Is this our biggest challenge yet? How would YOU cope?

At 10am on Saturday 12th February we set off from Namibia bound for the Azores, some 6,000 miles away. We'll break the trip up into three stages, with roughly a week in between each one, as follows:

Leg 1: Namibia to St Helena (1,450 nautical miles)
Leg 2: St Helena to Ascension Island (850 nautical miles)
Leg 3: Ascension Island to Azores (3,500 nautical miles)

St Helena and Ascension Island are both lonely outposts in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. British owned, they are tiny islands with small communities, and very limited facilities. Hiking on both is meant to be great, and St Helena enjoys an interesting place in history as the island to which Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled.

But interesting though they are, we’ll mostly be stopping to break up the passage, wait for the best weather window and enjoy a little rest and recuperation. Despite having sailed 17,500 nm so far (over a third of the way around the world) we have yet to sail more than 1,000 nm non-stop - South East Asia and the Indian Ocean require mostly much shorter passages compared with the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans.

So Leg 1, will already be 40% longer than our longest ever passage – it should take around 10 days or so. Leg 3 is the big one, though. It’s around 3,000nm in a straight line from Ascension Island to the Azores, but we think we’ll sail more like 3,500 miles in order to optimise our wind angles. That means that the passage will take at least 30 days, and perhaps even longer.

There are many challenges to overcome on passages of these lengths.

For one thing, even if the weather is benign, the strain on the boat and its many systems is significant. With weeks and weeks of non stop motion and use, there is a lot more potential for batteries, power generation, refrigeration or a thousand other things to go wrong, and very limited (if any) ability to fix it while at sea.

Avoiding bad weather can be very much more challenging too. The South Atlantic Ocean (Legs 1 and 2) is known to have relatively predictable and moderate weather, so we are not anticipating any major problems in that regard. But Leg 3 is a different matter. The North Atlantic is always a more volatile ocean, and we’ll be sailing it in spring, at the very beginning of the safer season, while there is still a reasonable chance for storms.

Modern weather forecasting is pretty good, but there’s still only a 5 day horizon where you can have much confidence in the forecast. Beyond that, the variables make it dangerous to rely upon. We’ve had 10 passages so far of between 600 and 1,000 miles, which have taken 4 to 7 days, so with those ones we’ve been able to pick our “weather window”, and wait until we’re confident the weather will be reasonable for pretty much the entire duration of the trip.

With a 30 day passage, however, you must just accept whatever weather comes your way, and deal with it accordingly. We do download weather twice per day while at sea on our Satellite phone, so our 5 day horizon of reasonable confidence is continually rolling forward. And if we DO see a storm brewing 5 days out, that gives us time to alter course and hopefully avoid the worst of it. So we’ve come to terms with this challenge – we’re mitigating it as best we can.

A more prosaic potential challenge for these longer passages, though, is simply boredom. Our 4-hours on, 4-hours off watch system means we tend not to spend much time together – often just 5 minutes as we handover the watch and pass on any details the other needs to know about. We try and spend at least an hour or two together each day, but that still leaves a LOT of time alone to your thoughts, or whatever book you’re reading. We’re told by other sailors who have made passages of these lengths that the days quickly roll together and become a blur, such that you are often amazed at how much time has passed when you try and remember what date it is. But still, I’ll admit to wondering if I’m going to go stir crazy at sea for that length of time.

By far the biggest challenge I expect to encounter, however, will be the total absence of internet throughout this period. No Facebook, no WhatsApp, no news feeds, no web browsing, no googling stuff when you have a question or an argument, no sense of what’s going on in the world.

Now I know what you’re thinking – “isn’t that part of the joy of being offshore?” And yes, to an extent it IS nice to have a break from the incessant news cycle, and inane chatter, and requirement to respond to the dozens of messages on the 20 WhatsApp groups you’re on, and checking emails continuously to see if you’ve had a response to something urgent but probably not that important.

So having a break is great. But having a 2.5 month break, though? That’s hardcore.

10 years ago today, Whitney Houston died. I was offline for the few days around her death, and completely missed it. So much so, that I lost a bet 5 years later when I was adamant that one of the biggest pop stars of all time couldn’t be dead, or I’d know about it.

That was just 3 days. Imagine what could happen in the world in a 60 day period – I may never catch up!

But that’s where YOU come in. Because the good news is that via the wonders of our satphone, we do have easy access to send and receive plain text emails. And we have a LOT of time to kill. So if you’re reading this, feel free to drop us a line on steelsapphire@myiridium.net *** and tell us what’s going on in your world, and also in the outside world at large. We’re super keen to hear if anything big, or interesting is happening. And we’ll have plenty of time to read and respond.

As well as email and the ability to download weather, our satellite phone has another advantage – it automatically tracks our position and posts it to this website, and when I’m downloading the weather each day, I can also upload mini, text-only blog posts on the “Where are we Now Tracker” at the bottom of the homepage.

But unlike Facebook posts, or the “normal” blogs here on the website, I have no way of knowing if anything I’m posting is being read, or even actually uploading. So if you DO read any of those updates, and it provokes any sentiment whatsoever, drop us an email.

Normal service will be resumed in Mid to late April . In the meantime, though, how would you cope with 2.5 months without internet? What would you miss the most? And what wouldn’t you miss at all?

Drop us a line and tell us!



*** One important caveat about emailing us: It’s essential that emails sent to our satphone are plain text only. It simply can’t cope with images or attachments of any kind (including email signatures) – if you forget and include anything like that, it can literally take 2 days to download, during which time we cannot download weather updates, or send or receive any emails. So again, plain text only with no attachments please!!