Volume 1 From English Harbor, Antigua, BWI

Air temp: 85° , Water: 82° , Sunny with some clouds

December 15, 1997

This is the first in what may be a series of missives from Paradise. Well, at least the Caribbean. I still don’t know how to access Ultranet yet from here, but if you get this I will have figured it out.

Basically Christine and I are in the process of stepping off of the Merry Go Round for a couple of rotations to smell the Hibiscus and rum punches. We are using our trusty boat Passe Partout, a Valiant Esprit 37, as a mobile home from which to tour the Caribbean and Bahamas. It’s no different from touring North America in a Winnebago except there’s less polyester in the parking lots, and there’s no dam snow. You can call it a sabbatical, boondoggle, or long vacation.

For those of with whom I’ve been out of contact, I’ll fill in some of the background as to what we’re doing.

I have always wanted to do a "great sail". That is, a journey with long, trade wind passages, exotic anchorages, some degree of seamanship testing, the time to read an actual novel, and lots of rum. Christine, on the other hand, does not share this grand view, but is willing to take some time off and try something different for a while, and she likes diving (she’s certified now) and snorkeling.

The typical 1 year sailing sabbatical for East coast and European sailors is the Atlantic Circle: East coast, Bermuda, Azores, then either the British Isles, or France and Iberian peninsula, then on to the Canaries, the passage to the Caribbean, then back home. The casual observer will note that the anchorage time to sailing time ratio is way low and that the expected discomfort level indicator is wildly flashing.

So we chucked Europe and the Atlantic islands, and will just do the Caribbean and Bahamas, which isn’t after all that bad a compromise. As it turns out, there was more than enough sailing to satisfy this writer, and that the probability of my ever doing another passage is getting pretty small.

So this is what we are doing: we had a big yard sale and got rid of tons of junk, sold our house and moved into the basement apartment, we each quit our jobs, made arrangements for our two pets, contacted a mail forwarding service, prepared our trusty boat, and took off. I can only tell you now, there’s a reason so few people attempt such a project. If we never go any further than here, we will have accomplished a major undertaking.

So, after about 1700 miles of sailing, many dollars, and much emotional water under the bridge, here we are in English harbor, Antigua, British West Indies, with the second leg of our voyage underway.

We are anchored in the middle of the foreground anchorage shown below.

Before we even got underway, however, and as any boat owner will know, there were just a few things that needed doing. In this case there were about 500 items on the To Do list, and almost as many on the To Get list.

Having done the ’95 Marion Bermuda race, Passe Partout was in pretty good shape for offshore sailing. Most of the preparations were for storage and living improvements, plus things we learned while in Bermuda, like you can’t have enough fans down below.

We also broke down and bought a new Genoa and Monitor self steering windvane. While outrageously expensive, I would not trade either away as poor Alf (Autopilot Life Form) could not have steered the whole way, and our old genny could not have taken the punishment we dealt it.

Then there’s the shopping. We ended up with about 3 shopping baskets of canned goods. I’m sure the checkout gal though we were going to hold up in Idaho until the FBI arrived or something. I mean, who in hell buys 12 cans of Spam in one trip? Or for that fact, one lifetime…

I can’t really describe this trip except to suggest getting a couple of root canals done without anesthesia in the morning, spending noon smelling diesel exhaust, and then in the afternoon getting your arm amputated (again without anesthesia), then paying double for the privilege. If you do this once or twice, you will get an inkling of what this part of the trip was like.

Christine, being no one’s fool, ‘sat’ this leg out and I recruited 3 crew members for the passage.

Paul’s Cruising Hint #1: Never ever leave on an offshore passage with crew that have never done as much as a day sail on your boat, much less an overnight. Every crew member must have completed at least an afternoon sail and preferably spent a night on the boat as well.

The consequences of ignoring this hint are grave and I could go on for hours, but won’t. However I’m still finding stuff put away in the wrong place, lines made up incorrectly, and things just plain missing.

The passage summary goes something like this: left in a Northwest gale; seas off of Noman’s land are 10-15’, but going our way; shiver the night away; same but less the next day; third day the wind dies and we motor through the gulf stream, seeing little life or temperature evidence that we actually did cross it; gale strikes the next two days; spend half of one hove to; spend more that 24 hours with storm jib and storm trysail trying to make some headway towards BDA; winds gusting to 62kts; last day spent in sight of land but having to tack to get in. Then the piece de resistance? Motor dies 1 mile out of St. George’s cut (coolant pump broken) so we have to sail in through the cut; we have about 90 seconds before the engine block overheats and use it to complete our way through the contrary winds in the cut (all this at about 1AM in the morning, of course), then, in the dark, sailing without an engine, the crew who never before anchored the boat, tries to get the ground tackle ready and we come to rest in front of the customs dock in St. George’s. Rum and Cola never tasted so good.

Exhausted from crew interaction problems, inability to sleep in the two gales, and having to explain just about each boat operation from where the silverware is, to how the Monitor works; three times; I just about packed in the whole voyage. I priced leaving the boat there until spring and just sailing it back home. The final blow was that all the cruising books we had assembled over a couple of years and to a cost of over $500 had gotten soaked. It was an all-time emotional low, made worse by not having Christine there.

However, renting a Moped and feeling the Warm air in my face and huge bugs in my teeth fixed just about everything that a few rum soaked nights couldn’t. We decided to press on. It couldn’t possibly get worse. (OK, one should hear the buzzer now and say ‘never say that’, but things did in fact not get worse.)

Cruising note: If you ever get a chance to buy duty free booze in BDA, do it. A 1.5 litter bottle is $8.50 as compared to > $23 normal price. This, of course, we found out the day we were going to leave when it was too late to get the duty free bottles.

This was the trade wind passage I had hoped to do for so long. It’s funny how things are imagined one way but turn out a different way. For example, Windows 95 is supposed to be easy to use, but we all know differently. Still, compared to the first leg, the second was a breeze.

It’s a little less that 1,000 miles from BDA to Antigua, and we did it in 8.5 days. We peeled of a couple of 148 mile days, with many of the others over 130 miles. It was pretty good sailing, with sunny skies, little rain and no dam gales.

Some random thoughts from the leg:

Salt. It’s everywhere. On your body, everything you grab, your bunk sheets, the seats, etc. I felt completely pickled about the 4’th day out.

The salt comes from the boarding waves or wavelettes. Little slops of water or spray that enter the cockpit and dry in about a minute or so. Of course once your tee shirt gets salted, it never dries.

Chicken. One of the crew members announced about a day before we left that he doesn’t eat red meat. That pretty much set aside our larder of meat oriented protein. So we clucked our way through about a half a dozen chicken oriented meals, none of which was too easy to prepare bouncing around at a 20° angle.

Sleep: offshore sailing for me has become just a sleep deprivation test. A 24 hour period with 2 in REM sleep was a good day.

I Still hear "Southbound II, Southbound II, this is the sailing ship xxx". Herb provides a superlative service, but one needs to be more or less glued to their SSB for 2 hours a day.

Sun: well, it’s everywhere. Shade with wind becomes an increasingly rare commodity.

The 3AM watch. If anyone ever asks you, never sign up for it. The sun will rise without you.

Somewhere between 32° N and 24° N, the early watch beverage turned from hot coffee to cold soda.

In what apparently has become a tradition, the engine salt water pump broke about a day out of English Harbor. I can’t begin to tell you how much fun it was to change the impeller in the Trade winds, now blowing a steady 20+kts.

The Antigua CG (running w/o lights and with night vision binoculars on) intercepted us about a mile out of English Harbor and gave us an escort in (to a harbor I hadn’t been into in 17 years). Who says cops aren’t there when you need them. Their coming along side completely unlit them turning on the lights and blue flasher scared us almost as much as the 40 foot whale that breached while we were in the second gale on the way to BDA.

 

Christine had to go home 2 days after arriving in Antigua to finish up business at her place of work. She has given notice and will be back down on the 23’ed. She did get in one dive at least.

Cleo our cat will be staying at home and the new house owners will take care of him. This way the mice will have someone to play with.

Sandy the dog will stay with Babcia (Polish for grandma) and get spoiled rotten. She will probably be covered with bed sores when we get back…

The house sale is dragging on, but the new owners really want it and will eventually make it happen.

So all the pieces are in place. Now all we have to is learn to live on a boat and explore paradise for 6 months.

Some random observations:

I have a new hobby: I open and close hatches and portlights all day long when it’s squally. Leave e'm closed and you bake; leave 'em open and you steam.

Ventilation has become an important subject of late. I now dream often of Pulpit Harbor, Maine in September.

I’m downwind from Shirley Heights in English harbor; this is the local jump up spot and while Pulpit harbor is nice, it ain’t got no Steel Band playing all afternoon, mon. Here they are: (our anchorage is in the background)

I think the pace of life may have slowed down a bit. It will take a couple of more months to be sure…

Some random thoughts while sailing the two legs so far:

The next boat we get (if ever we do get another one) will have Pilothouse in the title. It will probably never get much past the Bahamas or coastal waters.

A Valiant can truly sail through just about anything. The crew? That’s another matter…

The ocean is big and from what we saw, there’s not much life in it; just lots and lots of waves. And salt, of course. I never read on the way down and thus must have watched more than 500 miles of ocean pass us. Kind of like Kansas but salty.

The following things are a pain while sailing offshore: using the head, cooking, eating, sleeping, and standing watch. Did I miss anything?

 

We plan to island hop down the Leewards and Windwards, work our way back up and then to the Virgin Islands. Then, time permitting, the South coast of PR, the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, then to St. Augustine by June 1 or so.

We are looking for a crew or two for the last passage: PR to the Turks in early spring (maybe march or so), and from Florida to Buzzards Bay in early June. Any takers?

Well, sorry this was so long, but I now have some of that rarest of commodities in the Real World: time.

I will try to stay in touch with more e-mail, but it’s not easy finding a port into the net.

Peace (and merry Xmas)

Paul & Christine