The Caribbean 1500 Rally – Portsmouth, VA to Tortola - Part 1 The Route

Well we made it to Tortola ... but you probably already know that. We arrived Wednesday evening and have been trying to get settled since then. Internet access is a bit spotty so please bear with us as far as posting blogs. Over the next few posts we'll try and describe how the passage went and what it felt like ... starting with the route that we took.

The start of the rally had been set months in advance but was always subject to change depending on the weather. On Friday 3rd November rally control confirmed that we would be going on schedule at 11 am on Sunday. The boat was ready … the crew (Rod, Dave and Brian)  were aboard … but were we ready mentally? The truth is that I was pretty nervous, unsure what to expect from a ten day offshore passage, but there wasn’t anything more to be done other than get going. We left the docks about 8.30 am on Sunday morning and motored down the Elizabeth River to the starting line off Hampton Roads. Twenty one boats – 16 heading to Tortola and 5 to the Bahamas. We raised sails for the start, but in truth there was next to no wind and we all motored across the start line on flat seas.

It’s about 1340 nautical miles from Portsmouth, VA to Tortola as the crow flies, but it’s called the Caribbean 1500 because that’s more like the distance you actually have to sail. Our plan was to head south east to Cape Hatteras, cross the gulf stream as quickly and directly as possible, then head east (or south east) to the vicinity of longitude 65^o west, where we expected to be able to sail south on a beam reach in freshening easterly trade winds to the Islands. It didn’t exactly go like that! We motored to Cape Hatteras and into the gulf stream where we encountered choppy seas, variable winds and many squalls. By the second evening we were able to do some fine sailing and passed by most of the squalls without issue. However, we were hit with 40 knot winds in the middle of the night from one squall that came down on us really fast, then passed just as quickly to leave us becalmed. Satellite imagery, provided before the start, showed several large gyrations spinning off the gulf stream for hundreds of miles. We tried to make use of these, or at least avoid fighting negative currents, and over the following several days we made steady progress to the south east, sailing as much as possible but motoring where necessary and by the end of day six we were positioned south of Bermuda and ready to start heading directly towards the islands. We were fortunate to have avoided a cold front that left several boats inside a one hundred mile wide storm. However, we were also too late for the favorable winds, which by this point had turned south east. Over the next two days we sailed close hauled to the wind trying to make as much progress to the south without giving up our easterly position. Unfortunately the winds continued to turn due south and were dead on the nose to reach Tortola. We fought these as hard as we could with the boat slamming off waves, but by the middle of the night on the ninth day we realized that continuing to sail to the end would either involve tacking back and forth for days or making landfall in Puerto Rico, so we switched on the engine and motored directly for Tortola as hard as our fuel supplies would allow. We reached the finishing line at 7.33pm on Wednesday November 15^th, ten days after leaving Portsmouth. We pulled into a quiet Bay in the dark, picked up a mooring and had a cold beer and beef stew before falling into an exhausted sleep.  Actually I was literally falling asleep during the meal. The following morning we motored the final five or so miles down the Francis Drake Channel to Nanny Cay, where we were met by the rally staff with ice cold rum punches!

In total we motored 70 out of the ~250 hours total travel time. The rally collected motoring hours and factored these in to an overall position. We were thrilled to find out that we came in 3rd overall in the class-B section (smaller, non-racing boats)

The sunrises and sunsets were memorable. In particular the cloud formations that we saw were amazing, at night lit up by the moon. There were many squalls but we were lucky and most passed us by without incident. Other boats on the rally had much tougher conditions.