Overnight to Antigua
It’s 00:55 and I start hearing some rather interesting sea shanties through the speaker—it’s time to get up and leave Marie-Galant! Andy is in the galley prepping coffee while everyone is slowly rising from their bunks. Our night mission to Antigua has started. We leave the anchorage and hoist our mainsail and staysail in a quiet fashion. The first bit of the trip is going to be tacking upwind towards the eastern side of Guadeloupe, so I go back to bed (or try to) as they start tacking. You can hear laughter and feel the tacks getting better and better. I think to myself how cool it is that we are sailing a 65ft ex-racing boat with a bunch of like-minded people who a week ago didn’t know each other, making almost perfect tacks through squalls in the middle of the night.
After reaching the east side of Guadeloupe, we are able to bear away and it’s a sprint from there. FALKEN flew at 10-11 knots, first with the staysail and then with the Yankee and staysail on a close reach all the way to Antigua. She was loving it and so were the crew, feeling her speed on the helm. We directed FALKEN’s bow towards English Harbour, where Nelson hid his fleet of boats back in the day, as Andy explains to us. It was a fabulous entrance to the bay under sail, dropping sails as we turned the corner. After a little tour of the bay, we decided to head to Falmouth Harbour and ended the night enjoying some Caribbean Piri-Piri Chicken ashore at Flatties.
It is now, when I look back, that I realize how proud I am of what we do, what we bring to people who join us, and all they bring to us. It has been a blast! // Alex
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A last hurrah
Under the dome of stars in a moon-less sky, each of us during our time at the helm used the most rudimentary celestial navigation, keeping a star or two lined up with the mast as a helper to following the heading range. It was a whole crew event to set the spinnaker, reef the mainsail and practice the heave-to in case of man overboard. Alex stressed that the key to success in all of these crucial activities is preparation. It was hugely satisfying to accomplish these tasks through teamwork. We share a constant good hearted back and forth full of stories, one-liners and comebacks that also means constant laughter.
One little bird!
Falken has almost rounded the Channel Islands and is cruising along splendidly about 100 miles offshore. Though several models predicted some slightly fresher winds today, we were met with a consistent 18-20 kts of pure bliss. It seems that from the moment we left the dock in San Francisco, there has been much laughter and conversation amongst everyone. The plan is to gybe in a few hours and begin our approach to Ensenada. As much as I do appreciate the jokes and intellectual musings, I equally appreciate the natural, silent moments we share at night, all of us on watch gazing up above to the shooting stars, constellations, and planets putting on their quiet show.
Birds and glows
The sun brought new wind and we were soon putting up the Yankee (jib) and turning off the motor. During the evening tradition of sharing “glums and glows” that follows the crew dinner, our Mate Ryan proclaimed it a “champagne sailing” kind of day. As Alex noted this evening, life goes by so fast that one of the very best things about his line of work is enjoying the passage of time in the slow lane of an ocean passage. But by tomorrow, the green blobs in the weather sailing app indicate we’re going to pick up some significant northwesterly winds and we’ll take them ever further south to the Channel Islands latitude. We’re all super excited for the knots to climb and to see Falken really run.