On the Road

Skipper Don reported that BrainWaves has started her trip without us. His email last night says “. . . I saw them load up Brainwaves Monday a.m.. She hit the road at 9 a.m. and is due in Norfolk Wednesday a.m." We will meet up with her on Saturday in Norfolk. Don will drive down Saturday morning to pick up Rod and then the two of them will pick up Ken in the Detroit. From there all three will drive straight through to Norfolk and meet with John at the harbor. The SPOT until should track us all the way. Two days ago it was 90 in Norfolk and those warm temperatures are falling off now. We may chase the cooler weather and rain only to catch it when we get to the boat.

For those of you that may have caught my earlier long and humorous (to me) posting consider yourself lucky, or not. After my own First Mate read it through without even a smile and her only comment was "Well, somebody might think its funny" I decided to pull it in an effort to protect the innocent and save face! Where is that Harbor Bastard when I need his support?

The Dream

Hi, I'm Don, for purposes of this, a.k.a. skipper.

As I'm looking at the open water forecast off Virginia which today shows 21-28 ft seas and 35 knot winds I'm wondering, why did I want to do this?

Since childhood when I read about Columbus crossing the ocean in a 65 foot Caravelle, I dreamed of voyages of exploration. Give me a nautical chart I haven't seen before and I'm like a kid in a candy store. Together my family and I have sailed Lake Michigan and Lake Huron for years. We've chartered in the Caribbean and in Greece but we've never done a blue water crossing.

Since I'm still working, the thought of taking off months to years for an ocean crossing was out of the question. But what if I could cross part of an ocean? Since we had visited Bermuda in 1985, I knew of a beautiful sub-tropical destination that happened to be about 1/4 of an ocean off the East Coast.---The dream was born.

It incubated in my mind for some time. To charter or to transport? How to get the boat to the coast, by water or by land? What about the expense? And then the big roadblock. My family; my crew doesn't share my dream. They don't want to go out there in the big water. Then on a 2007 Labor Day cruise to Beaver Island I discuss my dream with Rod and Eric (affectionately known as the HarborBastard). Eric says, "We've got to do this thing"...The dream has a crew.

20 months later the myriad of details have been solved (mostly). The boat is loaded (mostly) and it's going to happen. This trip will be a pleasure, a trial, an adventure and an accomplishment. Friendships already forged will be tempered and burnished. We will see bigger seas than most of us have ever seen and will experience motion we may wish never to experience again. But we will survive and be wiser and richer for it. That's the dream.

Hi! I’m Tom Tietjen, the weather, safety and “20th century navigation” guy for this trip. Please don’t judge me because I’m only going to participate on the return leg of this cruise. It’s only because a one month vacation would finally give my partners the motivation they needed to replace me with a younger, harder-working model. Sorry Heidi, Frank, and Jim, unless the sharks get me I’ll be around a little bit longer!

It’s such a privilege to be included on this crew. My sailing resume is a little thin. Nevertheless, I’m hoping to marry my newfound love for sailing with the knowledge I’ve gained over the past three years crewing for Chuck Johnson and the classes I’ve taken with the Tip-O-The-Mitt Power Squadron. To that end, I’ll supply logistics and offshore weather forecasts to the outbound crew via satellite phone and celestial navigation for the inbound leg (yes, you can still find your way using the stars!).

I hope to use my skills at piloting to help get the boat out of Bermuda and into Norfolk (maybe at night for one of them… ). As one of three physicians on this trip (a neurologist, urologist, gastroenterologist), I’ve been assigned the duty of putting together a first aid kit, too. The kit is as big as an airline carry-on bag and weighs over 20 pounds. I think we’re ready for everything from sea snake bites to kidney biopsies to fibromyalgia attacks!

Sailing at night by the stars will be a treat. So little of that here on the Great Lakes, you know. In case any family members are panicking about now, please let me assure you we’ll have several (three I think) operable GPS units on board! I’m going to ask Don to allow me to navigate by the stars so long as I keep within 10 miles of our intended course. We’ll see how that works out…

More later!

Countdown

Two weeks and counting! The launch date is fast approaching and there are lots of little details that seem to pop up. I'm sure Don is busier than all of us with all the planning for shipping the boat and getting us underway. The plan is to pack the boat this Saturday with as much food and essentials as we can prior to transporting the boat to Norfolk. Don, Ken and I will probably be involved in the packing process so that maybe one of us can remember where things are stowed. I will be bringing a laptop so Tom can install a program to calculate our positioning based on our sextant readings. We are hoping that this will strictly be used for fun and not because of a failure of all the GPS units we will have on board. Tom just mentioned in his last email that he will be renting a SPOT unit which will allow tracking of our progress via the internet by family and friends. I'm slowly gathering the odds and ends to take on the trip and tomorrow I have to get it organized and packed to take with me to Petoskey on Saturday. I'm sure packing the boat will make this more "real". Don has found a website (weatherbouy.com) for placing a virtual buoy in our proposed sailing route to check for temperatures, wind and waves. We checked it out on Easter at his home and I was amazed at the wind speed and wave heights for most of the current week. Nearly every day was red flagged and several days showed waves of 20 feet plus! Hopefully we will not run into those conditions. While sailing with Don on Lake Michigan we have encountered 10' seas on several occasions and it is hard for me to imagine waves twice that height. However, we fully expect to run into both calm boring days and windy challenging situations. We would like to place an order for more of the former and less of the latter! - Rod