Saturday, May 20 – 1700

Bermuda makes for an excellent decompression chamber – before making one’s way to the States. There’s drugstore music on the radio (along with rap), lots of traffic whizzing by during the day, all kinds of stores to tempt you into buying unneccessaery items, and a really nice supermarket. And the most important item – good boat watching. This is, after all, one of the major cruising crossroads.

Beowulf is anchored in St. David’s, surrounded by boats from all over the world, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and materials. There are a couple of 150’+ Perina Navis, Rebecca (140′) is here, there are two L. Francis Hershoff reproductions, and even a copy of Joshua Slocum’s Spray.

We’ve been through the reef to the big city of Hamilton, done all of the tourist bits – lots of walking, museums, cool forts, art galleries, eaten out, and stocked up at the aforementioned “Super” Market – the latter probably being the highlight for Hamilton – they even have really good sourdough bread!

The weather has been unusual, the locals say. If you’ve been watching the 500mb charts with us you’ve noticed a classic cut off upper level low. This has brought lots of rain, and breezy northeasterly winds. Not exactly good for tourism or voyaging to the States or on to the Azores.

However, the Bermuda high is making a stab at re-establishing itself as we write this. The barometer has jumped 4mb to 1018, the winds have eased off and gone E to ESE, and all of the forecasts from the Marine Prediction Center are showing a resumption of the prevailing SW flow – which is what we want for a fast passage to Newport.

The marine weather forecasters in Bermuda enjoy chatting with yachties – as they do in most places. When we talked to them this AM they told us the upper level low was moving out and that they were expecting things to improve. The customs office on the wharf each day posts a four day forecast along with position data on the Gulf Stream. For 25 cents a page you can get your own set – very handy.

Between what the local forecasters are saying and what we can see in the MPC weather faxes, Sunday or Monday may present us with a reasonable weather “window.”

The issue between here and the East Coast are the successive continental lows which seem to be marching along every two to three days. These are supposed to be further north this late in the year and should not be affecting us in a negative manner. But they have not gotten the message, so we’ve got to be careful.

As we’re on a collision course with the continental weather, the time frame which we have to make it across is much reduced. In this context there are several considerations.

First, ahead of the fronts you have SW quadrant winds – which are favorable. However, on passage of the front the wind goes NW and then (usually) N. As our course is 330 degrees True, post-frontal winds are right on the nose.

Second, it is better to avoid unstable weather when crossing the Gulf Stream – which we’ll do about half way across. There are the bigger seas you always find there – typically breaking if it is blowing moderately hard – and increased gustiness and/or substantially stronger mean wind speeds due to the warm water heating up the colder air mass.

So, the first order of business is to avoid being caught in or near the Gulf Stream in frontal weather.

If we do get caught up in a frontal passage, we’ll stay on port tack as the wind goes around to the N or NE, and then flop over onto starboard when we can lay our destination – the latter being flexible depending on what the wind gives us.

We’re going to add the services of Commander’s Weather to our arsenal for this passage. We’ll let you know what they have to say shortly.

(View the weatherfaxes at http://www.mpc.ncep.noaa.gov .)