For those non-German speakers, it stands for “and back” which was the return trip of Margalo from the BVIs. It was an eight day offshore trip direct to Marion with good sailing conditions and great camaraderie. And what’s with the German? It’s an inside baseball Pline family joke from when we first moved to Salzburg in the 70s. The bus routes always had displays for the destination followed by “und zurück”. Not knowing the area well and knowing very little German, we were all wondering where “zurück” was.

The crew for this trip was Chip Johns (the boat owner), me, Nick Kennedy and Tom Duggan. Both Nick and Tom have a lot of big boat experience and Nick especially has many, many ocean racing miles (including the most harrowing story I’ve ever heard) so I was in great company. Turns out Tom and I have many, many friends in common and I am surprised now we had never met, although we have been at events at the same time. A few social media commenters we have in common were wondering if we were on the same boat during the trip!

It’s a long trip to get to Tortola including a 3am wakeup, drive to the airport, two flights, a taxi ride, and finally the ferry to Tortola. But we finally got to the boat at Sopers Hole late that afternoon and immediately proceeded to get things ready to go for a departure the next day. Some pizza and beer at the Admirals Club, a good night’s sleep (despite it being fairly hot), provisioning the next morning, a few other tasks and we were off about 1300.

We quickly settled into our 2 on, 6 off (night) and 3 on, 9 off (day) watches. I’m really liking this schedule especially as I have become much more familiar with the boat and its sailing characteristics since this system requires solo watches. I took the settee berth in the main cabin opposite the galley as my “superpower” is my ability to fall asleep quickly and sleep through almost anything day or night so the other guys didn’t have to worry about making noise or turning lights on.

Because I’m a visual guy and a map nerd – I don’t know why but I have always loved maps – I created a Google map of the Margalo deliveries to/from Marion MA/Tortola BVI which give a great overview of the round trip (in addition to the map I made of the week cruising). These use a combination of a coordinates from paper logs we kept and geotags on the included images. If you click on any photo icon you can see the image that was taken on the spot.

These tools make it quite easy to do and I learned a bit about how Google maps interprets and uses geotags. Of course there are more automated ways of recording tracks but we didn’t have any configured on the instruments. I thought about starting my Strava App, but that might have been a bit much for 8 days. Maybe it’s just the large scale of the map, but the diversion to Bermuda on the way down (red icons, an extra day and a half sailing) does’t appear to be that different distance-wise.

It was more or less eight days of starboard tack beam reaching in 10-20 knot easterlies (trade winds). Of course the closer you get to the coast, the more the weather systems that come off the land affect the breeze. Overall, the breeze was lighter on the way back than on the way down and we spent a bit more time under full main/jib and did more motoring/motorsailing. Margalo, a Morris 48 with a tall rig and deep keel is a very powerful boat and pretty much goes at the hull speed of ~9 knots when the breeze approaches 15 knots. As in the trip down, there was a staysail rigged on a furler to give a higher wind headsail and we had only the #2 and #3 reef lines run. We did have to motorsail some if a double reef was too little sail and we didn’t want to shake it out, the breeze was under about 12 knots, or if the angle was very broad since we didn’t fly a kite.

We more or less stuck to the rhumbline, a little east to stay in the better breeze for the first third of the trip. We were watching the daily weather model updates via PredictWind and there were two systems coming off the coast in the next week. The first was a cold front that was pretty harsh on the east coast and looked to approach us about when we would cross the Gulf Stream and the second was a front that would affect us for the last 36 hours. At one point, we were strongly considering a stop in Bermuda but after waiting a day to see the latest updates that option ceased being attractive because we might have gotten stuck there for too many days waiting for for favorable conditions. So we abandoned that and continued on the direct track. The models were split on whether we should take a westerly track or stay on the easterly track and we chose the west because it looked like we could skirt under the majority of the first front and if we kept the pedal to the metal, we might beat the front at the end of the trip. Fortunately, we chose correctly and a day later all of the models coalesced on the western track. We did miss most of the weather activity of the first front, only seeing an hour and a half squall with torrential rain and some lightning but no wind to speak of. Lightning is always stressful because there is very little action one can take to mitigate it. You just have to push through and hope your grounding (and luck) is good.

Once the front passed, there was little wind for about 36 hours through the Gulf Stream so we had to motorsail, but still made great time. The morning of the last day approaching the Massachusetts coast the breeze built from the east and we were again sailing fast. We were making good time and the approaching cold front was moving slower than predicted so it looked like we might beat the weather. Approaching the Vineyard we were hauling the mail and rocked through Vineyard Sound and Quicks Hole heading straight to Marion when the rain hit. The last several hours were very wet but with good breeze until a 40 degree header forced us to just motor with the breeze on the nose the last few miles. But at least it was never very cold. We expected it to be very cold the last few days since the water temperature was 30 degrees lower after leaving the Gulf Stream and that anticipation was really weighing on me during the trip. We got to Marion about 4pm on Friday and made a beeline for shore before the cold part of the front passed later that evening.

All in all, we were very lucky on the weather and it was a very pleasant trip free from any drama, a good thing when offshore. It was especially fun getting to know Nick and Tom and swapping life stories. As I’ve said before, this is ultimately the real gem of these kinds of experiences.