Four Orcas residents are crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a 1930’s Schooner on a journey to take the sailboat from Charleston, South Carolina to France. (Follow their trip via Google Maps)

The journey, which started on May 14, with Dwight Guss and Josh Brown assisting Antoine Dalnoky and his son 9 year-old son Noam, to sail the boat back to France where the Dalnoky’s are relocating.

Their only means of communication is a satellite phone that they are only able to use sporadically to send updates to family members. Guss also sends a daily latitude and longitude position using a SPOT GPS to Orcas through his partner Marie Baxter.

“I finally heard from the guys this morning,” Baxter said in a recent update. “They have had two horrific storms this week. Yesterday was the worst, with winds more than 50 miles per hour and more than 30-foot seas. They had to “hove to” last night to ride out the gale. My favorite comment written by Donald Hamilton about hoving to says, ‘Being hove to in a long gale is the most boring way of being terrified I know.’

Heaving to (also hove to) is a way of slowing the boat’s forward progress, fixing the helm and foresail position so that the boat doesn’t have to be actively steered. It is commonly used for a “break” while waiting out a storm.

The boat took on quite a bit of water during the storm and the sailors spent a recent morning trying to dry out their clothes and other items before getting under way again.

The vessel’s name is Provence and she was built in France in 1936 and launched in 1937. The boat is a gaff-rig cutter 62 feet in length overall with 50 feet on deck. Provence is double ended, built of teak and is “a lot of work to sail” because there are no automatic features.

The boat has traveled approximately 1,794 miles since the journey began, and they have another 1,247 miles to go before they reach the Azores. Baxter has been tracking their progress with satellite positions, which can be seen on this Google Map:

View Dwight & Josh’s Atlantic Crossing in a larger map