Canadian Boating May 2024 - 22

Homeschool underway- boat-style! Credit: Max Shaw.
Max in the office. Credit: Natalie Hunt.
discussion on how hard to push the boat.
Also, unlike a typical cruising crossing,
we could see the other participants' positions
and speeds through the ARC's tracking
app. Of course, we were not racing but
... we wanted to finish well ...
The first few days we worked our way
south mostly under gennaker to keep our
VMG up in the light winds. The calm seas
provided a good opportunity to launch
Peter's drone - something we never did
on passages in my boat! Some of the boats
elected to motor (as permitted by the rally
rules) but with the stable foredeck and the
gennaker on a furler, it was easy to swap
back and forth between the gennaker and
the big Oxley symmetrical spinnaker to
see which one gave us the best VMG in
the light shifty conditions. With the Oxley
we could sail very comfortably very deep
down wind in 7 kts TWS doing about 4
kts boat speed. In fact, conditions were
flat enough for the kids to do science
experiments with eggs in glasses on the
cockpit table!
On Day 8, we gybed over to point
towards St Lucia and our average boat
speed rose to almost 9 kts with the better
wind angle. School continued unabated
and there was even time for a birthday
party. One morning as I was on watch the
children appeared at 0530 to decorate the
boat to surprise their mother. While SV
June is mostly a 'dry ship' while underway,
we were treated to special Birthday
cocktails by the master distiller himself.
By halfway, we were in first place in our
category and we were alternating between
using the jib in the frequent squalls and
the gennaker otherwise - we were generally
doing about 9 kts with surfs up to 19
kts. Coming from my experience crossing
oceans in monohulls, I was astounded at
the way life continued as usual. At one
point I politely reminded one of the children
to keep a hand on their glass of apple
juice on the cockpit table. Of course, it
was pointed out we were on a catamaran
and it would be fine. She was right - you
can see on Instagram a video of the glass
on the table as we are doing 8 to 9 kts with
surfs into the teens in 2.6m seas.
Squalls are a part of any passage in the
tropics and this was no different. On one of
the nights (squalls mostly come at night)
we had 14 squalls.
The crew quickly
learnt how to track them to determine if
they were going to hit us (using relative
bearings whether visually or with radar)
and how long we could leave it before
adjusting our sails. One advantage of a
performance catamaran is that so much of
the energy from the gusts results in acceleration
so it was not as dramatic as on a
monohull. Further, working on the stable
foredeck made furling the gennaker light
work compared to the bouncing pointy
foredeck I was used to on a monohull.
Having Starlink onboard made it quite
different from my earlier crossings where
we relied on the SSB radio and then the
Iridium Go for weather information
22 CANADIAN BOATING | MAY 2024
and simple emails. With Starlink, we
had connectivity as if I was still in the
office. In fact, I surprised people who
called my office by answering the phone
from the middle of the Atlantic. I run an
offshore weather seminar program for
the Bluewater Cruising Association and
chaired our monthly Zoom discussion
on my 0000 to 0300 watch one evening.
Starlink also enabled us to maintain our
Social Media presence; in fact, the Hunts
won the Social Media prize at the final
award ceremony for their excellent content
(see Instagram Sailing_June). In
some ways, I missed the isolation of my
previous passages, but the connectivity
does mean that more people are able to
enjoy the experience of being offshore.
During the last few days of the passage,
I found myself baffled when a less
performance-oriented catamaran in our
class pulled ahead of us and maintained
surprisingly good speed going directly
downwind, which is usually very slow.
No matter what we did, we could not
catch up. Had we gybed too late? Would
an A2 Symmetric spinnaker have made a
difference? It was only when we arrived
and I discovered that they had blown out
their only spinnaker and the skipper had
elected to motor at speed towards the rum
punches that the mystery was solved!
With St Lucia almost on the horizon,
the excitement started to build as it always
does towards the end of a longer passage;
however, Mother Nature made us work
Canadian Boating May 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Canadian Boating May 2024
