Overnight to Florida

Sea vu Play

We all got up at 6:00 AM to listen to Chris Parker's weather forecast on the short wave radio. It will still take us all day before we clear the Banks and get to deeper water. Even though we are still on the Banks it is still rather rough. Once we leave the Banks late afternoon the swells start building. Very confused seas, very hard to walk through the boat, bouncing side to side. Linda tried a new motion sickness medicine that is not available in the states, but it still made her sleepy.

Sunset

Hitch hiking cormorant

Once we get out into the Gulf Stream the seas get even more confused, but at least we get a little speed boost. Strangely we see very few ships on AIS or radar. Around mid-night we start seeing lightning far to our west on the Florida coast. This went on for 3-4 hours as we got progressively closer to the coast. Soon after midnight our engine stalled and stopped. I change the primary fuel filter, because the vacuum gauge was running high which is an indicator that the filter is clogging up. It looks clean but I change it anyways. A couple hours later the engine stops again. Since we had so much wind I did not bother trying to restart it, figuring it was a fuel pump issue. Our speed only slowed down a little without the engine running. Sea-Vu-Play had gotten a couple miles ahead of us and had some rather close lightning strikes near their boat. The sound delay coincided with the distance they are ahead of us. About an hour before sunrise the Thunderstorms end. Of course the thunderstorms or the rough conditions were not predicted by Chris Parker or anyone else.