Skirting The Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devils Triangle, famously swallows “an average of four planes and 20 boats into the zone every year, leaving … [cue scary music] … no trace behind”!
But why such carnage? There must be some scientific reason for this annual nautical naughtiness. So before Amari would launch off into this dread abyss, I researched why this keeps happening, so I can at least understand my own impending doom.
Theories about the Triangle unpack an absolute clown car of wonderfully wacky explanations, including sub-sea pyramids, rogue waves, alien bases, geomagnetic blahbittyblahs, the lost city of Atlantis, and even giant methane bubbles! This complete canvas of crazy is like a conspiracy theorist’s Magic Eye puzzle, where you stare at it long enough and eventually you see the Queen of Hearts and Johnny Depp having tea with the Cheshire Cat.
If you add all the theories together, just based on pure logic alone, it’s obvious what’s going on here. The pyramid of the lost city of Atlantis (which exists at the center of the triangle, duh) distorts the magnetic field because it’s actually a launching ground for space aliens. These geomagnetic anomalies, combined with fact that that the aliens are clearly raising herds of giant Sea Cows grazing on the lawn of the pyramids of Atlantis, who’s Jurassic-level methane emissions gives the ocean gas. Ergo, ipso facto, and the clincher — be that as it may — those giant methane bubbles would not only stink to high heaven, but would also cause a very smelly rogue wave that could clearly take down a tanker.
Given my sterling scientific process in assembling the picture, obvi, this is actual truth of the matter. You’re welcome.
Fortunately for us, our trajectory from BVI to Bermuda led us just on the eastern edge of the triangle. I suppose had been an octagon, pentagon, or rhombus, we’d have been sucked into the dreaded devil’s triangle of doom [cue thunder clap, woman screaming, Kraken … making Kraken noises I guess]. In any case, our lives were clearly saved by geometry.
Absent certain death and excessive sea cow emissions, our passage north was the perfect maiden passage for our new team to make together. The sail direction was a straight shot due North of almost 900 miles. Plus, as we travelled north, the winds would be pretty predictable for the first 2/3 of the trip.
1st 3rd: The remains of the normal eastward trades blew over our starboard for the 250 miles or so, which is a great point of sail, and super easy for us to manage.
2nd 3rd: But as you plow north, those winds always die out into something called the “horse latitudes”. [Children, cover your eyes. And, if you’re sensitive to meanies in this world, skip right on over to the 3rd 3rd.]
An explanation for the term comes from Spanish ships transporting (among other things) horses to the West Indies and Americas. These big fat galleons would stall for days or even weeks as they passed through the wide bands of high pressure and prolonged lack of winds.
And once they hit this flat glassy sea with zero winds to move them forward and no prospect of getting anywhere any time soon, crews often ran low on drinking water. To conserve that scarce commodity, sailors would often throw their horses right overboard.
Sorry Trigger, so long Silver, bye bye Chestnut. Although there’s water, water, everywhere, there was only so much to drink.
We did hit these, although (thankfully) because boats in our century come standard an inboard motor with plenty of Diesel in the tank, we didn’t actually have to throw any horses, pets, or farm animals of any kind overboard. (whew!) After motoring for just a couple of days in this calmness, we then hit the 3rd 3rd of our trip.
3rd 3rd: There’s a sarcastic saying we say about sailing.
Q: Where’s the wind coming from, sailor?
A: Exactly where you want to go.
In fact it happened to us as well. During the last couple hundred miles the wind was coming due south, right on our nose and exactly where we wanted to be.
If you sail, you know this means we had a choice. We could pull down the sail and plow directly into the oncoming wind, and more impactfully, literally, the waves. This is super uncomfortable and hard on poor Amari. Alternatively, we could head away from our target by 45 - 60 degrees for a tight and bouncy close reach.
We opted for the latter, choosing a point of sail that could get us as near to our target as possible without swinging so wide that we ended up in Virginia.
After pounding out this sail, hobby horsing through the waves for another couple of days we got impatient with the constant beating we were taking. That’s when we made a classic blunder. Of course, the most common classic blunder is to never start a land war in Asia. Only slightly less well known is to never tack too early when trying to beat upwind!
We did though, and the wind + seas pushed us down well south of our Bermuda target. That left us, again, nose into the wind just like before! So in the end, tired, grumpy, and more than ready for the Dark-n-Stormies we knew awaited our arrival, we bailed on the whole sailing part, dropped canvas, and just muscled our motor into the last 20 miles or so, right into the harbor.
Arriving in Bermuda was so sweet for us all. It was our first solo sail for our little family triad, which we knew had to morph into our round-the-world team. This little test-drive of a week at sea was a perfect way to kick off the training wheels through a nicely manageable passage.
Also, sadly Grace had to leave once we arrived. She had to go back to NY to work, but would re-join us when the World ARC started in January of 2020.
In the meantime, we had scheduled for our dear friends Babs and Tim to be our crew on the next 2 legs, over to the Azores and then finally to into Portugal.
Because of all of this, landing in Bermuda was a great confirmation for us all that our team was perfect, and we could definitely do this!
