November 2009 Archives

On Saturday we moved to Baie St. Jean which is the bay next to the airport. We anchored outside the bay near some cliffs with houses littering its sides. A beautiful location only good for anchoring when the winds are coming from the south. There's a famous restaurant/hotel on a rock called Eden Rock which is sticking into the bay right off the beach. We took a walk on shore by taking our dinghy to the beach. We checked out the restaurants and made a reservation at Nikki's on the beach. We also did some shopping and had a snack at a bakery.

On the way back, as we were putting the dinghy back in the water, Karen slipped while trying to get in the dinghy. Thankfully, all that happened is she got her clothes wet and sandy, and laughed. When we got back to Tahina, we decided to take a swim to cool off. I wanted to check the anchor so I put on fins and mask. It turns out our anchor chain had wrapped on a rock at about 30 feet. Although I could free dive that deep, I couldn't stay long enough to move the big chain off the rock. So, I went up and got scuba gear to fix it. After getting the chain off, I decided it would be easy to move the anchor over a few feet away from the rock. It took about 10 minutes, but I finally got it moved.

We took showers and went ashore at 7 PM for dinner. The prices were high (especially since it was in Euros), but the food was excellent. After dinner we started up the generator and took care of some Internet (courtesy of nearby WIFI), did some laundry, and watched a movie.

The next day, we moved Tahina from Baie St. Jean back to Anse Columbier. After we arrived, we prepared for a hike over to Anse Flamandes - a beautiful beach about a mile away via a hike on the side of some hills with desert-like vegetation. We had done the same hike back in 2003 when we last visited here. We had an excellent time on the hike, and were rewarded with a nice swim at the beach. I took some 360 panoramas along the way.

Here are some photos of our passage to and visit to St. Barts:

Back at Columbier, we did some swimming and snorkeling. Then did some planning for our trip to Nevis. The shortest distance from there to Nevis is about 54 nm. However, we will probably need to tack at least once - which will add a few miles. This means it could be a 10 hour trip. So, we're getting an early start.

Today we're leaving St. Barts and sailing to Nevis. I'm clearing out of St. Barts (and making two blog posts). I'm using our dinghy "Coconut" to motor over to Gustavia from Anse Columbier and back. I'll try to do a tweet or two on the way over. And will update our position once we arrive. We'll see whether Internet is available in the anchorage after we arrive.

Before we left St. Martin I made sure to take a couple of 360 panoramas. I had hoped to do a kite aerial photo shooting as well, but the winds weren't strong enough on that day. Thanks to a lot of help from Jeffrey Martin of 360Cities.net, I managed to learn enough about the software enough to process them myself. The two photos can be viewed below.

First, I took a photo from the end of the dinghy dock at Marigot Bay next to the ferry dock. From here you can see the locals selling their clothing to visiting cruise ship tourists, the ferry and dock, the fort up on the hill, the surrounding moutains, part of the town, the large Marina Fort St. Louis (with megayachts), and the anchorage of Marigot Bay. Tahina is centered in the initial shot at anchor (you can zoom in and just make out Tahina).

The second photo was taken from next to the Capitainerie office of the Marina Port Royale which is a few blocks away from Marigot. You can only take your boat to this marina by entering Simpson Bay. As you can see, the mini-harbor here is sourrounded by restaurants and shops. At night the shops are lit with neon signs and its a great place to eat. We got our Internet from Royal Snack in the furthest corner (not visible in the shade). The Capitainerie is the best place to clean in and out of customs.

I'll write a post later on how I process the 360 photos.

An update on our near-term travel plans. But, first a quick update on where we are. We left St. Martin on Thursday and had a wonderful sail to St. Barts. We stopped at Anse Columbier for the night, then on Friday moved to the capital - Gustavia. There we entered customs, shopped, and got some Internet time.

Yesterday we ended up making arrangements for our daughters to join us during the Christmas holidays. They will be flying into St. Lucia, so we will need to be there to pick them up.

We're currently in St. Barts (or St. Barths) and plan to leave on Monday. Currently our planned stops are: Nevis, Montserrat*, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and then St. Lucia. Here's a map with a rough outline of the route.

We'll probably spend about 4-5 days in each location (counting sailing days) until we get to St. Lucia.

Also, yesterday we moved to Baie St. Jean on the north side of St. Barts. Its not normally a good anchorage, but the winds were right. So, we moved over. We went to a restaurant on the nearby beach for dinner. Also, upon arrival we watched a couple dozen plane landings and takeoffs from one of the scariest little runways in the Caribbean (here in St. Barts). It has a mountain on one end of the runway. And another mountain less than half a mile from the end of the other side of the runway, which ends right on a beach of the bay. Very crazy runway - only good for small planes.

* Looks like we may give Montserrat a pass this time. Current reports show the volcano is at a high level of activity. We will at least pass the island on the windward side (to avoid ash) and get some pictures of the changes.

Near the anchorage of Gustavia is a rock outcropping called Gros Ilets. It's a great place to snorkel or do a shallow dive. Every time I've been here the water is clear with visibility of 100 meters or more.

Today was no different. I left around 8 AM and took the dinghy over. Karen decided to sleep in. I had my camera with underwater housing with me to do some photography. I wasn't disappointed with the sights - lots of fish, some colorful coral (although tricky to find), and the photography turned out pretty good I think.

I use an older Canon A540 digital camera with an underwater housing designed for this model. It gives me full control over the switches and dials while underwater. There's an underwater white balance setting which makes the colors easier to process.

We miss being at home enjoying the Thanksgiving holiday with family, but to make up for that we've decided to go sailing! We were planning to find somewhere catering to Americans (turkey) for the holiday, but last night Karen and I decided it was time to get moving. So, we're going to clear out of St. Martin and make a short 25 mile trip around to St. Barts.

Who knows? Maybe we'll catch some fresh fish for our Thanksgiving dinner! Since its a short trip, we may not even update the map. We'll see how things go. Its supposed to be a light wind day, so the sailing could be slower than normal.

Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends and family! We wish we could spend it with you. But, we have a lot to be thankful for and we can't think of a better way to spend it than sailing in the Caribbean.

Back in October I conducted my first test runs with a kite aerial photography rig I purchased for our five-year sailing trip (see TahinaExpedition.com). Thanks to a partnership with Google, some of the imagery should find its way into Google Earth and Maps aerial imagery.

Today, I'm proud to announce that the first set of images are now available! You can see the marina where we kept Tahina in the months preceding our recent departure (Joyner Marina in Carolina Beach, NC) with photos taken in early October by me with a camera hanging from a kite string:

The catamaran in the lower left is our boat Tahina. You can zoom in pretty far on this imagery since it was taken from about 300 feet altitude.

In order to get it stitched together, I had some fantastic help from Stewart Long of GonzoEarth who did a fantastic job of processing my jumble of kite images into one cohesive geo-corrected image. Then Google processed it further for inclusion in their database. If you look closely, at the bottom it says "Tahina Expedition" for the image credit! A big "thank you" to both Stewart and Google for helping out!

This isn't the first time I've had aerial imagery included in Google Earth. Read this story of how I arranged to take a same-day aerial photo that got put in Google Earth. And, if you search for "TTA" in Google Earth (or the Sanford Airport in North Carolina), you'll see the imagery there was taken by Gearthblog. That was my airport where I used to keep my airplane.

Also, check out the cool 360 panorama I did of Tahina in the same marina (which can also be viewed in Google Earth).

Yesterday we did some shopping on both the french and dutch sides of the island (St. Martin on the french side, Sint Maarten on the dutch side). I ordered some items from a chandlery (marine store) online, and went to pick it up. And we went to two grocery stores to re-provision. It's always an interesting experience shopping for groceries in foreign places, and the prices are definitely higher than we're accustomed. But, you always discover new foods, fruits, vegetables, and drinks. And, you can meet interesting people.

At the chandlery - IslandWaterWorld - they had our package ready, and I also bought a lure to begin the process of replacing some lost during the fishing on the trip over. We walked about 1.5 miles to the huge grocery store and did our shopping there. It was raining when we were about to leave, so we asked about calling a taxi. Instead, they had a driver from the grocery store take us back to where our dinghy was parked. That was convenient! You wouldn't believe the amount of road traffic here. An amazing amount of cars are here in St. Martin.

We found that the movie theater we were so fond of last time we were in Sint Maarten was converted into a casino. But, a couple blocks away we saw there was a new 7 theater "megaplex" now open.

Last night I wrote a complaint E-mail to the company which provided the WIFI service I purchased a few days ago. This morning, I woke up to much better WIFI service and have been taking care of all kinds of online business. Yay! We were going to move to another anchorage, but I think we'll stay the day now. I'm planning to take some 360 panoramas today, and may have time to process them. If winds pick up, I may try to do a kite aerial photo shoot as well.

I've now processed the GPS track data for our passage from Carolina Beach, North Carolina to St. Martin which we completed last Saturday. You can see photos from the passage here and here. It took us a little over 7 days to complete the passage. You can view it best by loading this KML file in Google Earth.

For those wondering how I processed the track, I used three applications: 1) Garmin's RoadTrip software for the Mac to output the GPS track files in GPX format; 2) GPSBabel to simplify the thousands of track points down to 300 points; and 3) GPSVisualizer.com which is a free service and has an excellent interface for creating Google Earth kml files from GPS tracks (NOTE: GPSVisualizer uses GPSbabel and can simplify points, but my file size was too large for it to handle until I simplified the tracks).

Here's another set of photos from our passage to St. Martin. Here you will find photos of how rough the seas looked when we left the Carolinas and crossed the Gulf Stream. You'll also see how later the weather gradually improved, we flew our spinnaker sail, how glassy smooth the seas became, our catch of a Mahi Mahi, and more.

Yesterday, we did accomplish several tasks: did some grocery shopping, laundry, and we moved Tahina closer to the town to improve WIFI reception. However, I wasted several hours trying to get a good connection on the WIFI. I had signed up for a shore-based WIFI provider. But, apparently there was some router confusion between two partner WIFI providers. I had assumed for a while it was something wrong with my new network set up. The result was I couldn't get in to the WIFI I paid for, and my network looked like it was messed up. Anyway, this morning it magically worked again. Grrrr.

Early this morning I took our very helpful crewmember, Wilson Walch, to the airport. He needed to get home to help his family with travel for Thanksgiving this week. We really enjoyed having Wilson on board. I drove Wilson to the airport in our inflatable dinghy in the pre-dawn night. We felt like we were on a Navy Seal incursion. We are now on our own and get to enjoy our new life a bit with just the two of us. It won't be long before some family members join us down here in paradise.

Today we hope to take care of some basic necessities: replenishing needed provisions, laundry, fuel, etc. These menial tasks are definitely offset by the wonderful Caribbean climate, beautiful island, and the French-Caribbean-Dutch culture down here in St. Martin.

Soon we'll to a more secluded anchorage just to enjoy a bit of the "real" cruising life. Do some snorkeling, kayaking, sailing, etc. Later in the week we'll do some shopping and visit some tourist sights. Then look for a place to have a Thanksgiving dinner.

We've started discussing our next stops on our itinerary. We definitely plan to stop at St. Barts and Guadaloupe. We may stop at Montseratt, Martinique, and St. Lucia. Later we will definitely go to the Grenadines - particularly the Tobago Cays - and Grenada.

I've just uploaded the first batch of photos from our passage to St. Martin. I'll add more labels, geotag the photos, and tie photos to the passage posts later. Also, I have a few video clips to process and upload as well. But, for those of you following closely, here's a quick look at what it was like. Make sure you check out the anchorage photos for what the reward is like! Click the link for the larger slideshow for bigger pictures.

Also, here is a Google Earth view of our anchorage in 3D.

We arrived mid-day today at Marigot Bay in St. Martin (the French side). It was a great trip, with no bad weather. Unless you can call the lack of wind forcing us to use our motors too much "bad". The final stage of the trip, we did get to sail during the night. But, we had to "tack" using our motors in order to keep far enough east to avoid a more delayed arrival. And, once we rounded the first island (Sombrero Island, northwest of Anguilla), we had to turn into the wind. So, we ended up motoring the rest of the way into St. Martin.

Once we arrived at the bay, we dropped our anchor with a beautiful view of the island. We took showers, changed clothes, lowered "Coconut" (our dinghy) and rode through the canal to the Marina Royale. I had read you could enter the country through their office and it was less expensive than using the ferry office. Entry was simple as entering a form on a computer, getting a stamp, and paying 5 Euros. Much cheaper than entering on the Dutch side of the island.

We walked the stores nearby and soon purchased some fresh ice cream. Yummy!

Tonight we plan to go ashore again and have a nice French dinner. We had a rain shower right after we got back to Tahina, and afterwards wiped down the boat. It was very convenient since that saved us using our own fresh water to do the washing.

After 7 days at sea, 1317 nautical miles, we completed our trip from Carolina Beach, North Carolina to St. Martin. A great start to our 5 year trip!

We're on our final full day before arriving at our Caribbean destination. We expect to arrive in the morning sometime - if the winds keep us sailing fast enough. Yes, we are finally back to sailing after three full days of motoring through the stillest seas I've ever seen.

Early this morning, just after mid-night in fact, we finally started moving into some winds. We were sailing fine for a short while, but soon noticed some signs of a squall on both our radar and the large blot of clouds against the starry filled sky. Soon the winds shifted and we had to take down the sails. It was fortunate we did because the winds kicked up and clocked 180 degrees. We experienced a torential downpour of rain. That was good for the boat as it helped wash away some of the salt caked on surfaces all over the top of the boat.

We managed a couple more hours of sailing, but the winds shifted on our nose and we were back to motoring again. In the morning, we had a short visit of a small pod of 3 or 4 spotted dolphin who danced off Tahina's bows. It's always an honor to have the dolphins visit and every time they bring a smile to everyone's faces.

We had some fantastic fishing activity today. We actually only fully landed one - and we released him. But, the fishing was great anyway. The one we landed was a small blue marlin! It was "only" about three and half feet (compared to their full size of about 6-10 feet). We also hooked a full-sized marlin later in the day, but he made short work of our hook after his 3rd leap into the air and nearly pulling all the line off the reel! We also hooked some other big fish - another we never saw snapped the line. We are using 60 lb line which is normally good enough to land a pretty big fish. Definitely a day any game fisherman would enjoy!

We started sailing about 1 PM and have been sailing most of the day since. We had a brief period where we dropped sails when we passed some squalls. We're hoping to sail the rest of the way. Wish us luck!

We thought the seas yesterday were pretty flat. But, today the ocean looked like a giant bowl of cooled Jello which had been shaken a while ago and was settling in slow motion. You could see the reflections of clouds miles away in perfect clarity. The wind indicator couldn't determine a direction. The only wind was exactly matching the speed of our boat as we motored toward our destination.

Thankfully, the monotonous, yet beautiful, quiet was shattered by the sound of both reels of the two fishing rods screaming for attention. We had landed two fish at once! We soon had the first medium sized bull Mahi Mahi on board. One fish would be plenty for our meal, so we let the second one go. We put away the rods as we have a policy of only catching what we plan to eat.

Tonight we grilled the fish on our BBQ, and had a wonderful dinner of the freshest fish. Yummy!

According to our weather forecasts, we should start picking up wind tonight. We hope to be sailing before dawn tomorrow and sail our way the rest of our destination. Wish us luck! We'll hopefully start uploading pictures of the journey over the weekend (assuming we can find some Internet access).

After motoring all night due to the winds gradually diminishing, we awoke at dawn to glassy seas with virtually no wind. Unfortunately, our forecast has become disappointing from a sailing perspective. We're moving into the center of a high pressure system for the next day and a half. We'll finally pick up some light Caribbean trade winds during the final 12-18 hours of our passage.

Because of the change in weather, our arrival time will be delayed. Tahina actually goes faster with the wind than by motor. So, we'll be arriving a day later than originally planned. We run one engine at a time to conserve fuel, and have it slowed back a bit to insure a day-time arrival to the islands.

The weather is beautiful, seas flat, and we are all enjoying the experience. Moving through the huge ocean with no one in sight, no land within 400 miles, under beautiful skies... it gives a chance for your soul to rest in a way we rarely experience in modern society.

I highly recommend this to those who hear the calling of the sea.

So far we've traveled about 450 nautical miles with about 850 left to go. This passage was possible to complete in 6 days even under ideal conditions averaging 9 kts. We've been holding pretty close to that average so far.

The weather has become increasingly nicer with more settled seas, sunny weather, and warm. It's now 79 degrees F, and we're all in shorts and barefoot. We've finally put out some fishing lines, but nothing caught so far but seaweed. I'm hoping for some bites in the afternoon feeding time. The forecasts calls for some lighter winds this evening, so our average speed will likely drop. Later forecasts have it picking up again though.

We're all enjoying the trip and the wonder of the sea. We've only seen a few pieces of trash on this trip - a large buoy (barrel size) was the worst. We've had dolphin join us three times (that we saw). We hope some join us today since the weather is so much better, we'll try get some video at the bows.

Wilson's flight home is on Monday, so as long as we make it to our destination by Sunday we'll be doing fine. If we run into light winds, we can fire up the iron sails - we have plenty of fuel to make it all the way if needed. So far, we haven't used the engines at all since we left Carolina Beach inlet. Just the generator to charge the batteries each evening.

We are really blessed with a number of friends and family who helped us during the final days of our preparations. Too many to thank at once, but we really appreciate all the help - even if we were too busy to always profess our undying gratitude.

The first day out was a bit topsy turvy at sea. It started out fine at the crack of dawn with blustery wind, but mostly calm seas. The seas were calm near shore because the winds were coming from offshore. Once we got out further, the seas gradually built and the motion of the ocean was interesting. We ended up with seas as high at 12-15 feet during the night.

The funny thing is that for the first time, I managed to get seasick. Not only that, but our crewmember Wilson also came down with the bug. Meanwhile, my mild-mannered wife was doing just fine and held up her title as Admiral, well admirably. Fortunately, Wilson and I still managed to hold down our watches during the night (just not our cookies).

Today, Wilson and I are both feeling much better. And the weather dawned with partly cloudy skies and diminishing seas. Our wind dropped only a little, so we're still making good speed along our route. With everyone feeling good, the boat running well, and the sailing good, I can't help but hear that Crosby, Stills and Nash song "Southern Cross".

Current forecast has us arriving in St. Martin by Friday.

We have added a Map page for the Tahina Expedition web site that will let you check on our current position, our past passages, and will even show position reports while we're on a passage which are being made through a Twitter log. In addition, we'll make occasional blog posts during a passage to report on how things are going, and you can follow our Twitter at @GoTahina for short messages about how things are going. Hopefully all the new radio systems will work, so you'll actually see these reports and updates during our first passage starting tomorrow.

After careful consideration of all the factors - including weather - we've decided to make a change in our route. Our goal has been to start in the Caribbean with St. Martin. We have been planning to sail out to Bermuda and stop a few days because often the weather is better if you head toward Bermuda from the US east coast before heading south for the Caribbean. However, we have a weather forecast which gives us the option of heading straight to St. Martin.

Since we were delayed by about a week by weather, we have considered the option of going straight to St. Martin and by-passing Bermuda. Our crewmember Wilson would like to help get us to St. Martin, but he needs to be back home in time for Thanksgiving. If we go straight to St. Martin our route plan shows us arriving in 6 days. This would give plenty of time for Wilson to get home. And, it would give us more time to spend going through the islands on our way south. We plan to be in Grenada for Christmas.

So, we now plan to leave Saturday morning early. We'll still head east to insure the right winds for our route. But, we'll turn south sooner and therefore save lots of miles off the original route taking us to Bermuda. See the map of the two options here:

Keep watching the blog for updates. I'll probably make another post before we leave in addition to the subsequent tweets and posts during the passage.

I'd like to thank our partner EarthNC, specifically its founder Virgil Zetterlind, for working to develop and support our online geo-publishing strategy for the Tahina Expedition. He has been helping create a map page for the site (which will be put out later today); a strategy for updating posts and making Twitter tweets during passage; helping create a KML file which will show current position, tweeted positions, and our past passage tracks all from the new map page; and also making sure I have the latest EarthNC electronic charts and tracking software for using Google Earth to view our vessel position on board. Thank you Virgil!

I also want to thank Dan Wolfgang of uiNNOVATIONS who has helped provide some timely advice and server tweaks for our web site during the past few weeks. I first consulted with Dan back early this year to help with the initial release of the Tahina site. He's come to the rescue several times during the past couple of weeks. Thanks Dan!

The weather is still looking good for us to depart for Bermuda. In fact, we may be leaving Friday night now. The winds behind the departing remnants of Ida are making for some ideal conditions for a sail to Bermuda. We'll still have some large sea swells to contend with, but the wind conditions should be pretty good for sailing.

When we make long passages like this, we hope to have friends join us to help crew so we can reduce the amount of time each person is on watch. With three people on board, we can each get several hours of sleep while one person is on watch. This also gives the joining crew a chance to do a blue-water sailing adventure.

This time, we are excited to have our friend Wilson joining us as crew. We met Wilson during our sailing adventures on PatiCat back in 2002/2003 in the Caribbean. Wilson was on a catamaran called "Hotel California" with his family. Our families spent a lot of time together during our stay down there (see pictures, and read about our visit to St. Barts).

Wilson will be arriving at about 8 PM. We are going to put him right to work since it looks like we may depart by 11 PM.

Thanks to the blog I have been writing for the past four years (Google Earth Blog), we were fortunate enough to form a partnership with Google which will enable people to follow our trip in Google Earth. Then we formed a partnership with VideoRay (makers of underwater cameras in a remote operated vehicle - or ROV). We plan to blog about our adventures with the Tahina Expedition blog, generate maps and share GPS tracks and photos with Google Earth, and video content with the ROV onboard Tahina. So, next we approached National Geographic to see if they would be interested in sharing our content with some of their online readers/viewers.

One of my lifetime dreams has always been to be involved with a National Geographic expedition, and maybe someday take photos like those found in the Society's legendary magazine. When my wife and I decided to make our sailing trip into an expedition, so we could help raise awareness of issues faced by our oceans, we immediately thought about National Geographic.

National Geographic has a long history of studying the oceans and reporting on important ocean issues. And it turns out they have recently started their Ocean Now web site, which is dedicated to ocean conservation and exploration. They were thrilled with the idea of tapping into our story over the next 5 years, and inviting their explorers to rendezvous with Tahina at sea to make use of the ROV, our aerial kite camera system, and our vessel as a research platform. They plan to follow our voyage on their new blog devoted to exploration, National Geographic BlogWild. And they hope to share what we're doing with a global network of students, to inspire a new generation to care about the seas.

It's amazing to be embarking on a lifetime dream of sailing around the world. But to also be involved with National Geographic is especially thrilling to me.

With help from National Geographic, we hope more students will be encouraged to follow along on our journey as we share our experiences, our maps, and the sights we see. We think our site will be a wonderful way to learn about geography, history, cultures, weather, sailing, the environment, and about marine life. The Tahina Expedition will also be available as a platform for basic research as we travel to unique destinations rarely visited by scientists. We will capture as much of the experience as possible, and National Geographic will help share our observations.

I've been praying for a weather window to open up for days. The forecast was looking awful until last night. Suddenly a variation in the center of the low pressure from Ida pushed northward and has opened a window of opportunity for us to leave in 2-3 days!

We will now start working diligently to get the boat ready for departure. We have a friend who will be flying out to join us on this passage to help crew the boat. Flight arrangements may be made on that this morning. We'll also have to return a rental car the day before we leave so we'll have to get last minute provisions while we have the car. I'll have my nose glued to the weather forecast web sites making sure the conditions are acceptable until we are ready to depart.

Meanwhile, here's an update on other activities:

Before we left our house on Saturday, our neighbors Joe and Jan came over to say bon voyage again. Jan had made us an awesome pillow for our trip showing Tahina with our logo as our sails, the ocean along the bottom and fish jumping out of the sea. What a great parting gift! See it below:

On Saturday, my sister Susan came down with her family to visit the boat. We had a nice visit with them and they helped us with our last load of belongings, and even helped us while we defrosted the freezer. Then we all went out for dinner before they headed home in the evening. Here's a nice shot on the back of Tahina:

We'll have to get busy now on preparations for departure! I'm excited!

Part of the plan for our trip is to share our experiences in exotic locations using photos and videos online. A popular new photographic technique is immersive 360 panoramas. It allows you to view a location like you are there looking in every direction. After writing about the world's largest collection of 360 Panoramas being added into Google Earth by 360Cities.net, I decided this is something we needed to do for our trip. Watch this video of what the experience is like in Google Earth:

The founder of 360Cities, Jeffrey Martin, has been helping me get properly set up for this type of photography. He put me in touch with the most popular makers of panoramic tripod mounts and related camera accessories: Nodal Ninja. Their equipment has been fine tuned to meet the needs of panorama photographers and have great features to enhance the process of making the photos. They were kind enough to help make sure we had a proper set up for our needs.

Taking the photos involves taking several photos in a circle from your tripod using the special tripod mount and a fisheye lens. You then take a shot up and a shot down. Then you need software to take the photos, stitch them together, and project them into a format for showing in a 3D sphere. Jeffrey also helped me get the software from PTGui.com. Once processed, you can upload the photo to 360Cities.Net and put it on the map, or share it on a web site.

So, for the last couple of days (while we're waiting for weather) I've been getting a crash course in taking 360 panoramas. Here's the first example showing Tahina at our marina yesterday morning (make sure you view it in full screen, or go to the site and follow the Google Earth link):

Tahina at Joyner Marina in USA

Pretty cool huh? I'd like to thank 360Cities.net's Jeffrey Martin, and the fantastic support from both Nodal Ninja, and PTGui. You'll find all three listed on our partners page soon.

We actually achieved the goal of being ready to depart within 1 week of our planned departure time frame of late-October/early-November. The last few weeks were a blur of activity (partly in evidence from the many posts during this time). But, we were ready this weekend.

Now, thanks to the weather forecast (the influences from Hurricane Ida), we are facing a long wait (possibly more than a week) for a better weather window for our passage to Bermuda.

It is frustrating to not be able to begin the journey as planned. But, after the rushing around, maybe this will give us a chance to rest a bit before we actually depart.... Well, my wife will probably rest some. But, I'm not known for sitting idle (my friends and family are laughing at this understatement). I'll be experimenting with the new systems on the boat, and we'll probably do more safety drills this week. Also, we have some upgrades to the web site in the works, as well as a few new partnerships to announce. You'll start to see evidence of this in tomorrow's post.

We have officially moved onto Tahina, and are now making final preparations for departure. We had planned to be ready as early as Monday. We have to complete storing our final belongings, get provisions (food, water and fuel) for the trip, return the rental car, check all the boat systems one more time, and - once we have the right weather - we can leave.

The weather is the crucial part. Our first destination is Bermuda so that we can have a favorable route down to the Caribbean. Most sailors go this way in order to have favorable winds. If you try to go along the Bahamas you will have wind on your nose most of the way.

It takes about 3-4 days to get to Bermuda on Tahina from North Carolina - with the right winds. After we arrived at the boat, I started looking at the weather (I purposely waited because I didn't want to rush our final preparations). Unfortunately, the weather forecast is not looking good.

Hurricane Ida is in the Gulf of Mexico and it will soon be influencing the weather up north. A front is scheduled to come into the Atlantic off the East Coast of the US by Wednesday. And will rapidly make its way across towards Bermuda (in the current forecasts). It doesn't look like ideal weather for a passage currently for the entire week.

So, we may have more time to run some safety drills after all. We may even have a chance to relax and recuperate from the weeks of hard work leading to this point.

We'll keep an eye on the weather - these forecasts can change dramatically (especially with a hurricane out there). Hopefully things will change so we can leave earlier.

Yesterday we finally got everything wrapped up so we can leave to make our final move onto the boat. We actually sold my car, and the little truck we have been using to haul stuff around. And, we transferred ownership on two cars to our daughters (so car insurance can be set up for each of them). As soon as all the paperwork is finalized we will be able to cancel car insurance for Karen and I.

I listed the little truck on Craigslist at around 7:30 AM and had a buyer within 20 minutes (and many other buyers calling after that). I guess I put the price too low, but everyone I spoke to were amazed I got so much money for a 1988 pickup truck. Apparently small pickup trucks are very popular these days. We completed the sale of the truck by 10 AM.

At lunch, I took our other car to a dealer. This car was newer, and wouldn't sell as well on Craigslist. But, the dealer offered a pretty reasonable rate I think - especially after I explained our situation and why we wouldn't be able to do a trade. People seem to be very fascinated by our trip.

After we returned license plates to the DMV, we went to our car insurance place and took care of title transfers for our daughters and discussed the options for the transition of the insurance.

The rest of the day, and into the wee hours last night, was to get everything done with the house and our final load for the boat. I'm concerned because we have quite a load for the boat, but we'll deal with that when we get down there. But, we did manage to get everything pretty much ready. We have a few calls to make to cut off utilities (like the Internet connection), but most everything else is done. Yay!

We had friends over to help and said au revoir to neighbors and friends. We hope everyone will stay in touch via the Internet with us, or even come and visit us on the boat in some exotic location. We'll definitely miss this home of ours for the past 11 years. But, we're looking forward to our new life, new friends, and new adventures.

We are back at the home-front taking care of lots of final details. Selling cars, putting last items in storage, changing addresses with dozens of places, and trying not to take more stuff to the boat. The checklist is actually shrinking again. Especially the "Must Be Done" list. We may actually finish preparations on the home-front by tomorrow (Friday). The boat is close to ready except for final provisioning.

We may actually be ready to start final departure planning on the weekend. We'll need a good 4 day weather forecast for our trip to Bermuda before we leave. That may take several days. We'll see!

We have received tons of support from our friends and business partners in recent weeks. We can't thank everyone enough for their help in trying to make sure we leave as close to our schedule as possible. There are too many people to thank individually (I would hate to accidentally leave someone off the list). But, if you helped, please know that we greatly appreciate it!

Final preparations continued on Tuesday. In the morning, I attempted to complete final items on our purchase list like: more rechargeable batteries, a round file for the toolbox, and a kayak. We purchased a two-person kayak so we can get around without using fuel, and go places the dinghy can't go (or isn't allowed). We have plenty of room to store the kayak on Tahina's deck.

In the afternoon, we got Tahina out of the marina and headed out to sea. A big item on our checklist was to make sure to do some refresher safety drills. In particular, we wanted to run through both fire safety drills, and man overboard drills.

While motoring up the ICW (intracoastal waterway) to Masonboro Inlet (about 1.5 hours), we discussed both scenarios, equipment, and what actions to take based on a variety of conditions. The most critical element for both fire and man overboard (MOB), is to stay calm, and be prepared to take the right action quickly. Often speed is the decisive factor to ensure safety. You can't do this without practice. Hence the drills.

Once out at sea, we had time for several MOB drills. We used a life vest as the "person" who went overboard. In most cases, we pretended I was overboard, and Karen was still left in charge with no other crew on board. In every case, Karen successfully retrieved the "person". Afterwards, Karen said that the drills were very helpful because each time she was less nervous and better able to take the right action.

Here are some photos of one of the MOB drills:

There was little wind, and the seas were flat for these drills. So, we were unable to practice the drills with sails up, and seas in motion. And, we did not have time (because the sun is now setting so early) to try many variations of MOB retrieval techniques. We'll have to do more of these drills, under other conditions, later. We did discuss methods for various conditions the rest of the afternoon as we motored back to the marina.

Yesterday was a good day!

I started off the day making a presentation to about 65 fifth graders at the Carolina Beach Elementary school. Last week, when we appeared in the Wilmington StarNews, the writer of the story got a call from a teacher at the school. Mr. Dodd contacted me to invite me to speak, and I decided I could afford an hour or two out of our busy final preparations. In fact, it was a great experience! I love the inquiring minds of young kids, and they really seemed to enjoy my stories about what we will be doing. I even showed them the kite aerial photography system and our first test photos. I had an endless streams of questions for about 30 minutes before we had to stop. My favorite question about the solar panels: "Can you get power from the moon?" :-)

Progress Report

A lot of progress has been made on the boat systems during the last few days. And, it all seemed to come together yesterday. We upgraded the firmware for some of the bigger Raymarine instruments (chartplotter and sonar system) on Saturday. On Sunday we spent time setting up our new long-range WIFI antenna (capable of reaching WIFIs 3-4 MILES away), and then worked on network configurations. It wasn't until Monday though that it all came together. We now have a process for switching between the onboard navigation boat network (for use during passages), and back to normal use when connecting to WIFI or just between systems on board. A great big "THANK YOU" to my long-time friend Andy who came down to the boat multiple times and spent a long time over the past few months designing the system!

Yesterday, I also worked with our radio consultant (for our SSB - marine short-wave radio) known as "Doc John". John is the inventor of the RopeAntenna and helps run the Cruise E-mail service for providing services to send/receive E-mail over SSB. He has helped us walk through the installation and testing of our new SSB, and our grounding system for the SSB as well as advice on grounding other radios on the boat. Yesterday was a major milestone because we finally had several successful tests connecting the radio to send/receive E-mail with a facility in Florida! Once we get out at sea, away from the electrical noise in our current location, we should be able to reach thousands of miles with our new system.

Karen spent hours over the last few days organizing the truck-load of stuff we brought to the boat from home. She put a lot of thought into organizing our inventory into logical locations, and we're looking closer to readiness for departure.

Yesterday we made a trip to stores and got a lot of important items which had not made previous lists. Mostly small equipment, spares, and essential hardware (wire, shackles, etc.). We even bought spare boat shoes, and sail gloves. We also shopped again for a two-person kayak - we need to buy that soon. Kayaks are a great way to visit sites close to shore without the noisy outboard, and they are good exercise too!

Karen and I decided we should have our own crew shirts and hats. We ordered ours up from VistaPrint.com. We'll be wearing these on the day we leave for Bermuda, and other special events. Here's a picture of what they look like:

Later on the trip, if there's enough interest from people following the site, we may offer shirts and hats for sale on this site to help raise funds for our ocean conservation efforts.

Electrical energy is a valuable resource on a sailboat. Cruising sailors often go to enormous lengths to conserve energy and devise clean energy sources. Tahina has seven 80-Watt solar panels to help cleanly provide many amps per day of electrical energy into our large high-tech battery bank. We also plan to get a wind generator down in the Caribbean. Even so, we will still need to occasionally run the noisy, smelly, diesel generator on occasion to make up for demands that go beyond what the clean energy sources can provide. (Don't get me wrong, our generator is one of the quieter ones available, but sailors still hate to use them).

When deciding what computer to put into our navigation station, I wanted something energy efficient and that could run off our 12 Volt system (without requiring the large inverter we have on board). My long-time friend Andy Schwab has been working with me for months to plan our computer system needs. He evaluated a number of options for our nav computer and we've just finally completed the installation. The end result is a bit horrifying for Mac geeks, but it works (I should have written this yesterday for halloween!).

Our nav computer had to be able to run Windows because our Raymarine navigation software only runs on Windows (although, I have managed to get it running on a Mac under VMWare, it wasn't designed for that). We initially looked at buying a custom energy-efficient PC to minimize the number of amps the computer would draw from our 12 V system. It turns out the custom PC route can be pretty expensive. Andy eventually came back to another idea he had.

It turns out the Mac Mini is very energy efficient out of the box (I believe they've won some awards for it). And, we were able to get a deal because Apple was just coming out with a new version. So, it was more cost efficient, and energy efficient to go with a Mac. But, what about the Windows problem? Yes, we actually installed BootCamp and then installed Windows on the poor Mac, and that's what it will run normally. Thanks to a very efficient in-line 12 volt adapter we purchased, it will require 25%, or less, the energy of a typical energy efficient PC. My apologies to the poor Mac for subjecting it to this indignity.

To make up for this cruelty, we are using an Airport Extreme for our wireless network, and an Apple TV for our digital entertainment on the TV. And, I use a MacBook Pro for my everyday laptop use.