Location: 25° 16N, 63° 08W
Sunday, 04.27.2008

The Schooner Maggie B’s noon position on 27 April was 25°16N, 63° 08W. We are motoring directly north towards Bermuda in a 5-8 knot headwind. The skies are clear, the barometer is up to 1011 and there are long swells from the north. We have come 513 NM from Antigua and have 430 NM to go to St. Georges. We are on schedule to arrive Bermuda the morning of the 30th.

It appears as if we might have a nice SW’erly to blow us into Bermuda, but it may not arrive until we make landfall on the 30th.

We have been trying to fish. We have been very successful in catching lots of sargasso weed. It is a brown seaweed whose 150 cousins are attached to rocks in shallow water. Sargasso weed is the exception. It lives in the center of a giant eddy called the Sargasso Sea. This is an area east of the Bahamas Islands bounded between 25 and 30 degrees north, 40 to 60 degrees west. The name comes from the Portuguese word (they do get around!) “sargaco,” meaning grapes. This is a unique habitat that includes the Sargassum anglerfish which has the same coloring as the weed and bodies that are covered with protuberances that resemble the grapelike fronds. It is also the main breeding ground of the eels whose elvers swim to Europe in the Gulf Stream.

With Curtis’s encouragement, we broke out the sextant today. Following a ten-minute lecture on celestial navigation, we took the sun’s altitude to get an afternoon line of position. With total beginners luck, it came out within 1/10 of a mile of our actual position. I confess that we used a computer program to do the math, but still it was an excellent introduction. The computer program has very strange sign conventions (minus four time zone is represented as plus four, west longitude is minus, etc.) but once we got them right we were right on. We’ll try for a three star fix tonight and probably plot ourselves in the middle of North Africa.

Last night the moonrise was just after midnight. The half moon seemed to be cradling Jupiter, which was bright as a diamond. It was hard not to think of ancient stories of the stars and the gods.

All is well.