Our sail into the US was quite an eventful one. We thought we’d be catching the gulf stream up the coast and hopping off to explore NYC before heading down to the Chesapeake for scheduled boat work before our crossing! Within 24 hours, all that changed and we were sailing towards Florida after leaving the Bahamas to shelter from the storm we had caught ourselves in. We got caught off guard and this was our first lesson into the dangerous storms that form both on mainland and around the gulf stream due to the heat! We managed to sail towards St Augustine and from then on, we were sheltering from unfavourable weather and storms and very quickly our goal to NYC became just a goal to reach our marina in the Chesapeake in time for our haul out and boat work!

The plus side is we got to explore the coast of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia & Maryland! Sailing wise, it was quite the stark contrast to the Bahamas - the water was suddenly brown, the temperature dropped from 25 to 10 degrees (celsius), shallow waters, jettys and crab pot dodging began! The month we spent up the East coast and in the Chesapeake was not quite a relaxing one for these reasons. We did enjoy exploring life on land though and worked our way through all the museums, playgrounds and kids museums along the coast! The other upside was having easy access to online orders, ship chandlers and boat services at every port meant we got a tonne of much needed boat jobs done in the meantime too!

After a slight delay hauling out Tranquila, we had a couple of days to reach our start line in Solomons, Maryland, for our ARC Europe 2025 departure! We loved the few days we had in Solomons and got to do one last provision before 4 weeks of sailing and cruising to reach Lagos, Portugal! Our first crew and friend, Mikko, also made it to help us for the US - Bermuda - Azores leg! After our first skippers briefing with the ARC, given the storm warnings, we decided to delay our start date by a few days as it was too risky to set off in those conditions. Having said this, from Solomons to the exit of the bay was around 80nm so it was nice to have a soft start and rest along the way - especially because the crab/fishing pots made it hard to sail at night!

A couple of days later, we decided to head to Bermuda as we saw a break in the storms and were going to try catch the back of it to make our way over. To say this was the most challenging and scariest sail of our time aboard would be an understatement, but as Antoine says, the plus side is we’ve never had such great beam reach sailing either! We were on one tack the whole way for 3 days straight but those 3 days at sea felt just as long as our 3 week Atlantic Crossing, if not worse. We constantly battled lightning storms, day and night, with only one additional crew and the kids aboard! After a few hours of torrential downpour, we noticed our main had torn with the weight of the water, but luckily given the wind, we would keep it reefed the entire time! The wind remained until we reached the finish line in Bermuda but we were quite skeptical arriving at night given the reef and unlit buoys at the entrance. Just after midnight, gusting 25 knots, we managed to anchor down in a very busy bay with barely any light but we were so excited to catch up on sleep after what felt like 3 days awake!