13. Atlantic crossing... Captain's view

As we crossed the Atlantic Ocean, we could experience something that most of the people on Earth will never do: Do not see any land for a few weeks. In our case it was for ‘only’ 17 days and we had all the modern safety and communication possibilities, but it somehow gave us a feeling of connecting with past navigators and explorers like Christoph Columbus or James Cook. In our 40 feet (12.20m) long floating home the six of us managed to keep a regular and harmonized routine. The night watches were taken care by the boys while I tried to give the girls a quiet sleep even when the Sea was bumpy. During the day we fished, or at least tried to, changed sails, relaxed and once had to avoid a storm we did not see coming on the weather forecast. That was also the only time we had to steer JOLLY JUMPER by hand. The rest of the steering had been taken care by our best crewmember… our beloved wind steering system “Hydrovane”. It is a mechanical device in the back of the boat with a big red vane that steers according to the wind angle. It steers all by itself, but you have to keep an eye on it every once in a while. Especially if the wind direction changes, then automatically also your course changes. So, we never got bored. During the passage Karim and Chris even had to go up on the mast to catch a halyard we lost, but all in all we had relaxing days, though rolling all the time. The waves in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean can regularly get higher than in coastal areas, but as they have a much longer interval, they just make the boat go up and surf down again, and again... When we were looking for boats a few years ago, we made sure to get a centre cockpit. That is what makes the difference, especially with kids, if you feel save with high waves or not, or even get wet with waves washing on the deck. In our case, we once had waves that where about 7 meters, and it is impressive when you see them coming behind you, but we never felt scared or unsafe. All in all, this crossing taught us a lot about living together in a little space, but most importantly it gave us a good feeling about our boat. We had made the right choice when we bought JOLLY JUMPER in 2016. I am not saying the boat is perfect, but to us and for our needs it is.

So, when you are far from land for a while and you know, as it was in our case, that you should be reaching land soon, you start seeing signs everywhere. Maybe the water colour even changes, we saw different birds flying around us than we had the weeks before, and strange cloud formations on the horizon for a few days before land was really in sight. Sometimes, though not in this case as we had the wind pushing us, you even smell land, especially if there are woods near the coast.

So here we were, all more or less relaxed, all senses open and eager to arrive and go ashore on a new continent. After the first excitement of seeing land, it then took us some more hours to approach and pass the northern point of Barbados in order to enter the little harbour of Port Saint Charles, situated in a luxury holiday complex in the north of the island. We arrived in the afternoon just in time before the customs and immigration officers left for the evening. Lucky, because otherwise we would have been obliged to stay on the boat until we could clear in the next morning. The feeling of the arrival and the accomplishment of such an adventure, even if we were well prepared and never in danger or so, is amazing. We did it! We are on the other side, on another Continent! And all safe!