This video is taken by “Tarutuomi Vimeo Channel”. Here you can discover the sailing passage from St Andrés to Florida on board a classic 43′ Halsey Herreshoff yacht, built in 1971 for ocean racing.
“The trip started out fairly intense with 20-25 knots of wind and 8-10 foot seas. On the second day, the wind died out and sea remained still for four long days. Of course, we run out of diesel and despite our efforts of making use of the whole sail wardrobe, we didn’t accomplish more than perhaps 50 n miles per day during those four calm days”.
“On the fifth day the wind picked up again and unfortunately I don’t have the action recorded anywhere except in my mind, but there were heavy and very active thunder storms surrounding us for the final three days before we arrived in the US. A tanker a mile away from us got hit by the lightning and we thank our lucky stars that it was there right in that time, otherwise we would have probably been struck and I doubt our boat would have handled it as well as the cargo did”.
“Also very glad for all the animal company we had the pleasure to experience during this sail, the dolphins, the minke whales (I think it was minke whales?), the boobie bird resting for the night on our solar panels and the massive amount of flying fish finding their way to deck”.
“It was an interesting experience diving into the water of 5000 meter depth, in the middle of the calm Caribbean sea. Because of the strong currents of the gulf stream, the boat was still moving forward at 1,2 knots and made it almost impossible for me to swim back to the ladder… good exercise indeed!”
“The last 300 miles went fast as we caught the strongest part of the gulf stream and could rapidly push forward, clocking 240 n miles in the final 24 hours.”