D-1, the day before we leave

It's like waiting for Christmas, these last few hours before we actually cast off the lines and head for Bermuda. We (eight of us) are sailing on a 62ft steel schooner from Portsmouth, Virginia. The boat was built by J.C. Waters in Independence Missouri and launched in 2005 so she is a fairly new craft, and what a beauty she is. At 88,000 lbs displacement she draws 7 feet of water and has a 17 ft beam. That all means that we have room enough to not trip over each other and are in a boat that is stout enough to get us to our destination safely. I have been working as mate on the boat for about two years.

Since we have been talking about this trip for the past eight months we have had some time to think about the voyage and do some crew training. We chose this time to go because historically late April through June is the time with the most favorable winds and the least chance of a storm. That's not to say we are guaranteed smooth sailing, just to say that we have stacked the deck in our favor.

In the past few days we have topped up the fuel tanks (750 gal), the water tanks (700 gal) and bought some groceries ($700). We are getting more groceries today so that figure will go up. We won't run out of food!

As for the crew, we have J.C. (Master, 100 ton license), Joy Waters (Master, 100 ton license), Cindy S. (a few years experience sailing on the boat, usually as cook), myself (Master, 50 ton license), Ann W. (retired teacher) married to Jerry W. (retired from telephone company), Fay B. (recently left position as fund raiser), and Lisa H. (recently unemployed).

It's about 700 miles from Portsmouth to Bermuda so we plan on sailing about 100 miles per day and taking seven days to make the passage. The most recent weather forecast is for favorable winds of about 20 kts so we might get there in less than 7 days. It's an adventure and thus unpredictable. One thing we can predict is that once we are offshore we are all on our own. If there is an emergency back home, somebody else has to deal with it. No phone, no internet, no cable TV. Ah, I can hardly wait!