Read the passage and awnser the question Getting ready to leave Ponta Delgada, and extremely happy for a weather window to get ourselves someplace new, we turned on all the instruments and found the wind to be 14 kts at the docks. Perfect. We could put all sail up and have a nice comfortable ride. Getting into the harbor though, the winds had picked up dramatically, hovering around 25. We still decided to go for a full mainsail, and once that was up, we raised the staysail as well. Shutting off the engine we rocketed out of the harbor at 6 knots. It looked as if the wind strength was in our favor, but the direction however, was not. Coming straight out of the east, almost directly where we needed to go. Now forcing ourselves on a course of 160°, when we had been hoping for 100° or 110°, we moved along SSE, hoping the winds would change in the next few days. Even joking that we should move south to the Canaries and skip the Madeira group all together, we realized we were about 20° too far west of those as well. For the beginning of this trip and when we were still close to land, I made sure to position myself behind the wheel so I could see any small fishing vessels in the wide harbor as we exited. Sitting in that position I had no protection from the wind, and sat shivering and wearing Matt’s oversized fleece, while keeping my foot positioned on the binnacle so I wouldn’t slide away in these rounds of waves and 15 degree heel. Once we were about ten miles offshore and I was safe in assuming we wouldn’t be passing any more small boats, I finally moved to the protection of the dodger and watched the island of Sao Miguel fade out behind me.

Through the night and into the next morning the winds began dying down a little which made the ride just a bit more comfortable. Then they died out completely. We were off to a less than aspicious beginning. So far we had gone just close enough in the right direction for it not to be considered the wrong direction, and now we weren’t going anywhere. We wanted to try and find out where the wind was hiding at so we could catch it, but the signal we were picking up from our weather fax gave us an image equivalent to an ink blot test and we were left scratching our heads on what it all meant. Luckily we had both my dad and our friend Jason sending us weather reports on our satellite phone, but we didn’t always know when they were coming and wanted to try to get some information from someone who was in the exact same spot as us. Although we’d never done it before we’ve heard that boaters will sometimes hail passing cargo and cruise ships to get weather reports. I was now willing to be one of those boats and spent a full day waiting for one to pass within range.

On Friday, two days out, I saw my first tanker and excitedly hailed them on the radio. Over and over and over I called an no one responded. A few hours later another cargo ship popped up on our AIS.

1.whats the middle of the passage about