Back on land - We made it !

Wow - land and beer sure are good to be around! Rob even flew down to join us in Florida as we arrived. After skirting along the Bahamas for several days, including getting close enough so we could hold a Kindle high in the air and get the Mpls newspaper on wireless, we landed at Riviera Beach, Florida at 7 in the morning after 37 days and nights at sea. Yes, we are still friends. More about the homecoming below; first a little more about our voyage back across the ocean. The one thing we could not do with our "at sea" blog postings was include photos or videos, so here you go -

After a good night's sleep we were even happier!

Here are some fun, short videos that show life at sea. Some are narrated and some are narrated by the noise of the wind...

We had the wonderful pleasure of being visited by a group of dolphins for about 30 minutes one afternoon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiDS9PbhyX4

We wrote about being becalmed. Here's what that looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74sBxUT4xS4

Here is a clip from one lovely afternoon where we were flying the spinnaker and making nice progress. When Pat ordered the spinnaker he asked Rob to design the colored panels. You will hear Natalie Cole's Christmas CD playing in the background:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6i5CoIP-oQ

Of course, not every day was that nice! On the worst days, it was all we could do to manage ourselves and the boat. On the not-quite-the-worst days, we could shoot some short clips. Here is Pat hand steering us through a 30 minute rain squall. It rained so hard that I grabbed the soap and took a deck shower - no video exists of that - you will be glad to know:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAL7DMCKS70

Sometimes the wind came from mostly behind us. That made for smoother sailing and a more comfortable ride. We often found flying fish on deck in the mornings. This clip ends with a look at one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6bZ-T5yQkE

And, some days we sailed mostly into the wind. That made for lots of waves and noise...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ACpSUZdaBw

Some days were flat-out beautiful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zPYeXtPrB8

A couple interesting facts - we went 37 days and nights without sleeping more than three hours at a stretch. We both are good nappers and will find staying awake all day at work a challenge! Our days really only lasted from 10 a.m. till 7 p.m.. Someone was almost always sleeping from 7 p.m. to 10 a.m. as we alternated watches. Our favorite time of day was 4 to 7 p.m. when we cooked dinner, listened to music, talked and shared our feelings (!), and watched the many gorgeous sunsets.

Since dinner was our favorite meal - and our only hot meal of the day - here are some dinner shots:

The white brick is tofu waiting to be cubed.

We baked bread in a muffin pan to reduce the cooking time.

Here we have Thai coconut rice with tofu and chickpeas ready to serve in our beloved dog bowls.

Cleanup was usually just one pan and our dog bowls. Here they are set out to dry overnight.

Speaking of night, going out on deck was not a big deal, but going out on deck at night was always a little more tense. Here is Pat out clearing a fouled line under the glow of the overhead deck light.



 We tried to avoid rain squalls and their usual high winds but they moved at 30 mph and we could only go about 5 mph... Later in the trip when the boat was entirely salt encrusted we did look forward to a good rinsing rain.

Yup, that is rain up ahead!

We only saw ships in the early and late part of our trip. They usually avoided us but we did have a couple closer than we would like calls, including a cruise ship we had to motor around!


We are really glad we didn't hit this guy.



Even the best of friends run out of things to talk about after a month together.



Here is the information center in the back of the cockpit. The bottom screen is the gps and radar. The top left is the autopilot, next is the depth and speed, the round one is the remote control for the radio/stereo, and the upper right is the wind speed and angle meter.

Now, back to our arrival - after a night of cold, windy, rainy sailing we arrived in Riviera Beach, Florida. We were met by Rob, Mary, and Peggy with a silver banner and hot coffee! We unloaded the boat and did some other chores and then had a great seafood dinner with other members of Pat and Rob's family. The next day we had the boat lifted out of the water and later it will be shipped on a flatbed truck back to Minnesota.


The three sailors would like to thank each and every one of you who followed our trip and shared your thoughts, messages and energy. We loved the comments we got, the visits to the boat, and the help you gave us and our spouses back home. We owe a world of thanks to Michele, Mary and Peggy and will always be grateful for their support and forebearance...

Mother, mother ocean,
I have heard you call,
Wanted to sail upon your waters,
Since I was three feet tall.

Jimmy Buffet – A Pirate Looks At Forty


We hope that your dreams - and the dreams of others you help nurture - can all come true like ours did.


Rob, Pat, Tom



Welcome Them - The Sailors Are (Almost) Back

Remedios is sailing smartly toward the U.S. coast - expected to arrive under the (by now) expert sailing skills of Pat and Tom. They are expected to arrive in Riviera Beach, FL sometime Sunday morning.

Michele, Peggy, Rob and Mary invite all blog readers to send a message or post a comment to join us in welcoming them home. They have VERY much appreciated all the notes and support they received during the six months they've been gone. It truly made their trip extra special to know that so many family members, friends, and even people they don't know, cared so much that they have followed their Great Sailing Adventure.

Feel free to post a blog comment, or send an email to: remedios.ocean.voyage@gmail.com

It will be fun to hear their personal stories about the 4+ weeks on the open ocean return trip. Check back to the blog for their reports. It certainly has been an adventure!

Really, We're Trying to Get Home!

We are 700 miles away from our arrival in Florida and had been making 120 miles per day. We knew that wouldn't hold for every day, yet we had some hope it could. We have been watching a big storm way to the north and it is getting bigger and starting to move.

The good news is that this gale is centered off North Carolina and moving east and a little north. The bad news, at least for us, is that the storm is so big we are catching the southern edge of it way down here. On the southern edge of a low the winds blow from west to east and that will be exactly on our nose. Bad for progress to Florida. This also won't change - this low pressure system is too big to just dissipate or get pushed aside by another system.

We expect the heaviest winds to hit us Monday and Tuesday and maybe part of Wednesday. We don't know how much progress we can make during these winds. They will only be 20 to 25 knots or so, no more than we have had several times this trip, but they will not be at our rear pushing us along, they will be in our face...

To get ready for weather like this we have moved our storm sails out on to the main deck from their storage locker below. We did a cabin review and made sure that anything that could be flying off a shelf or table has been tied down. I made some fresh bread this morning so we have some easy food in addition to our protein bars. We will put some of our extra diesel fuel that we have in a fuel storage locker into the main tank so if we have to run the engine to maneuver we won't run out in the middle of the night. Other than that it is just the old sailor stuff of "batten down the hatches and hold on!"

One thing to note is that if we were five days ahead of where we are now, we would be closer to the middle of this storm and it would be so bad up there that we would have to go into Freeport in the Bahamas and hole up for four or five days anyway! So, if we had made faster progress we would have been stopped by this storm anyway.

You can all be sure that we are doing our best to safely complete our sailing adventure. This Wednesday is the six month mark of our trip – we left Barker’s Island in Duluth/Superior port on June 15. Seems like a really long time ago. A really special, fun time - even with all the challenges.

For our Minnesota family and friends, we have great empathy for the incredible winter/snow/storm weather you’ve been experiencing. After all, we’ll be back soon to enjoy all of that with you!

Posted by Peggy, on behalf of Tom and Pat, aboard Remedios, Atlantic Ocean

Life on the Ocean, After 3+ Weeks

Friday, Dec. 3, was a nice day of gentle winds, sunny skies and a couple oddities. We agreed that after Dec. 1 we could listen to one Christmas album each morning. So around 11 a.m. we put on Leon Redbone’s "Christmas Island" and got in the holiday mood.

I decided to bake some bread while the ride was smooth so I dumped some Italian seasoning into the flour and got my yeast mix going. I was kneading away on the galley counter and stopped to realize that I was baking bread, while listening to Frosty the Snowman, while wearing shorts and a tank top, while Pat was up steering with no shirt on, in the middle of the ocean, while it was 80 degrees and sunny, 1,500 miles from land. For two guys from Minnesota, this is a pretty odd run-up to Christmas! Maybe just listening to holiday music while wearing life jackets and harnesses is strange...

So last night for dinner we had Italian bread rolls, Dal Makhani with tofu and the Rat Pack Christmas CD for prep music. We just passed a time zone, so after dinner we have a couple hours together in the cockpit to listen to a couple shows from the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour as it gets dark. Last night the two shows we listened to were Hair and Food. The night before we listened to Water and Time - two subjects we have too much of at the moment. Bob talks for a few minutes in-between each song with some fun history about the song and/or the performer.

We get amazingly engaged when we see anything at all out here that isn't a wave. Last night we saw our third ship - it came within six miles of us before bearing away. Today Pat spotted a white thing bobbing in the water so we sailed a little closer and determined it was a buoy that had come loose from some fish or crab pot somewhere. I guess it doesn't take much to get us going.

Pat and I are worried that when we get home, once asleep we will jump out of bed after three hours and go sit on the front porch with a flashlight and binoculars for three hours, and then go back to bed. 35 days of never sleeping more than 3 hours at a time will be a hard habit to break. When this is over we can't decide if we will get an apartment together or never see each other again. We have resorted to topics like "Tell me about your first bicycle" to keep the conversation going!

A flying fish found its way into the dodger and behind some gear where made it stink like, well, a dead fish. BTW, a flying fish flopping under the dodger in the dark in the middle of the night is enough to scare big strong men.

And while we’re on smells, yesterday we found the source of an odd smell - a container of leaking gear oil and got all that cleaned up. This is too small of a micro-environment to have something stink. (That isn't one of us...)

We’ve certainly found it is possible to be deeply annoyed by the wind at both ends of the spectrum - too much and not enough, and then back again, in less than 24 hours. We can report that reading ceases to be fun at over 20 knots of wind speed.
Other random things to report:
You can actually do laundry while heeled over at 15 degrees in 20 knots of wind.

Our food got tossed off the upper shelf earlier today for the second time. First time, shame on the wind; second time, shame on us!

Pat has not had coffee for over 20 days. (And for those who know Pat, yes, that's true!) We each had our first piece of chocolate in 20 days two nights ago.


For those of you into garbage - we will hit Florida in a couple weeks with two small plastic grocery bags of garbage. We worked pretty hard at food packaging to make sure we didn't have a lot of trash to haul back. 90% of our garbage will be plastic packaging.

These are all among the many things we’re doing, and thinking about, as we focus on getting to Florida!!


Posted by Peggy, on behalf of Pat and Tom, aboard Remedios, Atlantic Ocean

It Really Is All About the Weather

With intermittent rain and wind squalls, winds 15 to 18 knots, we’ve have really been moving along in a good direction. Still the weather remains most challenging.

Tracking squalls is interesting. Most show up as black blobs on the radar which makes tracking and sometimes dodging them easier. It's the rain in the squall that shows up on radar. If it is just a wind squall, then the radar won't pick it up and the only warning is a sudden increase in the wind. And if it is a black watch, with no moon, then sometimes the only warning is that suddenly you can't see the stars anymore (big black cloud in the way....). Then it is time to grab a rain jacket and head back to the wheel to take over steering from the autopilot, if it gets too hairy.

Some nights there are no squalls, other times maybe one per hour. They are more prevalent at night due to a greater differential between the ocean temperature and the air temperature (Rob taught us that).

When squalls do hit, we are getting pretty good at “squall management.” Reef the sails, get ready, go through it, if it is 27 knots or less, and then run with it if the winds get to 30. They rarely last more than 20 minutes. Yet some do come up quite suddenly. I had one last night that didn't show up on the radar and then all of a sudden the winds went from 16 to 24 so I had to jump up, put on a rain jacket and get behind the wheel. Yet, it was over in 15 minutes. The day before we were hand steering through 30 knot winds and big, big rolling swells. That tends to focus your attention!

Thankfully, the weather changes. A lot, as you can tell! We’ve had a few great days now with lots of sun, medium winds and good progress. And - sorry - it’s been hot! We both went 10 days without ever putting on shoes - a new record.

We have passed the half way point in miles, days and psychologically. It is good to be in the home stretch!!!