Islands in the Atlantic

There is something exciting about the extended anticipation of making landfall in a faraway place for the first time: the imminent meeting of expectations and reality, the inevitable differences from the mental pictures you’ve shaped.

Through our decade of offshore sailing, my wife, Mia, and I have been fortunate enough to experience that feeling many times in the islands and countries we’ve called in at, both aboard our boat and others we’ve delivered, including Bermuda, Cuba, Canada, Scotland, Ireland, Britain, Sweden and Finland. Few, though, have had the romance of the Atlantic Islands we visited first in 2012, and then again in 2017—the Azores and Madeira, Portugese jewels of the eastern Atlantic.

THE LONG WAY TO HORTA

Isbjörn, our Swan 48, was running down the miles on the home stretch, 300 miles from Horta, on the island of Faial. Under a dark black sky, just a few stars peeking out through some misty cloud cover, she flew along, touching double digits when surfing and making a steady 8.5 knots. The ocean was itself black under the inky sky, and the dolphins that streaked by the boat that night glowed. The phosphorescence was so thick anything that stirred up the water left a fluorescent trail, including Isbjörn—the comet’s tail behind the boat was 3ft thick and stretched for 100 yards in our wake.

“Sixty-two miles is a long way to sail if there’s no wind.” Mia