When last heard from, we were just on the point of leaving Bermuda’s St George’s Harbour at 15:30 on Tuesday April 16, with pilot aboard and followed by the pilot boat. Pilot escorted us from our dockside mooring to the opening of the narrow passage that opens out to the Atlantic and then having hopped aboard the pilot boat that had pulled up alongside, left us to the open sea.

Every scrap of sail that she could carry was then raised….

This is perforce a brief post, as we will be leaving the dock shortly. Water pump has not yet arrived but seemingly it’s on the island, and as I understand it, we will leave as soon as it’s delivered and make the repairs while underway. At the moment the fuel tanker is alongside and filling the bunkers so within the next couple of hours we will be off.

Yesterday was a make and mend day, cleaning up and making ready for sea. I posted the blog, wandered into town for lunch, and took it relatively easy. Not much to report, everyone is impatient to be off and we still have about 2,000 nautical miles to cover to get to the Azores so every day in port is cutting into our scheduled arrival date, but with favourable winds we should be ok….

Joined the ship yesterday. I knew I was in for trouble at the airport in Toronto when, after I had cleared security and was going to call V, I realized I couldn’t find my phone. Mad scramble through carryons before I hit the Pause button and tried to remember where I had seen it last, hoping that it was at security screening where I might still have a chance of recovering it. Unfortunately couldn’t remember having seen it since checking emails in the back of the airport limo. Fired up my iPad and checked Find my Phone and I could see that it was located at an address about 10k away from the airport so clearly still in the backseat of the limo.

Sad really since I had planned to use my iphone to video the interesting moments of the trip with my phone…

It’s been a while!

The last time I posted I had just arrived in Ullapool, Scotland after sailing from Iceland via the Faroes, the Shetlands and the Orkneys. I had planned to journal our photo expedition through Skye and the Western Highlands but the days were too full and there never seemed to be enough time. I heard from a number of you who were unhappy that the blog just stopped so abruptly. Aplogies, I’ve given myself a stern talking to and will try to do better next time.

And what better time to start than now… at the moment I’m in Bermuda at the St George’s Club where I stayed last night and am looking down to the foot of the hill, on the top of which the Club is located, where I can see my next sailing ship, the Blue Clipper, waiting for me to board…

If you remember from my last post we are in Kirkwall, Orkneys for two nights to wait out a gale. Weather intermittent sun and rain but the wind blew hard from the south for the entire time and since we were on the northern side of our dock we were being blown away from our mooring, well that we had doubled our mooring lines.

One advantage of being moored for two days was the opportunity to find the town’s laundromat and clean up a 2 week accumulation, bliss…

uesday afternoon and we’re moored at the dock in Kirkwall, Orkneys and battoned down tight with extra lines at the bow and stern. Tell you why in a second.

We spent Sunday in Lerwick, a cold, wet day with nothing open. I had looked forward to finding a laundromat and getting my two week backlog washed and dried and on doing a Google Maps search discovered that while there was only one laundromat to serve the town, nonetheless there was a laundromat. I took a taxi from the docks with my bag of laundry, making sure to keep the taxi window open! and arrived at my destination only to discover that it was closed on Sundays…

I’ve had some email question asking about the ship, requesting some pictures of the interior and some more about the daily routine.

You need to know that we are not on watch when moored but only when at sea. So breakfast is usually around 7 so that the 8am watch can eat before their watch. The 4am to 8am watch also eat then with a couple of permanent crew standing watch in their place and then switching before the 8am watch comes on. Breakfast is done by 8 and if you’re not on watch and sleep in, you lose…

Torshavn on a Sunday is very much like Toronto the Good used to be 50 years ago, nothing open except the odd restaurant and cafe and very few people to be seen. Captain Gijs had arranged for a minivan to take most of my cremates on a drive around the island to see some of the local landmarks. I pulled something in my hip when we were raising sail and have been managing it with Advils and Tylenol but I didn’t feel up for a long day sitting in a van so decided to stay behind and write my blog and work on some pictures. As it turned out many of the places that the van visited were on Gijs’ sailing itinerary so we will end up visiting them by sea as well as by land and so I won’t have missed anything…