A Sail of Two Idiots (52 page)

Normally, the buyer would be aboard for the survey (and the seller wouldn't be), but he couldn't make it. We were more than happy to take the boat to St. Martin for the survey because we needed some boat parts and were hoping for one more chance to stock up on food and paper supplies.

After a great sail in unexpectedly high winds, we arrived in Marigot, St. Martin in probably our fastest time ever. Michael went to check in and returned very red faced. Someone had stolen one of our dinghy oars (it was latched to the boat, so it did not just fall off). That would be another $50 added to the $2,500 we had just spent on the new dinghy. Sigh. Oh well, at least we were in the right place to get another one. Plus there was wine, a baguette, and cheese to drown our frustrations.

The next morning we motored through the bridge without any problems and headed to the haulout dock, which was in the narrow canal leading to the drawbridge. I was only too familiar with the currents there, so I was nervous.

As we got closer to the main dock, we could clearly see many signs that read “
No
Dinghi,” but dinghies were there anyway
and
hogging the whole dock. There didn't seem to be any room for an actual yacht! Maybe these dinghy owners didn't read French.

Michael dinghied himself there to see if he could move any of the boats, but all of them were locked. If he shoved one sideways, I might be able to squeeze in. No problem. I cautiously maneuvered my way in, pleasantly surprised to have the current on my side, and settled between the two little boats. I had thought about punching holes in them with the “
No Dinghi
” sign pole, but I restrained myself.

At 8:30 a.m. we met with the surveyor and watched as the boatyard guys started placing straps all over the hulls. Why did they look as though they'd never done this before? The straps were not where we normally put them (it matters), but nobody seemed to listen to us. We even had photos showing the strap placement in previous surveys, but no one would look at them.

When they asked us the weight of the boat, we told them, but they insisted that it was heavier. I'm not sure how that was possible. We had run out of water that morning, and the gas tanks were less than half full. We had tiny engines, no generator, no a/c, empty storage.

No one seemed sure if they could hoist the boat. Normally we were hauled out by Travelift, a large motorized contraption that strapped us in from underneath and then lifted
Jacumba
by tightening the straps (from below). This boatyard was using a crane lift, using the same straps (and smearing the antifouling paint as always) but attaching them to a tall crane and lifting
Jacumba
from above. I cringed at how close the top of the crane was to our masthead and was also worried about the huge metal hook constantly swinging around. The process was repeated over and over again as the workers moved the straps, tried to lift, got concerned about something or other, and stopped. Time was slip-sliding away.

We had a lot to do, so while I stayed with the surveyor, Michael was dinghying around to the marine stores getting what we knew we needed: saildrive oil and a water pump as well as some stuff for a friend's boat.

After much hand-wringing and yelling in French, the yard workers tried one more time, got us lifted about two feet in the air, and then dropped us! At least we were still over the water. Yikes!

This happened around noon. We were told they'd have everything fixed by 2 p.m., and then they went to lunch. Sigh. The surveyor left to do other things, and Michael went grocery shopping by himself. I e-mailed the buyer (who was always online) telling him what was going on and recommended that he call another haulout place (he was paying).

I also happened to notice a storm system brewing just east of us, probably hours away. Uh-oh.

The surveyor came back at 2 p.m., inspected all the inside stuff, and discovered a few normal maintenance-type things, which we added to our list of things to fix.

At 2:30, with still no hope for the crane doing what cranes do, the surveyor managed to find another yard that could take us. This haulout facility used a hydraulic lift, which was the easiest and least stressful method yet. A lift with two prongs wheeled toward the boat, which was in shallow water on a boat ramp.
The prongs were inserted between the hulls, and what are called air bunks were inflated. No straps, no cranes. Just soft pillows for
Jacumba
to rest on as the tractor-like lift wheeled back onto land. Time for the survey to begin … finally.

Jacumba
's bottom was a little worse for wear, but it was clean! This surveyor's methods were no more impressive than those of any others as he went around the boat bottom with a mallet banging on things. I was not pleased to later see a chalk circle around one specific area on the hull. When I asked him about it, he had the nerve to use the dreaded “D” word. He was concerned about delamination. He was banging in an area behind which tools were stored, which would account for the “off” sound. The bad paint batch and uneven sanding job would explain the discoloration and undulation there as well. I was
not
happy. Worse, we didn't have time to get a second opinion. That's all he found, but it was enough. Now we knew how the guy with the Fountaine Pajot Athena felt when we surveyed his boat.

Once we put
Jacumba
back in the water, I had to head over to the original dock, since the surveyor's transportation was there, and Michael was meeting me there with a car full of groceries.

By now it was about 4:30 p.m. (remember we had started at 8 a.m.). Michael still wasn't back but called to say he was on his way. While I was waiting for him, the boatyard was nice enough to give me a hose to refill the water tanks.

Michael pulled up around 5 p.m. and we ran back and forth from the car to the boat, literally throwing groceries on board. Despite the rush, it was awesome being able to load everything directly from the car to the boat. A first! And last!

We had to get out of the lagoon during the 5:30 bridge opening, since we had an early-morning sail to make and the bridge wasn't scheduled to open again until 8 a.m. that morning (you'll note the word “scheduled”; there was never any guarantee). It was now 5:20 p.m. I pulled away from the dock and lined up to get ready. I was on my own since Michael had to drive the rental car back to the dock in Marigot, where he had left the dinghy. By the time I got through the bridge, Michael was in the dinghy waiting for me on the other side. I stopped long enough for him to motor up to me, board, and help me anchor. Whew! That was crazy!

Despite our exhaustion (and depression), we were proud of all we had accomplished in one day. We even had time to grab a few baguettes to take back with us! Hey—they would be our last, so no comments!

The next morning we awoke at 3 a.m. and hauled anchor by 4, warily watching lightning from the storm that I had been tracking online now lighting up Anguilla to the north. There was absolutely no wind to sail with. None. Our saving grace was that there were also no waves. So we had the engines at full throttle going a whole 6 knots.

Around 8 a.m., near Statia, we saw some ugly squalls approaching, both on radar and with our own concerned eyes. We were about 1½ hours out of St. Kitts when the winds came up in our face, as did the swells. Our speed was down to 4½ knots. We needed to get to White House Bay, where the car was, to off-load and get
to customs by 4:30 p.m. We were not going to make it at this rate. We unfurled the genny and starting tacking (
with
the engines on), but the winds were so fluky that we weren't gaining time.

About two hours later we got behind the island, only to find the large swells unimpeded, which hampered our progress. We'd never get there!

Eleven hours after raising anchor, we were hurriedly dropping it in White House Bay. It was 3 p.m. We furled sail, dropped anchor, and dropped dinghy all at the same time; took two hectic full-dinghy trips to shore and back, and were raising anchor, unfurling sail, and dragging dinghy toward Basseterre 10 minutes later.

Because we were now temporary “residents” thanks to Michael's work permit, we had to have the boat inspected upon our return. That meant our first trip into the marina, where we were instructed to tie up against the concrete pier.

At 4:10, Michael was literally running to the customs office to get there before it closed.

At 4:30, the customs agent came on board, opened up everything (more out of curiosity than duty, I think), and chatted with us about living on our boat for three years. We shook hands and off he went. Back to White House to anchor before the sun set.

The next morning, our property manager allowed Michael to off-load our goodies in our almost-ready apartment. Michael did this knowing that the worst had happened. Before we went to bed, we received an e-mail from Mr. Buyer telling us that the surveyor had
definitely
found some delamination and blistering. The surveyor also gave an incredibly low value to the boat. I e-mailed back that, without testing, delamination was just a
guess
and an unfair assumption. If he wanted to test and do the rest, we'd come down in price. Our final communication was that he'd get back to us in the morning.

The next morning, he e-mailed that he really liked our boat, but …

T
alk about taking the wind out of our sails. Both of us were deflated. And angry. The boat had been surveyed only a year before on Grenada with no evidence of delamination. The latest surveyor had no right to make such a definitive statement without further testing and to put our boat in the price range of an over-chartered catamaran.

I did a lot of research, made a lot of calls, and Michael and I discussed whether we wanted to pay for the delamination test ourselves. We'd have to go back to St. Martin, pay the $1,000 for another haulout, pay another $500 for a surveyor, and then pay another who-knew-what for the test itself. Even if the results came back negative, we'd still have to fix the hole made during the test. And what if the results came back positive? Would we fix the problem? Would anyone buy it fixed or unfixed? With what money could we do all this?

There was always the possibility that another surveyor (such as the one on Grenada) wouldn't even come to the same conclusion and the boat would just smoothly sell. Maybe … but we still had to wait for another bite.

While we were torturing ourselves, you might imagine our surprise when the buyer returned, lowballed us even further, and said he'd take the boat as is. This offer would be $13,000 less than what we owed on our boat loan. Ouch! What to do?

Tropical Storm Erika decided it for us. Here was yet another storm coming at us. Enough. Peace of mind is priceless.

Another contract was signed.

This time our jig was more subdued. Tippity-tap.

U
ntil the boat closed three weeks later, boat life would continue. It ain't over till it's over. So that meant a bunch of “lasts.”

Tropical Storm Erika produced some swells and gusty winds, but once again we escaped largely unscathed. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Maybe twice we'd seen a stingray jump out of the water in White House Bay. One day we were staring at the water just chatting about things when a 2- to 3-foot-wide stingray flung itself out of the water about 150 feet away. Then it propelled itself up again and this time there was a frantic gray mass behind it. We whiplashed a look at each other and yelled, “Hey—was that a … ?!” A third time, splash! And that time we clearly saw the fast-moving dorsal and tail fin of a shark. AAAACKK!

We loudly rooted for the stingray for about two minutes, with the poor thing getting as high out of the water as possible while the shark manically circled underneath it. Then it all went silent. Boo. We didn't see any outright proof of the stingray's demise, so we decided to pretend it got away.

Meanwhile, we were both unnerved to realize there was a shark, about the size of a dolphin, 150 feet from our boat. Hunting. Who was going to draw the short straw to clean the boat bottom next time? Did sharks eat squid? The following week, pieces of a human body were found inside a shark that had washed ashore on nearby Nevis. Eew and eek!

We had prepared for Tropical Storm Erika in our usual way, with two anchors and a lot of heavy metal hanging off the anchor chain. When we brought it all up, we noticed that our 40-pound kellet had disappeared through a hole in the mesh bag that was responsible for its safekeeping. Someone would have to dive into the water and look for the kellet. But what about the shark? The
hunting
shark. You go—no you go—no you! Rock, paper, scissors … Michael got in the water for all of five minutes and then came back with goose bumps on his arms. He just couldn't
do it. I, of course, saw this as a challenge, so I decided to make the attempt on my own while he was at work. If I chickened out, who would know?

I knew I'd have to swim back and forth in the area where the boat had swung during the storm, and I knew that the kellet would be too heavy for me to bring to the surface. The plan was to find the kellet, affix a rope with a floating fender, swim back to the boat, get the dinghy, motor back to the fender, and then haul the thing up (similar to what we did when the splice came apart). No problem.

I tied the fender/rope to my wrist and took off swimming. Every time the fender bounced off my leg, I panicked, thinking it was a you-know-what, and swallowed a lot of salt water. Shadows in my peripheral vision made me jittery too. Although I didn't see any predators, I did see three cannons from an 18th-century wreck. I also eventually found the missing metal.

I went to free-dive to the sunken kellet and then realized that it was in over 20 feet of water; and my line for the fender/marker wasn't long enough. Sigh. I let go of the fender (it headed for shore) and dove to grab the rope attached to the kellet, taking two very sinus-popping dives before I succeeded. Now what? I had to drag it back to the boat.