A Sail of Two Idiots (22 page)

Lest you think I exaggerate, even our cloth bimini (the awning that shaded the rear of the boat) was starting to buckle under the weight of rainwater. In order to alleviate the pressure, we cut two small circles in the thing and put grommets around the holes to keep them from fraying. That worked, but now we had two streams of water flowing into the cockpit. No problem. We found two clear plastic tubes that fit right into those grommet holes and made them long enough to stretch down so we could fill freshwater jerry jugs.

Sure, we already had the catchment system of gutters running along the salon roof down into plastic tubing (normally stowed) and into the opened water-tank fill spouts located on the bow, but it was a hassle, and we never had any idea how much water we were catching that way. By filling the jugs via the bimini holes, we knew how much water we were adding, plus we could use the full jerry cans to wash down the boat and do laundry. It was the perfect accident!

While we waited for the alternator's voltage regulator part, and now a care package from my mother, we met Hal on
Mane Bris
, a big steel sailboat with a deep draft. On a rare sunny day, he offered to show us a neat snorkeling place if he could follow us over (he didn't have a depth sounder, so we would radio him what the depths were as we went). Why not? So we headed to a beautiful area not too far west of Stocking Island and anchored.

Hal tied the dinghy to his wrist and swam off. I've decided that the only thing worse than being bitten/eaten by a shark is hearing someone call your name at the same time they're screaming “Shark!”

First it was Michael's turn (yes, first). We were all pretty spread out and I was starting to get cold, so I popped my head up to see where everyone was. That's when I heard Hal screaming at Michael, who didn't hear him. I was racing back to the dinghy when I saw Michael's head pop up. Hal was yelling at him that a huge shark had just circled him and gone up to his swim fin, and that Michael had flapped at just the right time, sending the shark off at lightning speed. Michael said he had just seen a tail in front of him but didn't know what it was or how close it had come to him. It had not been a docile nurse shark, and that was scary. We all sat in the dinghy for a while until we got brave enough to get back into the water.

That's right, we got back in. The next thing I knew, I heard Michael's muffled voice (we had stuck closer together), got my head out of the water, and heard him yelling “Shark!” at me. Stop that! I ducked back down to see where it was. At least it was a nurse shark. She actually spooned me, or rather came up to me so that I was spooning her (sucking in my gut as far as it would go). Considering that she was as big as I was, I wasn't too pleased, but she didn't seem aggressive. I did make my way calmly back to the dinghy after that, as did Michael, and we didn't go into the water again that day.

We did see a lot of sharks in the Bahamas. When we were walking on the beach, we could see them in the shallows. We took heart that no one had ever been attacked in the Bahamas, so why make a big deal of it?

Even more interestingly, someone told me that we were more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker (hey, I was from New York!), so that made us feel better. I think.

When not trying to feed us to sharks, Hal taught us to play Mexican Train Dominoes. There are several variations, but the game usually involves a “Double 12” set of dominoes (the highest domino has 24 dots on it), some little colored trains as markers, and three or more people. The idea is to end up without any points, so the more points you can leave someone else with, the better. Whoever gets to 500 points first is the official loser. An agreement up front of what the rules are that came with your game set is essential, and a container of rum punch never hurts either. That game would become the staple activity for the rest of our journey. We still play it. Cribbage, cards, Yahtzee, Scrabble, and backgammon are good too. The list of games is endless.

Tip: Hal also hooked up a connector that allowed us to listen to movies or music from our laptop on our boat speakers so we'd have surround sound. That was a cool addition and highly recommended. The cables are easily found in places such as Radio Shack.

By the end of May the final batch of boaters had left. Storms were getting worse, and the tropical waves (atmospheric disturbances) had begun. Tropical waves can create hurricanes. What to do?

We weren't completely alone. Our French Canadian VHF-net announcer was still there, although he had gotten tired of saying “It's raining” so he quit broadcasting.
Whisper
was still there, too, but not for long. The few boaters who remained got together for potlucks, bonfires, and snorkeling when weather allowed.

June—Week 1 of Hurricane Season. Hans and Kristen on
Whisper
decided to take off for the Dominican Republic. For our farewell cocktails, we took a final stab at the Chat & Chill. Talk about banging your head against a wall. I'll just say that the name of that place is a misnomer in terms of the owners.

Good-bye
Whisper
…

June—Week 2. Our trawler friends, Astrid and Paul on
Horizons
, told us that we should change our blog name from
Jacumba
-At-Sea to
Jacumba-
At-Anchor because we hadn't gone anywhere. They left for the Dominican Republic (via Turks and Caicos).

We had to make up our minds. We were leaning toward the Dominican Republic, which would be cheaper and safer, and our friends on
Whisper, Horizons,
and
Half Moon
were there. Pooooperon. Our saltwater toilets would be pumping that sludge, we would have to rinse our cat's Astroturf in the brown goop, and our nice new clean boat bottom would be ruined in that harbor. More hemming and hawing.

Ticktock …

June—Week 3. We made the decision to go to the Dominican Republic. Not so much because we were scared of hurricanes but because we were bored, lonely, and concerned that we'd become one of “them.” Many people weren't willing to make that final leap into the Caribbean. They would chicken out and head back north. This would explain George Town's other name, Chicken Harbor. That would not be us.

We traced the errant package we'd been waiting for to Georgetown, Kentucky, and had it rerouted to the correct George Town. The alternator voltage regulator was important because it would prevent our starter battery from melting when we turned on the engines. For months we had been connecting the battery to start the engines and then disconnecting it before egg (sulfur) smells permeated the boat. Upon receiving the package, we would be so outta there.

I started plotting our course to Turks and Caicos. Turks and Caicos! A new country! How intimidating and invigorating at the same time. I was happy to have something to do. Rain, rain, and more rain. Ugh. I needed to plan a way out from under that infernal cloud …

We were really ready. How 'bout you?

J
une 18, 2007: S-Day (Sail Day). We planned to get up at 7 a.m., check the place that received the Federal Express packages one more time, and then head about 48 miles to Conception Island to start our four-day stepping-stone to Turks and Caicos. Conception Island would take us north and east around Long Island—out of our way if we were heading south, but we had heard great things about the island and wanted to check it out.

Michael went to the store, which opened at 8 a.m., and they told him to check the main FedEx place in town at 9 a.m. The main FedEx place told him to wait until they could call the international number at 10 a.m. Uh-oh. The good news was that our package was on Great Exuma Island. The bad news was that it was 18 miles away at the Four Seasons. No one knew why, and no one could help us retrieve it. We had to leave that day or we'd lose our weather window. The forecast was for four days of semi-decent weather (this was the Bahamas, after all), and it would take four days to get where we were going.

Michael tried to hitch a ride to get the package, but as usual he couldn't get a lift from anyone. He couldn't find the guy in charge of the mopeds either. The women in the marine store finally took pity on him (I think he actually batted his eyelashes at them) and handed him the keys to their car. He raced up the island, got the package, and raced back; we pulled up the anchor by 11:15 a.m.

This was going to be close. We had to go at least 6 knots to get to the first anchorage by sundown. We did okay for about the first two hours, motorsailing, when—can you guess what happened?—one engine died. We were down to 4½ knots. The only saving grace was that the sun wouldn't set until 7:30 p.m. Even so, it was getting dark as we came to the shallow reefs surrounding Conception Island. I used the chartplotter and radar to get us around the bad stuff, and we were anchored (barely) before we lost all light.

Any guesses as to the engine issue
this
time? We had run out of diesel. Duh! We had extra diesel in jerry cans, we knew we'd need to refuel, but the fuel gauge was off by a quarter of a tank. We were just thankful that this was a problem we could handle. Fill 'er up!

The next morning we had only a few hours to explore the island because we needed to stay in front of the storm bearing down on us from the northeast. What
a shame. Conception Island was uninhabited, but there was so much to do there. Snorkeling among huge elkhorn coral, brain coral, and all kinds of marine flora. Zipping in our dinghy around tributaries that had the fastest turtles we had ever seen darting among the stingrays. Spotting lots of birds in the mangroves. It was spectacular, and we were sorry to leave before we had time to see it all.

From here we could have gone southeast, hopping among the more sparsely populated islands, maybe from Crooked to Acklins to Mayaguana, but we were concerned about the weather and wanted to stay as far in front of the predicted squalls as possible. Plus, our charts showed a lot of “dangerous underwater rocks” surrounding Crooked and Acklins islands and I didn't think those places were worth the stress. We decided to add a more easterly component to the trip and just go straight to Mayaguana Island. That meant our first voluntary overnighter (you know, sailing in the dark on purpose!). We had 194 miles to get to our last Bahamas pit stop, which would take about 30 hours. The wind and waves were all over the place, so we'd pull out the genny and then furl it back in. In. Out. Out. In. I eventually got the hokey pokey song stuck in my mind with the following words: “You put the gen-o-a out, you pull the gen-o-a in, you put the … Until you're down to 4 knots.” Too much sun, I think.

Anyway, the sun went down and we continued to bump up and down all night as we motored through waves higher than we would have liked and coming toward us, slowing us down (not unsafe, just uncomfortable). Winds were right on our nose, resulting in the same conditions we had encountered with Captain Tim on our first day's sail to the Bahamas—an endlessly luffing genny and a rather useless tightened main in seas strewn with shallow reefs. We weren't confident enough to tack in these conditions, so we motorsailed.

People always talk about romantic night sailing. You're cutting through the waves, the stars are sparkling in insane numbers overhead, nothing but the sound of the wind. Yeah, that
would
be romantic, but what we had were our engines running, our loud wind generators spinning, clouds, and waves banging hard on the underside of the boat. We were both so excited and nervous, and unable to sleep, that we didn't employ a typical night watch. We both kept an eye on our radar and alternated stretching our legs every 15 minutes, looking around in the darkness to avoid any surprises. (See upcoming LESSON 65, The 15-minute rule.)

Needless to say, we were glad to be on the last leg of our four-day trip. Our final stop in Mayaguana was only to anchor for the night, so we aimed for Horse Pond Bay, as far southeast of the island as we could get, before sailing our final 53 miles to Turks and Caicos. We anchored easily and were the only ones in the bay, so we tried to enjoy the isolation. It would be our last chance before we arrived in the Caribbean, where we heard it would be hard to find empty anchorages. Tomorrow we'd wake up, set sail, and be someplace
not
the Bahamas by the end of the day. Yay!

So that's it for the Bahamas, but I added the following section for those of you interested in the more technical aspects of our trip.

As you may have noticed, we had a lot of boat repairs to make and maintenance to perform. I kept them in the main part of the Bahamas section just so you could learn as we did and get an idea of how everything, from work to play, balanced out.

However, it occurred to me that only some readers will be interested in what broke. Others might not be. So at the end of most of the remaining chapters is a “What Broke?” section, describing what we had to fix as we sailed along for those of you interested in such things. The rest of you can just skip it and continue the adventure in sweet oblivion.