Well, the Picton Castle has had a pretty good run down from Lunenburg, bound for Charleston by way of close in to Cape Hatteras.
We have been under power the whole way, sad to say. We steamed out of Lunenburg and headed southwest to skirt south of George’s Bank east of Cape Cod. We did this to avoid all the busy fishing traffic and strange currents of George’s Bank. Then we kept going like this skirting Nantucket Shoals.
Why? The hint is in the name; “shoals”. Don’t want much to do with shoals.
Now it is getting warmer. 2 degrees Celsius was the sea temperature upon leaving fair Lunenburg and in two days it was 5 degrees. Wow! Now as we are off the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay by about 90 miles the sea temperature is up to 20 Celsius or 65 Fahrenheit – much warmer indeed. But the cold was good for crawling under heaps of covers in your bunk and sleeping cozily.
And we have also skirted just north of the Gulf Stream which sets almost due west near here, did not want to get set to the Azores at a rate of 4 knots, now, do we? No, so we stayed north of that meandering hot water river right in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean.
This morning we had a small low-pressure system pass overhead and our strong headwinds became light headwinds and are now veering (aka clocking) around to become a fair sailing breeze. This, of course, is welcome, looks like we can shut down and set sail soon to pass the famous and daunting Cape Hatteras under sail tonight.
Why is this cape so notorious? Well, a lot of factors weigh in. One: the Gulf Stream comes very close in here and the cape sticks pretty far out. And then you have all sorts of weather systems barrelling off the coast. So a cold northeast storm against a hot 4 knot current setting to the ENE is a cauldron of trouble. There is more to it than that, but that’s a good start.
But we have a fair breeze it looks good to slip in between the Stream and the shoals off the Cape for a nice passage south, or so we hope, then around the corner southwest towards Charleston.
