All alone on the Atlantic Ocean?

Anybody out there?

Once away from land, the ocean is a remarkably empty and vast space. We had left Cabo Verde pretty much by ourselves; while a couple of yachts were leaving for Brazil at about the same time as us, most others turned west towards the Caribbean or were not yet ready to go.

So, without any other sailing yachts to be seen we felt like we had the ocean to ourselves and that is a wonderful feeling – humbling and awe-inspiring for me (F) and just plain nice (D).

During our 10-day crossing, we saw a total of three cargo vessels and one fishing boat. Other signs of human presence were four floating Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs) spread over a distance of 15nm, with not a fishing boat in sight.

On our over-the-horizon AIS, however, we could see more vessels, including fishing boats with clusters of FADs, but this was at a scale of 100s of kms.

Finding Dory

While physically by ourselves, today’s new technologies all but solve isolation and we kept in contact with other sailors as well as family and friends using Predict Wind tracking and WhatsApp messaging. The ‘Finding Dory’ WhatsApp group of trans-Atlantic sailors proved to be a real find, with 280 yachts communicating about all things sailing before, during and after their Atlantic crossings in the 2025/2026 season (https://blog.noforeignland.com/finding-dory-crossing-the-atlantic-together-again/).

An important role of group was the daily check in from each boat underway. This confirmed that everybody was safe and happy and provided information on conditions along the way. Hearing from other vessels, was very reassuring, particularly when it was clear that they were suffering from similar frustrations of wind and wave conditions and enjoying similar highs.

On the homefront, parents, siblings and friends could also keep an eye on us, and in some cases even assist with problem solving along the way (thanks Bart and Marcel!).

What else is out there?

While there is a great deal of water and sky out there but otherwise, after leaving Cabo Verde behind, we saw little else. There were surprisingly few seabirds until we approached Brazil’s Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago near the equator. Before then, we saw Cape Verde storm petrels, the odd (gorgeous!) tropicbird (Red-billed and white-tailed), some shearwaters and a brown booby, but not much more.

Noddies

We were very pleased then that, passing the archipelago after one week, we were visited by a handful of brown noddies each night who used Yuma as their sleeping platform. They took up position on the radar, the solar panels, the outboard, the dodger, the railing and the folds of the reefed mainsail an hour or two after dark and settled in for the night.

This was accompanied by lots of squawking as they squabbled about who got the best spot for the night. Around sunrise they began a multi-hour preening session before flying off to spend the day doing those things that noddies do.

Unfortunately, they also left a bit of a mess but we took this as par for the course in exchange for some welcome company and entertainment during night watches.

Flying fish

Flying fish were by far the most common non-avian animals that we saw, mostly gliding low over the waves but also sometimes dried up on our deck first thing in the morning. Oops! Thinking that flying fish might indicate the presence of yummy predatory fish underneath them, things like mahi-mahi and tuna, we regularly and futilely threw out a line behind the boat.

Well not entirely futilely, we did hook bits of Sargassum which was becoming more and more common the closer we got to the equator but that wasn’t the idea, we weren’t fishing for salad.

What is Sargassum doing out here?

From her university days, Frederieke remembered the Sargasso Sea as the place of Sargassum seaweed where European and American eels would go to reproduce and then die. But here was Sargassum weed well to the south and the west of the Sargasso Sea. What was this seaweed doing in the middle of the Atlantic?

After checking in with Marina Santana, my (F) former Brasilian PhD student, we learned that large Sargassum blooms had become common around 2010, with the “great Atlantic Sargassum belt” now occurring pretty much every year. The occurrence of the belt, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to West Africa, appears to be connected to riverine nutrient enrichment and climatic variations and may have become a permanent feature of the Atlantic Ocean.

While we saw lots of Sargassum, and had to clean it regularly from our windvane’s rudder, we didn’t encounter large mats of it. The vast majority of what we saw was long lines of weed and less commonly patches of tens or a few hundred square metres. Still this, was enough to foul trolling lures and to put the vane steering off course.