Ep 169 Midnight Express | Kevin and Wendy | Sint Maarten to Tortola

Midnight Express: I actually hate night passages, especially when there?s no moon. This is because in the Caribbean at night, and the warm-water Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda, squalls tend to form with a particular regularity. Absent moonlight and modern doppler radar, these often-violent squalls have and will destroy sails and even dismast boats. So why do we do it? Well, it has to do with passage length. If you have near 100nm to go, and you leave in the morning, even early morning, like dawn, you will not arrive in daylight. This means you?ll be anchoring or trying to pick up a mooring ball in the dark. These tasks can be done as we demonstrated a couple of years back when we arrived in the middle of the night in Grenada, but it?s not fun or advisable. That same season, we left from Bequia at 0400 hours on a passage that would skip the main island of Saint Vincent on the way to St Lucia. There was no moon and the anchorage was pitch dark. We literally crept out, knowing that an unlit, anchored boat could appear out of nowhere. Wendy stood on the bow with a powerful flood light, keeping an eye out, but the night plays tricks with the eye. Absent the kind of plotter-based GPS enabled charts that we use today, I would never attempt anything like that. In this case, we did have a bright, full moon that wasn?t scheduled to set halfway through the evening, and that changed everything. A night passage under a full moon with minimal squall activity can be marvelous, especially if you have good wind, which this we did. It was a mad rush at near max boat speed the whole way. sailing yacht talisman, sailing, sailing youtube, boating, top sailing, oyster yachts, oyster sailboats, oyster 485, offshore, bluewater, blue water, sailing vlog, sailing vblog, sailing videos, cruising, monohull, boat projects, offshore how to, sint maarten, saint martin, grand case, boat life, tortola, BVIs, british virgin islands