Timeline of Voyage

We expect to depart Boston by noon Thursday June 17th and sail overnight to Greenport Long Island. This is a 150nm voyage and we hope to arrive by 8pm on Friday 18th. Of importance to the trip is timing as we have to ensure we catch the correct current passing through the Cape Cod Canal. We will spend Saturday 19th in Greenport with the Bermuda Cruising Rally where we will have Prairie Gold checked out to make sure we have all of our safety equipment installed. We will have safety as well as other seminars and then, weather permitting, set sail for Bermuda at about noon on Sunday June 20th.

When we arrive in Greenport we will join up with other boats and crew on the trip and will meet Tania Aebi , the first women to solo circumnavigate the globe. Tania will be sailing in the Rally and will, we are sure, provide much guidance for us.

Throughout the voyage we will be in twice daily satellite phone contact with the rally and will also get daily weather and gulf stream briefings from Jenifer and Dane Clark.

By sailing with the rally we gain access to the Clark's services which will be important to help us identify a weather window to enable us to sail to Bermuda.

As we sail to Bermuda we will need to careful identify waypoint locations to help us make use of advantageous currents from the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream will have a current of up to 4kts and given the maximum speed of a sailboat our size is about 7-8kts (in ideal conditions) we want to make sure that the current works for us, not against us.

A critical area is eddy currents that form from the gulf stream. As the gulf stream heads northeast clockwise rotating warm eddies form on the northern side of the stream, and counter-clockwise cold eddies on the southern side of the stream. Thus as we approach an eddy we want to head to the eastern side of a warm eddy so that current helps propel us towards Bermuda. We will get daily help in identifying the location of these eddies and in navigating to use them to our best advantage.

See surface temperature measurements help identify the gulf stream and its eddies. This image is extracted from The Satellite Communications Facility at the Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory and is a 3 day composite image posted on June 9th 2010. During the voyage we will not be in email contact. Thus we will not be able to update the blog. However, when we arrive in Greenport and again in Bermuda, we will provide updates.