(This is a post I wrote a while ago on the leg from Bermuda to the Azores)
We have been sailing to the wind for about 5 days now, trying to get Southeast over to Horta. The winds and waves have been high for days and we have had the storm jib up the whole time. We are now very close to the Northwest islands of the Azores which are Corvo and Flores. They are about 130 miles Northwest of Faial, the island that Horta is on. The winds have been coming straight out of the Southeast which prevent us from going the direction we need to go. All of the weather reports we have received have told us the winds will shift to the West any time so we are waiting and waiting for that to happen. As soon as the wind comes from the West we will have a beautiful tack that will carry us Southeast down to Horta. All we need is for that wind to shift!
However, the closer we get to the islands the more the wind kept shifting to the East (the wrong and unexpected direction) which made our track curve to the North of Corvo, the Northernmost island. Since we missed our intended target and were now getting low to negative VMG we decided to tack back. We are now on a port tack back through the channel between Corvo and Flores. On this tack we see the first glimpse of the outline of Corvo which is the smallest of all the islands in the Azores. It was too dark to get a picture.
We are all pretty tired and beat up at this point and our immediate goal is to try to find a little relief from the pounding waves and wind for the evening. We are trying to sail between the two islands and to the lee side (downwind side) of Flores to see if the conditions are better there. We sail all day trying to get around Flores and the sun sets before we find any relief. We begin heading towards the lights on the Western side of Flores to within about a mile. There is no port on the West side of Flores that we could pull into.
It is still very windy and bouncy and we decide to just heave too for the night to try to get some rest. The heave too provided quite a bit of relief but the wind was still howling and the waves were bouncing us up and down. We still did the regular 1 hour shifts through the night in case the boat got knocked out of the heave too and started sailing again by itself. It was interesting to be on the watch during the night in these conditions. The wind was making howling noises through the lines and struts and the waves were splashing all around the back of the boat but when you checked our speed through the water it was zero knots!
When the sun came up we started sailing again. We had drifted about 18 miles in the wrong direction during the night. We began reversing our track between Flores and Corvo again. These pictures are the first sighting of land in the Azores. It would have been nice if it had been the right island. Oh well, at least we got a chance for some nice pictures.
