Log of Sea Wings

THE BEAUTIES, THE BEAST AND A BIT OF MELANCHOLY

16 April 2010

At anchor, Salinas, Puerto Rico

17-57.3410 N

66-17.5259 W

We are currently anchored at Salinas, Puerto Rico doing laundry and provisioning for a passage to at least the Turks and Cacios, possibly all the way to the Bahamas.  Our last update was too long ago, and, yet again, we have not updated as we should have.  At that last update our bow was headed north from Bequia in the Grenedines to St Lucia, the northernmost of the Windward Islands.

From Bequia a day’s sail easily brings you past St Vincent and to the southwest coast of St Lucia where you find Joulouse Bay, a small, deep bay set between two conical shaped mountains call Gros Piton and Petite Piton.  This setting is one of the most spectacular and beautiful locations in the eastern Caribbean and one of our favorites to visit, but one at which we hate to anchor.  There are few buildings here to spoil the natural beauty, just a small resort and several houses.  The bay itself is a marine park and moorings for rent are provided as anchoring is nearly impossible because the water is too deep right up to the shoreline.  Referred to simply as “The Pitons” the mountains are uninhabited and provide a stunning setting of lush green spires against the sky.  It is even more stunning at night as the spires block all but a small portion of the sky and they seem to intensify the size and brightness of the stars.  It is certainly a not to miss location in the eastern Caribbean, so beautiful that even Don Street, the well travelled writer of Caribbean guidebooks, claims to have chosen it as the place to propose to his wife.

But sometimes with the beauty comes the beast and the anchorage at the Pitons is certainly a beast.  While the Caribbean trade winds are usually steady as they approach an island, they are often gusty on the leeward side as it travels up, over and down the mountain peaks.  So the wind is often 5 kts gusting to say 12-15 kts which at anchor tends to swing the boat a lot but is still quite comfortable.  At the Pitons this wind is then channeled between the twin peaks and the wind in the anchorage between them can be 10 kts gusting to 30 kts or more.  It was these conditions that we encountered when we tried to pick up a mooring.  Try picking up and securing a mooring line with your 5 foot wife doing the muscle work when you approach in the lull and then get blasted with 30 kts as she is trying to get it secured.  Even with full throttle and the rudder kicked full over it was impossible to hold the bow for more than a few moments and six times the line was stripped from her hands, leaving her with a damaged shoulder for weeks.  On the seventh try we succeeded with the assistance of a boat boy and were able to finally make it fast.  Once moored, the wind blasts are not as bothersome and the day passes in relaxation and enjoyment of this beautiful place.

Unfortunately, at night the wind often falls to dead calm.  This might sound ideal but then the boat swings to the tidal flow and not the wind, which means that the bow often comes in contact with the mooring ball as the wind is no longer pushing the boat away from it.  At the Pitons the mooring balls are quite large in diameter and made of hard plastic.  So when it comes in contact with the boat you have one large hollow plastic object (ball) slapping another large hollow plastic object (boat) and the noise is amazingly loud inside the latter object………..especially if you sleep in the bow of the object and the contact point is right next to your ear.  We tried everything we could to keep it from hitting the boat but no matter what we did it only reduced the number of hits but did not eliminate them.  Now we had just enough time to fall asleep before it would bang in your ear.  The most we have been able to stand here is two sleepless nights; even with the daytime beauty, the nights are a high price to pay.  But if you have never been there, and have the chance to do so, put up with a sleepless night or two, you won’t regret it.

From the Pitons we stopped for several days at Rodney Bay before leaving St Lucia with a great weather window to complete our trip to St Maarten where our daughter was to join us for Christmas.  We hopped island to island for the next five days stopping only overnight and not actually clearing into another island before reaching St Maarten.  Those days seemed to rush by with only a few highlights, notably our Thanksgiving dinner with Mike and Cynthia aboard Minx in Portsmouth, Dominica and our passage from Guadeloupe to Nevis where we passed close to Montserrat during an eruption.  A very special thanks goes out to Minx where we enjoyed a Thanksgiving of good company, wine and canned duck.  Yes, kids, you can actually get duck in a can.

Our 72 nm passage from Guadeloupe to Nevis was on a nearly windless day which is normally disappointing in the eastern Caribbean as if the wind is blowing and the sailing angles are good  it is always great sailing.  However, on this day it turned out to be the best possible conditions for the trip.  The island of Montserrat lies precisely at the mid point of this passage, and right on the rhum line so it is normally passed by sailing close to the windward or leeward shore.  The Soufriere volcano on Montserrat has been extremely active for the last year tossing tons of ash as high as 20,000 feet and has rained down on islands as far as a hundred miles away and has actually closed the airport in San Juan, PR several times.  But on this perfectly clear day the island was calm and beautiful with the top of the volcano hidden by the ever present fluffy white clouds.  Under these conditions we planned to motor close to the shore (there is normally a two mile exclusion zone if the volcano is active) to get a good look at what used to be the town of Plymouth before it was destroyed by an eruption in the early 1990’s.  We spent the morning lazily reading books as the motor droned on, occasionally checking for boat traffic and the ever threatening fish pots, watching the island grow larger and larger as we neared.

Only several miles south of the island the fluffy white cloud was suddenly penetrated by a billowing column of ash rising into the air above the cloud.  We watched it carefully for a while trying to determine which way the ash would travel or if we needed to turn around and make a run back to Guadeloupe if it looked like a really big eruption.   Luckily, it seemed a relatively minor venting and with no wind the ash seemed to be falling straight back down on the island, so we decided to proceed on the leeward side and actually came within about a mile of Plymouth and did not even get a good dusting of ash.  In fact, we got more ash on the boat a year before when anchored 50 nm upwind of the island.  But taking no chances we did don our sanding masks for a few hours and enjoyed the pyroclastic show.

The months of December and January were spent in Great Bay (Phillipsburg), St Maarten where we enjoyed the holidays with our daughter Blair, our longtime friends Scott and Jan Clarke and the Deher family who always warmly welcome us and open their home to us like family.  It was our third visit to St Maarten and we always look forward to being there and being with these wonderful people.

Lyn was called back to the US to deal with some family issues and was gone for the entire month of January. These times are when the captain is supposed to get a lot of work done on the boat (or catch up on the blog) but, as usually happens, the captain spends all his time in the bars drinking and enjoying guy food and not getting much useful work done.  Such is the cruising life.  Actually, the captains are usually not punished too harshly since all cruising couples are living together in only a few hundred square feet 24/7/365 so the time alone for both parties is usually cherished.

Sea Wings arrived in Virgin Gorda Sound, BVI after an uneventful passage in early February.  Since then we have island hopped around both the US and British Virgins rendezvousing for a week with our good Canadian friends Andrew and Denise on Samaria II (now with ship’s dog Murphy) and catching up with friends cruising the Virgins whom we have met from the Chesapeake to Grenada.  We recently read a piece where the author noted that the best areas of the Caribbean, and possibly the world, for cruising sailors are the Virgin Islands and the Grenadines/Grenada. And we could not agree more.  Here there are fair winds, beautiful islands with beautiful anchorages, warm and friendly residents, and sailing distances judged in hours, not days, of sailing time.  On this visit we concentrated on some of the smaller bays that we had not visited previously and have spent many quiet nights in quiet anchorages with the company of only one or two other boats.  We have been to the USVI and BVI numerous times but have probably never enjoyed them as much as this trip where we have spent more time off the beaten path.

Our last days in the USVI were spent at Honeymoon Bay, Water Island where there is a beautiful beach and friendly local beach bar and best of all, ‘Monday Night at the Movies’ put on each Monday night by Heidi who runs a mobile canteen on the beach.  The theater consists of plastic chairs on the sand, the balcony is golf carts parked behind the chairs by the local residents and the screen a large white cloth stretched between two palm trees.  Heidi supplies the hot dogs, beer, popcorn, and the movie…. complete with cartoon.  Blis.

After a short run to Cluebra in the Spanish Virgin Islands we spent a week hunkered down in Ensenada Honda while the wind howled for the entire week.  It was bad enough that one boat was washed onto the beach and some of the bay markers were torn loose as well.  But the stop over did give us a lot of time to explore and enjoy the island and we enjoyed it enough that we are considering the possibility of purchasing property there.  It is no more beautiful than many other islands but the fact that a different language is spoken and that flights home are from Puerto Rico and therefore several times cheaper than flying to other islands makes it very appealing.  Or maybe it was meeting many locals while we wiled away the afternoons a Mamacita’s Bar and Restaurant (a special ‘hello’ to Annabelle, our favorite mixologist!).  We’ll see how we feel about it in a year or two.

Prior to our arrival here we spent one rolly night in Esperanza, Viequez just to go to our favorite restaurant in the Caribbean, El Quenepo.  Kate and Scott Cole do a fantastic job and it is a joy to eat five star cuisine in the setting of a quiet Spanish island.  If you are in the Spanish Virgin Islands, do not miss this place!

It is a rainy morning as we wait for our washers to finish and work on the blog and we are thinking of our pending arrival back in the States.  With parents reaching crucial points in their lives going from independent to assisted living with the attendant emotional and logistical issues to deal with and at a time when our kids need us to be more available, we have decided that we must travel back to the States.  Unfortunately, finances preclude our air travel back and forth as often as we are needed, so sailing back to the States seems the mature, responsible thing to do.  During the trip south we skipped the Abacos (Bahamas) due to the cold weather, but hope we can catch them on the way home.  We plan to be there only a year or less before heading back out again but we contemplate it with a bit of sadness.  While we look forward to being with family and friends again, we are realizing that we are not looking forward to being in the States.  Perhaps we have become too attuned to ‘island time’, perhaps it is that the things that were important to us as North Americans are no longer important to us as cruisers or as citizens of the world.  But mostly I think it is that we feel we are only beginning our journey and have a lot left to do and see.

When we reach US shores in July we will have been out for just over three years.  Sea Wing’s bow will have pushed through over 6,000 nautical miles of ocean (that is 6,900 statute miles to all the dirt dwellers).  That is more miles than sailing across the Atlantic and back again.  In the pre-cruising days we might have been vain enough to brag on that fact and think we were somehow the ‘cat’s meow’.  But as cruisers we are continually humbled by the accomplishments of others and realize that we have only just begun what we hope will be a longer journey.  We often meet people, folks older than us or even the very young with children, that have sailed across the Atlantic multiple times or even around the world.  Here in the Caribbean these people are a dime a dozen and our paltry 6,000 miles becomes laughable.

But more so than the miles covered, it is the places visited where we come up short.  While the circumnavigators have been to exotic places we know we will never sail to, we realize that there is much that we have not yet seen or experienced even here in the Caribbean.  We socialize with other couples and the conversation turns to their time in Cuba, or the San Blas Islands, or Cartagena, or Venezuela and we are reminded of what for us seems a job undone.  Each one represents more miles that need to be traveled, some even, technically, unavailable to us as North Americans.  Our greatest fear is that we will not be able to get back out soon enough and will gradually succumb to the lifestyle that we left behind……. and therein lies our melancholy.

Fair winds,

Lew and Lyn