This post is part 7 of 8. If you missed earlier ones, you might want to scroll down and read them.
Crossing the Gulf Stream is not a trivial undertaking. Most people with sailboats still make this crossing under power. The Gulf Stream is a rough ride, and it is quite powerful. It seems to be the rule that whatever the weather is on either side of the stream, it is more powerful in the stream. Winds are stronger. Waves are higher. Turbulence is greater. It is, after all, a river within an ocean.
Without an engine, we knew that we had to be very careful. The Gulf Stream might carry us where we did not want to go unless we planned wisely. Our destination was the Lake Worth Inlet, because we felt that we knew enough about that area to find the help we needed for our engine. We knew we could not transit that inlet under sail, but as BoatUS members, we knew we could call TowBoat US for help.
As morning dawned on Thursday, April 29, we sipped our coffee with little conversation. We had a lot to talk about, but first we needed to get our heads clear. The first cup of coffee each morning had acquired a value out of all proportion to its normal image. Somehow, as soon as we had coffee in hand, it was as if the slate had been wiped clean, and the new day before us was a pristine opportunity for success. We sipped our coffee and allowed our minds to roam.
With very little wind at the beginning of the day, Larry decided that maybe he could finally look for the obstruction that had blocked the generator’s cooling water. We were far from Great Isaac and the only ships we had seen were on the other side of the channel. I took the helm and Larry went below. Happily, he quickly found the clog. Then he replaced the water pump. Finally, he coaxed an hour of charge out of the generator.
It was like a miracle. The batteries were charged to a level that would allow us to run our e-charting for the last two or three hours as we approached Florida. We could turn on the VHF radio whenever we wished. We felt that we had hit the jackpot.
Larry asked, “What do you think? Should we go now or wait a while?” The wind was only 7-8 knots. It was predicted to be 10 knots during the day, but we could not guess when it would increase. Yet I really did not want to sit in that channel waiting and waiting. It seemed as if we ought to use the available wind to move closer to the Gulf Stream. Maybe it would increase soon, or maybe we would need to wait somewhere before we actually hit the Stream. We concluded that waiting was not our wish, and off we went.
Happily, the wind began to rise very soon. It is hard to say exactly when we arrived at the Gulf Stream, but by the time we became aware that the roughness and the current indicated we were there, the wind was running about 15-20 knots.
I don’t think I will ever think that a Gulf Stream crossing is delightful. That water is rough. It gave us a thorough shaking, even though it was a different kind of roughness than storm waves. I guess it is what I think riding rapids might be.
There was another oddity. By sunset the wind was 20-25 knots from the southeast. We reduced sail, because that much wind combined with the rough water was taking a toll on us. It was hard work to maintain our course. Still, that much wind was definitely going to take us toward our destination. However, we frequently observed that the wind suddenly dropped to nothing. Zero. Or 5 knots. It was almost scary. Then, just as suddenly, it would zoom up to 15 or 20 knots again. We hung on and kept moving west.
My first sign that we were drawing near to Florida came at sunset. We had watched sunsets daily in the Bahamas as an evening ritual. We ate dinner in the cockpit and watched the sun go down. We had even seen the green flash a time or two. Often someone nearby would sound the conch horn at sunset. After the sun fell below the horizon it would grow dark in the west and the stars would come out.
Not this time. The sun went down, but the glow remained. It took me a while to realize that the glow was not the remnants of the sunset. The glow was Florida. How wonderful! We were actually getting there.
The last couple of hours were a bit of a shock. Larry had planned our course very well, but we both thought that the Gulf Stream wall was 11 or 12 miles from the coast. We thought we had a buffer zone between the Stream and the coastline where we could make a northward adjustment to get to Lake Worth. We learned that evening that the Gulf Stream is less than 3 miles from the Lake Worth Inlet. We had thought we were across and were ready to make our way to the inlet only the Stream was still carrying us north. When we called TowBoat US we were already past Lake Worth Inlet. We were steering southwest, but under reduced sail, we had not enough power to fight the current. Our track was northwest. It was the Great Isaac syndrome all over again.
Nevertheless, the towboat soon found us and pulled alongside. We tried to turn into the wind to drop our sail, but we could not get there. Eventually, we just pulled the sail out of the track and wrapped it up on the boom. The towboat captain said we drifted three miles north while we were getting our sails down.
I am always in awe of those guys. They are so calm and professional in all that they do. After the towing harness was attached to our bow, the towboat moved ahead and paid out some line in an attempt to give us a smoother ride. Compared to our crossing, I guess it was smoother, but we were still in the Stream and going against the current. It was pretty rough. We didn’t care. It was all in the hands of the towboat captain and we could relax. Larry steered to keep our boat following the towboat, but that was simple compared the adventure behind us.
The captain towed us to a dock at the Riviera Beach Marine Center. We tied up to that dock at 0545 on April 30, 2010. Our journey was over, just 2 hours and 15 minutes short of 6 full days after we started. We were home again, safe and sound.
We gave thanks to God for our safe passage, and then we went to bed. We thought we would sleep late, but I guess the habit of 2-hour shifts had become ingrained. We woke up about 8:30 starving for coffee. Our journey home had ended safely. We sipped our first cup and coffee and remembered.
This post is part 6 of 8. If you have missed previous posts, you might want to scroll down and read them first.
On this trip, with regard to our winds, it seemed always to be feast or famine. Wednesday, April 28, was famine. The winds were almost nothing. After the two back-to-back cold fronts with their tempestuous wind and wave, it was nice to have some peace, but only for a little while. We were glad the fronts were gone, but we wanted to get to Florida. We could not go there with winds less than 5 knots.
In fact, we could hardly go anywhere. We had decided to simply putter around in the channel, trying to avoid big ships and trying not to go too far east, so we would be ready to cross if the wind ever became strong enough. We were okay with holding our own. We had no idea how difficult that would become.
One of the big lessons of cruising the Bahamas is the tidal currents. We learned to write down the Nassau tides every day, and we learned to pay attention to the relationship of the local tides to the Nassau tides. We learned to care if the difference between high and low tide was small or large. All this stuff matters. In the Chesapeake, the only reason to care much about the tides was if you had a deep draft boat and you wanted to eat lunch at Rock Hall. Otherwise, we hardly cared if they were up or down. In the Bahamas, you care a lot.
For example, when we went to snorkel at the Thunderball Grotto, we planned to arrive at slack tide. However, we were a little slow getting ready that morning, and flood had already begun by the time we arrived. The flood current was strong enough that I never did get inside the grotto. We thought we might go back later, but things happened, or didn’t happen.
On another occasion, during a high high ebbing to a low low, we tried to go against the ebb in the cut between Fowl Cay and Big Majors. The current completely turned our dinghy around and sent us back where we came from.
I learned that the power of the current results from the vast amounts of water that must move between the banks and the deep water through small cuts. However, I failed to understand that even when there is not a cut, the currents are still powerful. They are spread out more, but still strong.
On this day of light airs, as we tacked back and forth across the channel, we were moving in a location approximately between Great Isaac at the edge of the banks and Freeport at the end of the Grand Bahama island. We had grown inattentive, because almost nothing was happening, until we found ourselves in a position about 5 miles from Great Isaac and prepared to tack. That is when we discovered that we might be steering north, but we were going south, and south led onto the banks.
This was a big problem. Ordinarily a sailboat in this fix would hoist the iron jib, but our iron jib was unresponsive. What to do?
We were still sailing with reefed main and the staysail, because we really didn’t want to go anywhere in a hurry, but as we watched ourselves move inexorably toward Great Isaac, we surely wanted to go somewhere else at any speed. It was uncanny. Then we remembered the tides. We were within five miles of the banks, and it was flood current. The wind was so light that it was not filling the sails. We deployed the big genoa, but it simply flapped. We steered away from the banks, but the boat continued to drift. We had no power. The water was still too deep for us to drop an anchor, but if we reached a place where the anchor would bite, how would we ever get away?
If we ever had needed wisdom it was then. We prayed together for the wisdom to see some solution. Then we returned to our analysis. We peered intently at the charts as we continued to chart our position using the handheld GPS. We were headed for Great Isaac, and no two ways about it. The sails were dead. In desperation, we tried to tack anyway, but the headsails would not begin to cross.
Then a tiny gust of wind hit the genoa, and it flapped against the forestay. Larry said, “I wonder if I can walk that thing across. And if I do, I wonder if it will make any difference.” He went forward and led the genoa past the inner stay. Another little gust caught it and it filled momentarily. We let go the port sheet for the staysail and it filled on the starboard side. Larry released the traveler for the main and moved it to starboard. The wind speed indicator reported 7 knots. Suddenly we could hear the water against the hull. On this tack somehow we were moving.
I screamed, “Look at the GPS? Where are we?” Larry looked and behold, we were moving north. We charted every 5 minutes, and we were moving ever so slowly north. At last, we were on a tack with enough energy to take us away from Great Isaac. Whew!
The rest of the day and through the night we had one objective: stay clear of Great Isaac. The moon was still big, although waning. We saw a few big ships, but none in our path. The night passed quietly, and the morning dawned. The wind was from the east at barely more than 5 knots. That was certainly not enough wind to take us across the Gulf Stream, but we did not want to waste an opportunity to go forward. We tip-toed northwest and then gibed southwest. We simply had to keep moving.
At dawn we were approaching New Providence. We could see a small light halo above the island, but it was not at all what I had expected of the largest town in the Bahamas. We gave both New Providence and Andros a respectful berth as we cruised north.
The seas were quite confused, and it was obvious why it had been so difficult to steer a straight course overnight. Waves came at us seemingly from all directions. It was time to choose between the Northwest Channel and the Northwest Providence Channel. The choice seemed obvious. If we had seriously confused seas already, and we had not even begun to move into the funnel of the Northwest Channel, what could we expect if we chose that option? We decided to avoid what looked like big trouble and go the other way. We never regretted that choice.
We came around the southern edge of the Berries on a tack that took us far to the east. We tacked several times that day as we moved north. We looked over at Hoffman/White/Devil area and remembered our first misadventure with the engine. As the day wore on the wind wore off. The last thing we had expected was to be becalmed, but when the wind speed indicator displays 5 or 7 or 3.4, it feels like a calm. After the serious but lovely winds overnight, we were disappointed.
We discussed anchoring in Great Harbour south of Great Stirrup Cay to wait out the weather that was expected the next day. Our information seemed confusing, and our confusion had led us to decide to take a chance on it, but as we drew near to Great Harbour, we evaluated the possibility of anchoring there. It has a wide, easy entrance, so entering and departing under sail seemed doable. The problem lay in the fact that as the predicted winds clocked around, the protection would not be consistent through all points. We talked about what we would do as the winds clocked around after the passing of the first front. Where would we go?
A bigger problem surfaced due to the lack of wind. We could not get there before dark. We could not go in after dark, and we felt that we did not want to be outside tacking back and forth all night. We decided to proceed toward Freeport.
Part of our problem in dealing with this situation was that the forecast we had recorded did not clearly explain what Chris Parker meant by “nasty” weather. We knew that we could not cross the Gulf Stream until the winds had passed through the northerly quarter and back to east or southeast. Chris had said that there would be squalls but the wind in the squalls would be light. Still, he had said it would be “nasty.” We just did not know what that meant. We would soon find out.
We continued cruising northeast toward Freeport all night. Our entire trip seemed to be an effort to sail on a course 330 or 240, and never at any time was it easy to maintain either course. We were always adjusting. We reefed down at sunset again, having learned our lesson. We do not like reducing sail at 2AM in winds gusting to 30 knots.
Part 3– Saturday, April 24, 2010
If you missed parts 1 and 2, you may want to scroll down and read them first.
At 0800 I wrote down our anchored location in the ship’s log. We went up to the aft deck and looked over the situation. We had plenty of room to turn the boat after the anchor came up. We could sail slowly between two boats behind us, then past another one. At that point we had a clear shot out to the banks and to our first waypoint at Sandy Cay.
We have always felt that God gave us each other and God gave us the dream to sail together. We give thanks every day for the beauty and the adventures God has given us in this life. As we were about to embark upon the most challenging passage in our sailing life, we knew that we needed to rely on God more than ever. No matter how skilled we might be, and no matter how well we planned, we were about to go forth on God’s huge ocean in a boat that the ocean could disassemble if it chose. We are convinced that God always wants us to use the gifts he has given us to their fullest extent, but we are likewise convinced that God wants to be with us through it all.
We bowed our heads in prayer. We read Psalm 62 as a prayer. We prayed for God’s presence and his guidance and protection for our journey. We were ready to leave, but it was not time to stop praying. On this trip we lived the truth of “pray without ceasing.” It was no time to be careless or cocky. It was time to go.
We raised the mainsail. Larry went to the bow as I took the helm. When he signaled that the anchor was up, I turned hard to port. Larry came back to the cockpit and deployed the staysail, which gave us the extra speed we needed to make the turn. Gently, slowly, gracefully, we sailed between the boats and out toward the banks. Soon we were clear and the passage was begun.
It was a gorgeous morning. The sky was clear with only wispy clouds. We looked back toward the Pig Beach for the last time. Then we looked forward. We soon came near enough to our waypoint to make the northward turn. The wind was ESE. We gibed gently and kept moving toward our goal. It felt very good.
When we reached the first marker on the Decca Channel, we continued north a bit. The channel runs due west, but we really could not stay on that straight line with our following ESE wind. We gibed about 4 times before we were far enough along the channel to head northwest toward the Tongue of the Ocean.
As we reached the central marker of the channel, we were on a northerly tack. We had hoped to miss the coral heads in that general vicinity, but we found ourselves in a small patch despite everything. Larry went forward and spotted while I steered. It seemed like a long time, but it was probably less than an hour before we were clear. It was one of the great moments of the trip. We had navigated through a large patch of coral under sail without any shouting and no scrapes, either. We were very thankful.
By the time we had cleared the channel it was mid-afternoon. Larry decided to run the generator and get the batteries back up to a good level. He went below. I took the helm. Pretty soon he came back up. “I guess I didn’t get the water intake as far below the water line as I thought,” he said. “The generator isn’t getting any cooling water on this tack. We have to wait until we are on the starboard side.” That news was not desirable, but neither was it devastating.
After our next gibe, Larry went below again to run the generator. Again, he quickly returned to the cockpit. “I think we have a bigger problem,” he said. “I’m going to need to look at things.” He went below and dug into the problem. Our generator is installed beneath our bed in the aft cabin. To work there, he had to fold up the bed, remove the casing of the generator and try to do this work as we were sailing. Fortunately, the wind was running 14-17 knots, and we had little turbulence. Soon he came back up with a solemn look on his face.
It turned out that the water pump had lost one of its impeller blades. That blade was obviously stuck in a hose somewhere impeding the flow of cooling water to the generator. Larry could not tell where that blade might be without pulling out all the hoses and checking each one. The sun would set within the hour. That work could not be done at that time. Who knew when he would get the opportunity?
Without knowing when we would get to recharge the batteries again, we had to take severe measures. We turned off everything non-essential, and that included the refrigerator. Our refrigerator will keep things cold for three or four days, as long as your definition of “cold” is generous. We had canned food to fall back on. We simply could not afford to run the refrigerator in this crisis. We left very few breakers on.
These five items were the only drain on our batteries until the very end of our trip. They drew the batteries down at the rate of about .1 volt per day. It is a good thing we took this action, because Larry was not able to find the blockage in the generator’s water system until the day we departed for the Gulf Stream crossing. After he found it, we ran the generator and were able to charge the batteries sufficiently to allow us to use our e-charts as we drew near to Lake Worth.
Whenever we were below decks at night, we used flashlights. The refrigerator did a pretty good job until the last day. We used the galley foot pump for water. We had a supply of ground coffee and a press pot for our morning java. We cook with propane, so we had hot meals. With all our constraints we still had everything that was truly essential.
So, this is how we sailed into the first night of our journey.
At sunset we discussed whether to reduce sail. We really wanted to avoid the necessity of a sail change in the dark. I gathered together my weather predictions. Both Chris Parker and the Tongue of the Ocean buoy predicted 15-17 knots. We had been sailing with winds at this speed all day, and we concluded that if they were to continue we did not need to change anything.
We were wrong. Our logic was right, but our information was wrong. As the evening progressed, so did the wind speed. First it was 20 knots. Then it crept up to 25 sustained. Then I saw 30 knots skim by on the wind speed indicator. That was it for me. We began to adjust things. We reduced the genoa by about half, but that was not enough. Eventually we furled it completely, leaving only the staysail deployed. We sailed for a few minutes in that configuration, but it was still extremely difficult to hold a course. The wind and wave frequently conspired to throw the boat as much as 40 degrees off course in a matter of seconds. Over and over. (When dawn came we could see how confused the seas were. Clearly, a swell from the north or northeast was countering waves generated by an east to southeast wind. It was a mess.) We reduced the main to the first batten.
With that adjustment, we gained control without losing too much speed. Both of us had grown quite weary fighting with all that sail. At that point, Larry was able to go back to sleep. Overnight the max wind speed recorded was 31.9 knots. Although we had a lot of weather yet to come, we never recorded any wind speed higher than that.
One of the things I learned to like about sailing at night instead of motoring at night is the quality of my rest. When the engine is running and I go below, the noise only gets louder. I dare not wear ear plugs to sleep. I need to be able to hear Larry call if he needs me, but with the engine running, there is so much noise and vibration that it is extremely difficult to get real rest. Under sail, after I adjusted to the pilot berth instead of my bed, I actually slept quite well. We set a kitchen timer to wake us at the end of our sleep time, and each of us had the experience of actually sleeping right through it a time or two, despite its loud beeping right beside our heads. If we make more extended passages, I certainly want to sail rather than motor if the winds are right.
I will never forget that run up the Tongue of the Ocean. It was a moonlight night, only a day or two past full. There were occasional clouds, but the sky remained generally clear. We simply flew. The sounds of wind and water were beautiful as we scooted north. This is why we have a sailboat instead of a trawler. It was wonderful. I didn’t need a diesel engine or a generator in order to enjoy that experience.
So ended the first day.
If you missed Part 1 of our return home, you might want to scroll down and read it first. This post is part 2 of 8 that describe our long sail home
Part 2 – Plan and Prepare
As we started planning to sail back to Florida, our first order of business was to identify a weather window for the trip. We needed wind, but not a gale, and we needed southerly winds for the Gulf Stream crossing. We needed a window of about 4 days. That duration was unlikely, given our experience with the passage of cold fronts during our trip, so we allowed mentally for the possibility that we would need to wait out a front somewhere, even though we continually hoped to avoid that possibility. After all, with no engine, our options for entering and leaving anchorages were severely constrained. Many, many entrances to anchorages in the Bahamas are much too tricky to maneuver under sail alone.
We needed the weather window pretty soon. It was already late April. Our insurance wants us north of Florida by June 1 each year, the beginning of hurricane season. Even after we got back to Florida, we knew that it would take some time for a mechanic to determine the problem with the engine and then do the repairs. After the repairs were done, we still needed time to get north of Florida before June 1. We really could not dawdle.
We had to choose a route that gave us the least challenges to our limited maneuverability yet took us as directly as possible to our goal. We worked out a route with a decision point in the middle. We could depart Big Majors Spot, traverse the Decca Channel, and cruise up the Tongue of the Ocean. When we reached New Providence, we had to choose either the Northwest Channel or Northwest Providence Channel.
If we chose the Northwest Channel, we had to arrive at slack or flood, because we dared not risk it if the wind were east or southeast into an ebb tide. We had to navigate a fairly narrow path to the Northwest Shoal, then to Mackie Shoal and Great Isaac Light. As we viewed our weather windows, we inevitably found ourselves crossing that bank in the dark. Or anchoring out there through the night. The tidal currents on and off the banks can be very powerful, and we worried about our options passing the Hen and Chickens and Great Isaac at any time.
Our other choice was to take the Northwest Providence Channel (Route B) around the Berry Islands and completely avoid the banks and Great Isaac. It added distance but greatly reduced our risks on the banks. As will become clear later, this choice added its own risks. You can never avoid risk altogether when you embark on a sailing adventure. The trick is to be able to manage the risks you accept.
Both routes converged between Great Isaac and Freeport. From there, we had to cross the Gulf Stream without power, navigating appropriately to arrive at our destination, the Lake Worth Inlet.
We identified 4 tricky challenges along our path.
As for the weather window, our first choice failed us when the predictions were revised unfavorably for us. The next window looked like four good days if we started on Thursday, so we got ready to go, but there was never enough wind. We need 10-12 knots to move this boat. On Thursday, April 22, the wind never exceeded 7 knots. One day lost.
On Friday, April 23, the winds were predicted to be at or near 10 knots all day. In fact, they were much lower until late in the afternoon. Since our plan was to sail round the clock, it would not have been unthinkable to depart in the afternoon, but it was completely unthinkable to navigate the Decca Channel in the dark. A second day was lost.
As we waited, we continued to discuss our plans. They were complicated by the fact that not only was the diesel engine completely unavailable; the generator that we used to charge our batteries was behaving strangely. We had been running it 2-3 hours each morning and another hour or so in the evening to keep our batteries well charged. However, at the same time our diesel engine problems emerged, the generator began to behave strangely as well. Not being an electrical engineer, I can only report that Larry said it was putting out too much voltage to the inverter/charger. If it had an AC load, such as the electric coffeepot or the water heater, it could be induced to run normally for almost an hour, but eventually, even those loads were not enough to keep the voltage down and the generator had to be shut off. We could charge the batteries to some extent, but there would never be sufficient charge to run e-charts or the auto-pilot.
As we planned our watches, we expected that twice a day, Larry would be able to run the generator for about an hour, but during that time, he needed to give it his undivided attention. We would be able to have refrigeration, lights, hot water, and most of the comforts of home as long as we were careful.
Sailing without the auto-pilot was a daunting prospect, but we gritted our teeth. What choice did we have? If we stayed where we were, we would never solve our problems. We decided that we would take turns at the helm, 2 hours on, 2 hours off. Our actual schedule was a bit more flexible, but not by much. Without the auto-pilot, somebody had to be steering at all times.
Sailing without electronic charts was less daunting, but still undesirable. We sailed without them for several years, but never on such a passage as this one. Of course, we had already learned that e-charts cannot be the only resource for piloting in a place like the Bahamas. During our whole trip, we were constantly checking the e-charts, the paper charts and the guide books for all the information we could get. We had two sources for GPS information: a handheld GPS with a display about the size of a cell phone screen, and a GPS mounted on the nav station. We had the Explorer Charts for the Bahamas, which we had come to rely on heavily, perhaps even more heavily than our e-charts. (When we went to Hatchet Bay, the e-chart showed us sailing through solid rock, so we took the e-chart locations with a grain of salt in the Bahamas.) Our handheld GPS had a chart display of sorts, but you can imagine that what you could see on that little screen would be more entertaining than informative. It did, however, provide information such as speed over ground and distance traveled, etcetera, which proved very valuable to us.
The part that worried me most as we planned was sailing at night. We had cruised round the clock on several occasions, but always with the engine, the auto-pilot, and the e-charts. The person on watch at 2AM mostly needed to be sure not to collide with another ship or go off course into some other hazard. We had never sailed at night precisely because we had not felt ready to manage sails at night. However, in this case, we really had no choice. Even if there were some place to stop each night, stopping meant that it would take us a very long time to get back. Even if there were some place to go, there was no guarantee we could get in and out under sail. We had to sail round the clock. Again, we gritted our teeth and accepted that challenge.
We had a plan. On the morning of Saturday, April 24, we listened to the weather, observed that the wind was running about 12-14 knots from the east, and everything looked right. The generator hit some kind of a glitch after half an hour, but we assumed we could make that time up later.
It was time for the Go/No Go decision.
We chose GO.
This post is Part 1 of 8 that tell the story of our return from the Bahamas. It was quite an odyssey. I will be posting the segments daily for a while, so come back for the next installment.
There is a saying that the cruising life is an opportunity to work on your boat in exotic places. We have learned the truth of this statement, but sometimes, an exotic location is not the right place to initiate repairs. We found ourselves in exactly that situation, and this blog is the story of how we dealt with it.
If a friend who owned a sailboat with all the bells and whistles said to you, “I think I will turn off everything and sail 400 miles without ever using my engine or anything else that needs electricity,” what would you think? No engine. No electronics. No auto-pilot. No refrigeration. Nothing that used electricity except bilge pump, sump pump and navigation lights. Radio off unless needed for an outbound call. What would you think? You might think this person is crazy.
We recently completed just such a trip, and it was not about mental illness. It was about necessity. Our engine would not work. Our generator would not work. We were in a foreign country and our efforts to get repair parts shipped in had hit a brick wall. Furthermore, we had no way to assure ourselves that the parts we thought we needed would actually fix our problems. For all we knew, the new parts would only allow us to see a deeper problem. It was desperation time. Larry said to me, “Do you think we could sail this boat back to Florida without an engine?” and I said, “Well, it is a sailboat after all.”
We had owned our home sweet sailboat since July of 2000, almost ten years. We had had some lovely adventures, but we had never before undertaken to sail longer than 8 hours at a stretch, and we had never before sailed after dark. We had always been able to fall back on the engine and the auto-pilot and e-charts. The trek that lay before us would have none of those things. Here is how it came to pass.
We checked in to the Bahamas on January 18 with high anticipation of the adventure of discovery. Maybe it is true that thousands of people have made the crossing and spent the winter in the islands, and maybe it had become a ho-hum trip for some, but not for us. We might have been the first people ever to conceive of such an idea. For us every new sight was like a new discovery that nobody had ever done before. We visited the Berries, Eleuthera and the northern Exumas, going as far south as Staniel Cay. We anchored at Big Majors Spot across from Staniel Cay on the 16th day of March, and we remained there for five weeks.
Along our journey to Staniel Cay, the engine occasionally failed to start on the first try, but that behavior appeared to be mostly related to the fact that it is a relatively long run from the fuel tank to the engine. Time after time, Larry was able to trick the engine demons and get us going. After we reached Staniel Cay, we remained there happily for two or three weeks. Then we thought we would like to visit nearby Black Point Settlement. We planned to do laundry and shop for groceries and see some new sights. We called the fuel dock at the yacht club to confirm that we could get to the dock and that there was actually fuel available. We buttoned down for travel, and then Larry went up to the cockpit to start the engine. Nothing. Nothing but a feeble splat.
Been there. Done that. He began to muddle about in the engine room, but unlike previous efforts, there was no response. We settled down to give him time to trouble-shoot the problem.
He tried all the usual tricks. I waited in the cockpit for the command to push the button. Every so often Larry called out, “Push the button!” Each time the engine wheezed or groaned, but it never did start. Things looked very gloomy.
The next day he worked through all the diagnostics one more time. He concluded that the starter he had hoped would finish this year’s voyage had bowed out, exit, stage left. It was finished, over, kaput.
Internet searches at Staniel Cay require an account with Exuma Wifi at the cost of $10 for 24 hours or 200 mb, whichever comes first. Accounts for longer terms are cheaper per hour or mb, but still very costly by our standards. We bought an account for a week, knowing that there would be some back and forth conversation when he ordered parts and arranged for shipping to Staniel Cay. Rather than give you that story blow by blow, I will simply say that Larry came to despair of getting the part shipped to our location. There were too many hurdles to success in that endeavor.
The biggest hurdle was his fear that even if he somehow managed to get the parts and install them, they might not solve the problem. Even with a new starter, it was possible that the engine would not start. The problem might lie deeper than that.
Thinking along that line, we quickly rejected any notion of trying to locate a diesel engine mechanic in the Bahamas. We had already received numerous warnings not to look for such services in the Bahamas. It would be a miracle if we connected with someone who was actually qualified to help.
The day came that Larry said to me, “Do you think we could just sail this boat back to Florida without an engine?” and I said, “Well, it is a sailboat, isn’t it?”
We began serious planning to take the boat back to Florida where we could work with a credentialed diesel engine mechanic in a location where parts could be shipped readily.
Come back tomorrow for Part 2.
Aboard No Boundaries
January 4, 2010
Before we ever set out to visit the Bahamas, friends with experience gave us a somber warning. “Be sure you get across before Christmas. The Christmas winds can keep you waiting for days and days.” I wondered what that meant, because I could not find that term anywhere – Christmas winds. I know now what that is all about.
One of our guide books tells the story in more scientific, therefore more cryptic, language. It talks about the fronts that line up to the west of Florida (I deduced that they must form first in the Great Plains) and roll across that state into the Atlantic and across the Bahamas. These fronts come in from the west, but they usually have a northerly component, a dead stop for any plan to cross the Gulf Stream. The description accorded nicely with the comments of other friends about the parade of fronts across the Bahamas in the winter. I filed all this information in my mental folder for the Bahamas and there it sat, waiting for a time when it would be needed.
Well, here we are, still in Florida on January 4. And now we are learning firsthand what the “Christmas winds” are all about.
We never intended to be here in January. When we cruised into St. Marys, GA, on November 30, we thought we needed a few days to do some work on the generator. We might even need to deliver it to the Panda shop in Ft. Lauderdale. We thought a week or ten days ought to do it. However, the math on the rates for Langs Marina showed that if we paid for a month, then, after ten days, the rest of the month was essentially free. We said to ourselves, “What if it takes eleven days, or even twelve?” We never thought for a minute that it would take a whole month.
In fact, when Larry called the Panda folks to tell them that he had done all the tests they recommended at first report of our problem, he expected them to tell him right then that he should put the generator in the shop. Instead, they gave him more tests to run. He did what they advised, and he talked back and forth. It seemed as if all this conversation went on forever. Finally, on Friday, December 18, we delivered the generator to the shop. All the dithering over what to do about this generator had taken almost three weeks, and we seemed to be no nearer a solution than when we started.
We were concerned about all the time it took, but we were more concerned about the likely cost. Even though the generator was still in warranty, we worried that somehow, the work we needed might be ruled out of warranty. You just never know. So here we were, one week before Christmas, and no generator.
The day we delivered it, Larry wanted to arrange to pick it up as soon as possible. He delivered it to Panda at 8AM on Friday morning, and he expected to pick it upon the following Monday afternoon. The service manager quickly disabused him of that expectation. He told Larry to call on Monday afternoon, and then he could give him a better idea when to pick it up.
Larry persisted in his faith that we could pick up the generator at least by Tuesday morning, but we deferred making hotel reservations for the trip until after that call. It was a very good idea. We learned on Monday afternoon that the service team still had no idea when they could give the generator back to us. They seemed not quite sure what it would take to get it working, and they were quite professional in their determination not to guess or string us along with promises or hints of promises that they could not keep. Needless to say, Larry and I speculated endlessly, constantly concerned that we would get a huge bill along with the repaired generator.
Despite all our worries, Panda made the generator good and completed the work under warranty. We are deeply thankful that they saw it that way. We would have loved to get the generator back a lot sooner, but when we pulled into the marina at 5PM on Christmas Eve with the generator in the back of our rented jeep, we felt good about its condition. Unfortunately, the long delay occasioned by the repair did not get us across the Gulf Stream before Christmas.
We enjoyed Christmas Eve with friends. Mike and Suzanne Pillola hosted the evening at their home in St. Marys. We sang and feasted and played games with Roger and Bonnie Ford and our hosts before attending Christmas Eve worship at Christ Episcopal Church. We relaxed on Christmas Day, enjoying a nice dinner and lovely Christmas music all day. (I think we have every Christmas album Mannheim has ever released, plus lots of other great stuff.)
Then it was time to get the generator back into the boat and working again. Larry put it through its paces to confirm that the repairs had, indeed, put it back in working order. All this work was not complete until New Years Eve. We were not ready to leave the marina until New Years Day. We were in for a big shock.
We had no idea the freeze of the century was about to drop in on us, not to mention the Christmas winds.
We had regretted for several days that we had never been able to visit Cumberland Island due to the constant confusion surrounding the generator repairs. We left the marina on New Years Day in a light rain. We said to ourselves that we would not like to walk around the island in the rain. We would visit it the next day. From that day to this it has not been a fit day to go strolling about in the outdoors.
We started following the weather the week intensely the week before New Years Day, and I was unhappy to see that the winds were almost constantly from the northwest. As I watched day after day, this state of affairs continued. When we left the marina, I remember saying hopefully that maybe the winds would change on Wednesday, the day after the last day in the forecast cycle. From that day to this, I keep hoping the same thing – that in five or six days the winds will change. The fronts keep rolling through, and the wind keeps coming at us from the northwest.
I don’t know when this state of affairs will improve. Not only are all the winds from the wrong direction, but we are also in the grip of arctic cold, something we certainly did not expect at the border of Florida. As we check cities down the coast, we can see that the situation is not dramatically better in any location we could reach in two or three days, even if we were willing to go out into the ocean at these temperatures. Wind from the northwest is not itself a problem when we go south along the coast, but a northwest wind at 20 knots and a temperature of even 40 degrees feels quite cold. The forecasts do not indicate that the deep freeze will relent soon.
So here we are still, trapped by the Christmas Winds. We will get to the Bahamas sometime. We take it a day at a time. Nothing enforces flexible decision-making like cruising in a sailboat,.
November 22, 2009
Aboard No Boundaries
I have been telling you how early we get up each day. Even on the ICW, with the exception of our first day, we are getting up at 5:30AM in order to cover a lot of territory before dark. Anchoring in the dark is no fun. We want to be ready to stop around 4PM in order to be set and comfortable before the sun goes down.
Sometimes this strategy actually works.
When we were cruising this summer, we managed to adhere to this strategy with one exception: Provincetown. An assortment of issues conspired to delay our departure from Boston until noon, resulting in an arrival time in Provincetown, at the end of Cape Cod, around 8PM. We could see our destination as the sun began to set around 6PM that night, but it is a long trip around the little curl at the end of Cape Cod before you actually get into Provincetown Harbor. It was fully dark before we rounded the end of that curl. We crept into the harbor, almost running into the breakwater in the dark. We thought it would be an actual wall, but it appeared to be just a pile of rocks that stuck up a foot or two above the water. Provincetown is a very small town. There is very little light at 8PM down on the waterfront and no signs of life. The moon wasn’t much help as we anchored in deep darkness using flashlights, e-chart and grit. We didn’t do it because we love to prove ourselves; we did it because it was necessary.
We had to do the same thing in the Sassafrass River on our way back to Baltimore. We had run up Delaware Bay with the intention of transiting the C&D Canal before we stopped, because finding shelter along that monster bay is no simple task. We also were quite ready to get back home, and this was a good way to get there sooner. The result, of course, was that we entered the Sassafrass just after 2AM. Again, there was little moonlight, and again we felt our way to a successful anchorage.
We had planned to avoid such issues when in the ICW. In the first place, the ICW anchorages are almost all quite confined. There isn’t a lot of room for error, due to the constant challenge of shoals and stumps and snags. It would be easy to get in a mess if you try to anchor when you can’t see. Yet on Saturday (11/21) we found ourselves doing it again.
We had left Buck Island Harbor about 6:45AM. We got up early as always and were ready to leave as it got light. The run down the North River was uneventful. Crossing Albemarle Sound reminded me of cruising on the Chesapeake. We passed through the Alligator River Bridge and headed for the Alligator-Pungo River Canal.
It was about 1:30PM when we saw a couple of sailboats ahead of us pull out of the channel into a tiny little spot near shore where they appeared to be anchoring. We were near the entrance to the Alligator-Pungo Canal, and I asked Larry why they would be anchoring there. It isn’t a designated anchorage, and it was not long past noon. “Maybe they don’t think they can get to the end of the canal before dark,” he said.
That was a sobering thought that I had not considered. The canal is 25 miles long. It was 1:30PM. At best we were making about 6 knots. Sunset would be 4:55PM. Whoa! Maybe we would not get to the end of this canal before dark either, and there is NO place to stop in the canal.
The longer we were in this canal, the less I liked it. The scenery is quite picturesque, even a little spooky. I love swamp landscapes, and this one was lovely. However, twenty-five miles of it was almost more than I needed. The ambience was not improved when our 8-foot depth alarm went off in the middle of the channel, supposedly in 15 feet of water. There was a thump and a scraping sound, and then nothing. The depth went back to 15 feet and we went on. It was probably a log that washed into the channel during recent heavy rains.
At the end of the canal is a fixed bridge charted at 65 feet of clearance. I didn’t look, and we didn’t thud, and we soon exited that canal. Off to the right in the upper reaches of the Pungo River is a designated anchorage where we had considered stopping. However, we had also looked for a slightly better spot a couple of miles downriver, and that is a good thing. There were already eight boats in the designated anchorage. We could certainly have found a place there, but we don’t like crowded anchorages. Every time we see a crowd of boats anchored together, it calls up images of the anchorage at Newport, RI. We don’t like that kind of close communion.
We continued downriver to a spot where we could anchor in 8 feet of water in a more sheltered location. We were just about to finish our work when another sailboat came cruising in to be our neighbor. It isn’t that we don’t like friends and neighbors, but with all that water to choose from, why did this boat want to be right next to us? Oh well. We used our flashlight and our e-chart and our grit and we got the anchor set just the way we wanted it.
We were exhausted. We had arisen before it was day, and we cruised until it wasn’t day again. We ate a simple supper and went right to bed. Boy, am I glad we are retired and don’t have to work for a living any more, getting up at the crack of dawn and working until we keel over into bed at night. I bet everyone would like to be retired and on permanent vacation like we are!
November 21, 2009
Aboard No Boundaries
What would cruising be if there were no surprises?
We woke up on the morning of November 20 at Buck Island Harbor. It was very early, as are all our days on this jaunt. We wanted to get across Albemarle Sound and past the Alligator River. Our first act every morning now is to turn on the engine so we can run the inverter for grinding and brewing coffee. (The generator is another story for another day. Be sure you have redundancy in all critical systems, and be sure that the cruising gremlins will strain your ability to provide enough layers of same.) Larry turned on the fuel pump, and then tried to turn on the engine, and that was the great moment of truth. The truth was that the engine was not going to start.
Before I tell you about the engine, I’ll tell you about my own redundant backups. When I was employed, I was a database administrator. If you think that system administrators are anal about backups, dba’s are moreso. In fact, as a dba, no matter what the system administrator told me about his/her backups, I always managed to find some way to make a backup of my own that I could rely on when the system backups failed to meet my needs. And that happened way too often.
Now that I am retired, I am as avid about protecting my morning coffee as I ever was about assuring database backups. We have had too many issues with electrical systems and diesel engines and so forth for me to think that I can safely rely on an electric coffee grinder and an electric coffeemaker. When I bought food for our journey, I bought one pound of ground coffee and stashed it for this moment.
It all goes back to motorcycle days. When we were first married we used to travel on a motorcycle and camp out. We made coffee by boiling water and throwing in some ground coffee. After the coffee had five minutes or so to brew, we dipped it out carefully and it was quite good coffee. So on this delightful morning when our engine refused to start, we did not have to do without coffee. I hauled out my stash and made what Larry calls “cowboy coffee.” We drank our coffee while Larry mulled over the situation. I assure you that the fact that we were able to have coffee anyway made the whole day work better.
Larry spent about five hours with wrenches, screwdrivers and few choice words working on the engine. The day before we had casually said to each other that if something happened that made it necessary, we could always dinghy back to Coinjock; it was only six miles. However, as Larry was fighting with the demons of diesel, the winds were ramping up in excess of 20 knots. It was no day for a six-mile dinghy ride. If no real solution could be crafted, then something had to be jury-rigged. The engine must be compelled, willy-nilly, to run.
Two bad things had happened. First, Larry discovered that the fuel line was blocked. When he attempted to run fuel through the filter, hardly any came through. Task #1 was to clear that fuel line. And wouldn’t you know that the one item that could possibly do that task was buried in the most inaccessible space in the boat? It was in a box of assorted remnants of electrical cable, all stuffed at the bottom of the locker under the locker behind the forward settee. When we stored that box way down there, we said that there would be no need for wiring any time soon. Ha! The cruising gremlins giggled all morning as we pulled out boxes and bags and paraphernalia that had been piled and stuffed on top of the box we needed. Our boat is none too tidy on its best day, and this was not by any means its best day, unless you mean the best WORST day. It was a frightful mess, but Larry found a piece of cable that was just the right size to push through the fuel line and unclog it.
That done, he encountered task #2: fix or replace the fuel pump. Even with the fuel line clear, the fuel pump was not moving fuel. This was a much more serious problem. We could not go to Coinjock for parts and pieces, and who knew if anybody there would have what we needed anyway? However, Larry soon realized that we had exactly what we needed, exactly where we did not need it to be. The generator is a diesel engine, and its fuel filter was not needed, because the generator was not being used (another story, as I told you earlier). He scavenged the fuel pump from the generator and installed it on the auxiliary engine, and voila`. We had power in the power zone.
The cruising gremlins are always working had to keep us from having any fun, but we ignore their agenda. We have our own: just keep trucking, or rather, just keep cruising.
November 18, 2009
Aboard No Boundaries
AAaaahhhh. Early morning. What do you think that means? For us it is very early, 4AM, and it is cool. Not frigid, but cool enough that we need jackets. We haul out our foul weather gear, because it is impervious to wind. That makes all the difference, of course. If the wind can’t get to you, then you can ignore the cold.
Larry takes the helm and I go forward with a big spotlight so I can make the day markers visible when there is no associated light. And if the marker is lighted, the day mark shows the number, which is critical to success. Just any red marker won’t do if you actually need marker number 22.
When we decided to make our run south, we knew that we needed to get far south in a hurry. It was already the middle of November. Any nice days this time of year are complete gifts, and we knew we needed to make the most of what looked like a few days of good weather. We want to anchor whenever possible, and knowing that it is easier to anchor in daylight, the best way to lengthen our productive time is to start early. It is much easier to leave a spot in the dark if you arrived in the daylight, and it is much easier to follow your inward track back out in the dark than to create a new track and anchor successfully in a strange place in the dark.
Three days in a row we were up at 4AM and out by 5AM. It was a real adjustment. We always used to say that no matter what we did, we could not get going before 11AM, but these days we are setting new records. As a result, we were able to run 78 miles on Sunday and arrive in the Patuxent in plenty of time to anchor before the sun set.
Our departure from Baltimore at 5AM was quite interesting. Even though we had passed in and out along that channel many times by daylight, it all looked quite different in the dark. We were really glad that we were in familiar territory. Our departure from the Patuxent at 5AM was a challenge, however. It was an occasion for gratitude for e-charting and saved tracks. I could illuminate the markers as we passed them by using a flashlight, but some of them still seemed to be in strange places.
The best experience of all was the Wicomico River. We cruised into this river shortly after lunch on Monday. We decided to stop there, because there really wasn’t an acceptable place to anchor between the Wicomico and Norfolk without going a long way off our real course. Being there reminded us of being in South Dakota, where our anchorages were truly remote.
We went upriver in the Wicomico to a bend where there was good protection from the north, the predicted wind direction. We had a little challenge anchoring, because the force of the river current was in conflict with the force of the wind. However, our second try dug in nicely. The wind died down to almost nothing by evening and remained calm all night.
Along the bank of the river we could see three or four houses, but that is all. When the sun went down, there were lights in one of the houses and a few lights on one of the boat docks. However, for the most part, the dark of night was truly dark. Beyond hills to the east we could see a glow that no doubt came from some small community, but it was nothing compared to the light in the sky anywhere in the area near Baltimore and Annapolis. Standing on deck in the Wicomico River, we could hear frogs and birds making their night calls, sounds we would never have heard farther north. We looked up and saw a brilliant night sky. I could actually pick out the Pleiades, a faint little constellation I love.
When we got up at 4AM in the Wicomico, there were absolutely no lights anywhere near. I shined my light on the markers and Larry steered to the saved track from the day before. We successfully stayed off the shoals between us and the mouth of the river. It was so dark and so clear that I saw 4 meteors between our anchorage and the main bay. We were joined by a parade of huge fishing boats as we exited the river, but they went their way and we went ours.
Now we are on the ICW, where our days are controlled by bridge openings. I guess we won’t need to get up at 4AM here. I can enjoy the extra sleep, but there actually is something very special about the sky in the deep darkness of real night. I am glad we made our early morning getaways on this passage.