14 Days at Sea: Arriving in the Azores from Saint Martin

By the 15th of June we were still out in the Atlantic, somewhere in that stretch of a long passage where nobody quite knows how many days it’s been but everyone knows exactly how many hours are left. That contradiction is normal on a passage like this — the countdown to arrival gets tracked obsessively while the running total since departure blurs into the background.

A Pulley, a Tether, and a Question About Hours

First, the obligatory safety check: Harry was up on deck doing something to a pulley, and the first question wasn’t what he was doing, it was whether he was tethered on. He was. Good. The pulley itself turned out to be in bad shape — not a dramatic failure, just worn enough that it needed fixing before it caused a bigger problem. That’s fairly normal wear for hardware that’s been run hard the length of the Atlantic.

Somewhere in the same conversation came the honest admission that nobody on board could say with any confidence how many days we’d been at sea, while everyone could rattle off the hours-to-go estimate without thinking — 30 hours, then 25, jumping around depending on the breeze. It’s a fair snapshot of what long-passage time actually feels like: elapsed time stops mattering, remaining time becomes the only clock anyone’s watching, and it’s entirely dependent on whether you can keep the right sail flying.

Redesigning How the Jib Sheets

Forty nautical miles out from the Azores, with the boat still moving and the crew still thinking about performance rather than just survival, Shayne started talking through a proper redesign of how the jib gets sheeted. The immediate fix already in place was a cleat added to the barber hauler, letting the clew be brought down and trimmed properly rather than left to find its own shape.

The bigger idea was more ambitious: an athwartships track mounted on the mullion, the structural piece of the cabin top by the window, running a floating ring across it. Sheet the jib’s clew down to that ring and it would only need in-hauling, or with the track angled right, potentially not even that — crack off and the sail could run straight to an outboard sheeting point without needing to be hauled in at all.

The detail that mattered most in the conversation wasn’t the hardware, though — it was the geometry. A previous boat’s jib sheeting had a genuinely bad lead: the sheet had to cross the cabin top, forcing an awkward path from ring to sail. Paikea’s current arrangement, by contrast, runs free — no load, no resistance, just a clean line from the jib straight to the pulley block. That simplicity is exactly why it works, and it’s the standard any new setup has to be measured against. One option discussed was drilling straight through the cabin top and running a tube for the sheet — technically workable, but the geometry through a floating ring, out at ninety degrees, then up to the sail, was going to look and behave a bit ugly by comparison. Nothing was finalised on the water; it’s the kind of problem that gets solved properly back in a yard, not mid-ocean, but the thinking behind it is worth recording while it’s fresh.

Landfall at Horta

And then, the wind dropped out completely, and there was Faial — the headland of Horta — dead ahead. Fourteen days, one side of the Atlantic to the other, and a genuinely stunning evening to arrive on. After weeks in Caribbean warmth, the cold hit hard and fast; Pico’s volcano was visible in the distance, already earning a spot on the to-do list for the next couple of days.

The crew, predictably, got a little ahead of themselves — sails came down with about eight miles still to run, everyone too keen to mark the end of the crossing to wait for the actual finish line. Fair enough, after fourteen days. There are worse problems to have than an overexcited crew a few miles from landfall.

In This Series

This is part of a longer story — six chapters covering the return crossing from the Caribbean to Barcelona, ending with the discovery that kicked off Paikea’s biggest refit yet. See the full series on Crossing the Atlantic: Caribbean to Barcelona, or read it in order below: