. That pretty much sums up how I am feeling right now as we put more and more miles between us and pirate country.

Sophie spent most of the last 24 hours trudging north at 5.5 knots into a 10-15 (true) knot chop in the middle of the Red Sea. We were running both engines @ 2100 RPMs and covered 152 miles in our 26 hour time zone-adjusted noon-noon run. Going any faster would have created unnecessary and uncomfortable pounding.Taylor Swift made us all happy when we passed her by last night, and Rachel Flotard is just 80 miles ahead of us.

We believe that this is the first time a Red Sea navigation waypoint has been named after a Seattle musician, and Jenna and I have been listening to Rachel’s music for fifteen years, which is even before she started Visqueen. Rachel plays beautiful power trio rock and roll, seems to be a good mom, and supports her community. We are honored to name this next waypoint after Rachel Flotard.

Hazel served her first formal watch yesterday! She sat at the inside steering station and monitored course, speed, and marine traffic for 45 minutes while her mom and dad slept. She was so proud of herself! She has also transitioned from a state of having perfect mermaid hair — complete with dreadlocks and tangled up bits of seaweed and shells — to a state where she is combing her hair over and over again throughout the day. Both hair states look great, and this girl is definitely now 8. We love her so much.

Our passage ends in 360 miles, and Sophie will have to SLOW DOWN to get to our destination by noon Wednesday. After 2500 miles so far, we have a happy, salt-encrusted boat.

Back in the US, school can be canceled on snow days. On Sophie, school can be canceled on chop days. There was no Sophie School yesterday, and the kiddies watched Pitch Perfect, Pipi Longstocking, The Book Thief, Star Wars IV, and Star Wars V. There is also a LOT of sleeping going on.

We caught a 12 pound barracuda in the afternoon; Chris reeled it in and posed for his “Look, I caught a fish in the Red Sea” photo, and then we released it.

Jenna and I think we drove through a whirlpool last night. We had been motoring for 30 minutes through a sloppy, washing machine sea state — which is usually current-induced and something we are used to experiencing — when suddenly Sophie was heading sideways to port at 10 knots. 30 seconds later we were heading to starboard at 15-20 knots. In another minute we were back on our normal course and speed. There was no change in wind, and we don’t think the GPS or fluxgate compass malfunctioned. It was the weirdest thing, and hasn’t happened since.

Dinner was barbecued chicken and cauliflower. That was the last of the cauliflower, but we still have cabbage, cucumbers, onions, and ginger left. Yum.

Tonight will be mac and cheese with beef tenderloin on the side.

On Wednesday, I will be drinking draft German beer and eating schnitzel. Jenna thinks we should just order everything on the menu. I love that girl, too, and I am pretty lucky that she loves me back.

Oh, and a friendly reminder: we are not going to post anything on Facebook or on the blog until we are on the other side of the Suez canal. We may have survived pirate country, but we are still in the Middle East. Please respect our privacy and personal security. It should be less than 10 days. Thanks!

More tomorrow …

Day 17: Flat Good! Gronk Spike!
I came up to the salon for my 5:00 AM watch this morning and was greeted by a big fat 8.5 on the knotmeter. The seas had finally flattened during the night and Sophie was flying along. We covered 192 miles in our 24 hour run, averaging exactly 8.00000 knots. It was the nautical equivalent of Moses parting the Red Sea, which is supposed to have nasty northerlies this time of year. Where’s the wakeboard? We’re coming home.

Our destination lies 170 miles ahead of us. At this speed, we will arrive at the marina at 9:00 AM tomorrow morning. The big question we are discussing right now is if we show up at the German bar at 10:00 AM, do we order breakfast or lunch? It is so nice to have a first world problem again.

GRONK! is less than 50 miles away. To celebrate, we will watch the Superbowl XLIX DVD this afternoon. I am sure that Tomasz, the guard from Poland, will enjoy learning more about his distant relative and fellow countryman Gronkowski. The timing is perfect, because Sophie was brushing off waves yesterday the same way Gronk brushes off cornerbacks while running downfield.

We emptied the last bag of fuel into Sophie this morning, and it was like injecting a glucose/adrenaline shot into a marathon runner at mile 24. The fuel gauges look great. I think we will make it.

We are motoring along over a glassy sea under a cloudless sky. A haze has formed on the horizon, cutting visibility to just a couple of miles. It is caused by dust blowing off the desert. Egypt is now to our left. It has gotten cooler as well, with the noontime temperature in the salon hovering at 76 degrees F. Jenna is wearing a fleece as she sits at the table editing photos and listening to truck drivers’ boogie woogie.

There is not a whole heck of a lot to report from yesterday. At one point Chris looked up at the starboard fishing pole and asked “Isn’t that supposed to have line on it? There was line on it 30 minutes ago.” With all the noise from two engines, one watermaker, and all the crashing and bashing, we never heard the fish run off 300 yards of 80 pound braided line, then snap the knot off the reel. We are lucky we still have the pole.

The kids got their schoolwork in and then watched Pitch Perfect II and Star Wars VI. The mac and cheese with beef tenderloin was a huge hit.

Today we are just hanging out. The kiddies are doing school while learning the lyrics to Dick Curliss’s “A Tombstone Every Mile.” Perhaps we can get them to perform it at a wedding later this year. I desalted the boat, changed another fuel filter, and started creating some new dance party playlists. Summer is coming. The boys are packing their bags and will head off to their flights home after we dock.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow’s post will be brief and definitive.

We’re Done, Baby!
Sophie docked at the immigration dock in Port Ghalib, Egypt at 8:00 this morning. We completed our 2,900 mile passage in 17 days and 23 hours, achieving an average speed of 6.7 knots during that time.

People say that sports championships are won on the practice field. In a similar sense, you could say that Jenna and I completed this passage before we ever left the Maldives. We spent 6 months getting ready for this trip, putting together a good plan while doing everything possible to make sure that Sophie was ready. Nothing significant broke during the passage, we put 60 pounds of fish into our freezer while underway, and we handled all of the weather that mother nature could throw at us. We never saw a pirate, and we had some really nice-yet-badass guards ready if they ever did show up. The kiddies were magnificent, with Leo standing 2-4 hours of watches every day, and Hazel taking on her first formal watches of our entire adventure cruise.

Thank you for all of your prayers and positive thoughts. They obviously helped.

Have I mentioned lately how lucky we are?

Made It!

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Jamie

Sophie dropped anchor in Male at 21:30 UTC +7, 8 days and 22 hours after we left the dock at Ao Po Grand Marina in Phuket, Thailand. Sophie covered the 1,527 mile passage at an average speed of 7.1 knots. Crew and boat are safe and happy after a spectacular and relaxing passage.

More tomorrow.

Current-aided Run to the Barn

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Jamie

Our ongoing tack for 1,100 miles came to an end after sunrise yesterday when the wind finally shifted to the east, forcing us to drop the main and raise the spinnaker for a straight downwind run in flat seas and sunny skies. By lunchtime the wind died altogether, so we dropped the chute and turned on a motor. Sophie spent the rest of the day cruising along at 8 knots with one engine running at 2,200 RPMs and no sails. She really wants to get to Male.

We really need to get a wakeboard.

Our current position at 3:30 UTC +7 is 04 42.138n, 077 24.261e. We covered 174 miles in our noon-noon run, averaging 7.3 knots. Male lies 235 miles ahead of us. We will get there tomorrow. Sophie is now closer to Pakistan than we are to Phuket. It is pretty crazy how small the world gets once you leave the Pacific Ocean.

Once the chute went up yesterday, I strung a laundry line across the deck and we did 5 loads of laundry. Jenna ran Sophie School inside. Aftwerwards, everyone hung outside up top, competing for a spot of shade under the bimini while discussing family weddings past and future. We have three weddings scheduled for the summer, as far as we can tell. It was a fun afternoon.

It turns out that pork and alcohol are illegal in the Maldives, so we decided to address this situation by eating all of the pork on board. While we were in Phuket we had a stainless steel bracket welded to one of our stern pulpits for an LPG bottle for our barbecue. We tested this rig last night with our first-ever passage barbecue, grilling up 3 pork loins and 2 packages of artisinal sausages. The food was quickly demolished by the crew. As Rich remarked, “If this is how we are forced to eat when we don’t have fresh tuna, then I guess we are doing OK.”

Indeed. Sophie Adventure Cruises has now added the capability for holding passage barbecues. It keeps getting better. We plan to eat the rest of the bacon for breakfast and then grill up some hot dogs for lunch. Then we will catch some more tuna and eat them for dinner. That’s how we roll.

We finally learned of the weekend’s NFL scores via an email from Travis’s wife Jenn, who will be joining us in Male later this week. Holy Moly, what a weekend of football it must have been! Seattle Seahawks, you had a great run! The Maldives are supposed to have excellent mobile coverage, so we will watch the remainder of the playoffs from Sophie’s salon. And to all of my stateside friends who promised to send me the scores and never did, please consider yourselves blogshamed!

We will post our next update when our anchor is down in Male. It’s been a great passage so far! Happy Birthday Steven Utzie!

Afterwards Afterwards

Beneath the Subcontinent

Posted on January 17, 2016 by Jamie

Sophie is now just 235 south of India as we leave Sri Lanka behind us and enter the Lakshadweep Sea. I thought I knew the names of all of the bodies of water we would transit on this passage until “Lakshadweep Sea” popped up on the chart. Lakshadweep. It just rolls of your tongue, doesn’t it?

We had our best sailing day of the passage yesterday, averaging 8-10 current-aided knots for most of the day in bright sunshine with minimal seas. Our noon-noon run was 164 miles, but that doesn’t take into account our 15 mile dash south across the shipping lanes and the fact that we stopped twice for fish.

Sophie’s current position at 3:52 UTC +7 is 05 04.104n, 080 11.725e. We are sailing at 7 knots under jib and full main on a course of 277m with a 9 knot apparent wind on our starboard quarter. With the exception of our jog across the highway, we have been on the same tack for almost a week. We are 403 miles from Male and should arrive there in 2 days.

We had a yellowfin tuna double takedown yesterday morning, where Nic and Travis boated fish simultaneously off the two rods, each trolling a small hoochie. These fellows were 4 and 5 pounds respectively, and they no longer exist. Jenna made sushi for lunch and the remainder was pan seared for dinner. We stopped fishing after the takedown because of our boatspeed, because I didn’t want to clean any more fish, and because I wanted to take a nap. I now wonder if some sort or temporary insanity came over me. Jenna was even asking me if I felt alright. I’ve gotten over it now, and 5 small hoochies are going out at sunrise.

We started seeing fishing boats yesterday for the first time on the passage about 70 miles south of Sri Lanka. On three separate occasions a boat stopped what they were doing when they saw us, changed course, and headed in our direction with their entire crew yelling and waving their arms at us. These boats were all about 30 feet long with a deep draft. We had heard stories of cruising sailboats last year that were harassed by Sri Lanka fishermen, and we wanted no part of that action. I am sure they were all just being bored and curious, but we just smiled and waved back at them as we turned the motors on and motorsailed past them at 10.5 knots. Given their draft, they couldn’t match our speed and in each case soon went back to work. We’ve seen another 10 fishing boats this evening, but at night they are leaving us alone.

There has been a lot of Yahtzee action in the aft cockpit for the last couple of days. It’s been too breezy back there for cards or board games. It has been a lot of fun, and we are holding off on doing Yahtzee shots until our big beautiful Rocna anchor is buried in sand.

We still don’t know the results of the NFL playoff games this weekend. We know the Patriots were beating Kansas City 14-6 at halftime, and my mother vaguely mentioned on the satphone that they had won “20 something to something.” A friend (and you know who you are) promised to send us via Sailmail all of the game scores plus a couple of the New England game stories, but he has gone dark on us. I hope he is not in the hospital or stranded on some backcountry Montana mountainside, trying to rub two sticks together in order to make a fire in a desperate attempt to survive in the cold and desolate wilderness.

But enough of my first world problems. In two days we will be swimming in crystal-clear water in some palm-studded atoll. Life is grand.

sailing sophie

follow our family on our sailing adventure.

Sailing Across Greece

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Reflections: Maldives

Reflections: Holly Bali

Turkey is Not Southeast Asia or the Pacific

From Egypt to Turkey

In Praise of Fuel Bags

3,200 Miles From The Maldives to Egypt

Made It!

Current-aided Run to the Barn

Beneath the Subcontinent