At 9:43am this morning, Woody Norwood & JD Shiver set sail from Beaufort, SC to Bermuda. Some friends from Beaufort, Jim Travis and Reggie followed them out for a bit, and thanks to Vosbury's for taking the pictures! For those of you who are wondering who is behind the keyboard, my name is Tracy Tumlin Allardice and I am one of Woody's very proud nieces. My husband, Darryl and I are the Communications Crew and will be updating the blog while Woody is at sea.We expect to hear from him daily via his satellite phone and he will be checking in with my father, Bill Tumlin (BT) for weather updates.
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Here's a note Woody sent early this morning:
" We are definitely departing today. The sun is shining and we should have generally northerly wind all day, getting stronger as we get offshore. I expect 15 to 20 knots (kts) this afternoon and tonight. There are no tropical storms in sight. However, we will be going through the Gulf Stream (GS) all day tomorrow, and with a northeast wind at around 15 kts, opposing the direction of flow of the GS, the wave heights will be significant (8 +feet) and steep. By tomorrow night we expect calmer seas. After sailing through the GS we will have to dodge the northern curl of an eddy. This eddy is termed a "warm eddy", spinning off the GS and rotating counterwise. We will sail south of the rhumb line Sunday-Monday to avoid the adverse current and maybe even pick up a boost on the south edge of the current.
Longer term the wind looks light and will be adverse for a couple of days. If it is light and adverse we'll use the engine some. We have enough fuel for roughly 200 miles.
The boat is loaded. We are running last-minute errands this morning, including a run to the dump with trash. We bought more food than we need (or could possibly fit on the boat. Tha addage is, "Don't send a hungry man to the grocery store". We will leave this legacy to our neighbors at Carriage Court in Beaufort. Enough Ramon Noodles to put a young person through a semester of college.
~ Woody"
I did hear from Woody & JD around 2:00pm today. On their way out to sea, they took a short cut through Bay Point Reach, but the tide was not their friend and ran out on them which caused them to run aground - just in the sand. So they jumped in the water, cleaned the bottom of the boat and did a little swimming and R&R, waiting for the tide to come in. They were expecting to be back at sail around 5:00pm, spirits were high.Bill Tumlin (BT) is serving as Weather man and was ready with a report at 5:00pm for Woody. BT had been tracking the progress (to do so, click on the Spot Finder to the left) and noticed the tracks stopped around 12:30pm and figured he must be off the coast. Little did he know that he was literally on the coast. We expect to get tracks around noon each day from the spot tracker.
Last Saturday night about 40 people gathered for a Bon Voyage party for Woody & JD. We had such a great time and Woody's kids, Liz and Parker and their families joined us via conference and sent YouTube videos. I'll post the links of their videos and pictures of that evening in the days to come.
In closing, please find one of my favorite quotes:
There are good ships, and there are wood ships,
The ships that sail the sea.
But the best ships, are friendships,
And may they always be.
More soon! Tracy
