Oh dear.  The time has finally come to say farewell to the fair blue waters of the Caribbean.  Our adventures in the Lesser Antilles have been more than we had hoped for.  We laughed, we cried.  It was better than Cats.

Our passage to the Bahamas from the British Virgin Islands would be over 550 miles long.  It would be our second longest passage yet (the first being our 1440 mile trip from North Carolina to St. Thomas).  We would sail between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic to the south and the Turks and Caicos to the north, making landfall on Great Inagua Island, one of the southernmost Bahamian islands.  We hoped that our time in the Bahamas would be as amazing as all the cruisers say it is.  It was hard to imagine anything more wonderful than the Caribbean.

With so many miles under our life jackets, we were pleased to find that we were not nearly as anxious about the upcoming passage as we were leaving North Carolina.  But we had lots of work to do just the same.  As soon as the Armitages boarded their ferry back to civilization, we raced back to the boat and spent 4 days preparing to depart.  Back in St. Maarten, Anything Goes was making the same preparations.  They would leave several hours before we did in hopes of sailing within VHF range during our passage.

We got ice and food, dropped off our laundry, and started cleaning the boat.  During our week with the Armitages, we neglected our typical cleaning and maintenance routines.  We also had bigger projects that had to be completed.  Chris started off with fixing the compass lights.

We were happy to have company to break up the hard work.  Bryson and Cindy had arrived back in Soper’s Hole and were busy preparing Xanadu to leave for the summer.  We all worked hard each day and then got together for easy taco dinners and drinks in the cockpit at night.

Chris and I took advantage of the massage therapist in Soper’s Hole, which soothed our muscles after days of hard work on the boat.  The kids caught up with school.  They did very little the week before and would likely do almost none on our passage (it is usually too rough offshore to do schoolwork).

 

 

 

 

On our last day, we noticed a charter boat take a mooring next to ours.  We met them later when they dinghied over.  The boy on the boat, Peter, was a student in Mr. Whittier’s class back in Massachusetts!  If you recall, Mr. Whittier contacted us last summer when he saw our boat in Tenant’s Harbor, Maine.  He is a teacher and has utilized our blog and adventures as a tool in his English classes throughout the year.  We published one of his students’ essays a while back.  It was fun to meet Peter’s whole family and wonder about this small, small world we live in.  What are the chances that their boat would pull into Soper’s Hole on that exact day and take a mooring right next to our boat and recognize our boat name?  My mind is boggled every time I think about the serendipity of it all.  Now we just have to head back to Maine to meet Mr. Whittier! (spoiler alert)

On the morning of April 21st, we made water, checked out at customs, and got fuel, ice, and last-minute produce.  We hauled the dinghy onto the cabintop and contacted our emergency contacts to let them know we were leaving.  The weather was fair (obviously.  It’s the Caribbean.) and the wind was blowing 20 knots out of the East-Northeast.  We’ll take it.  Chris set out the fishing lines and we were off.  Next stop: Great Inagua.

 

 

 

 

“The sea continues to feed our spiritual need for adventure into the unknown.” –Robert Ballad (this one’s for Aunt Carolyn)

 

For 12 hours, we fought off “first day seasickness” from the large following seas.  I took Sturgeron, the kids used their seasickness acupressure bands, and we kicked a brand new bag of pretzels.  By the time my nightwatch started, I was back in business.  I grabbed Jimmy Buffet’s book A Pirate Looks at Fifty, 3 Twizzlers, and a pudding.  My watch was uneventful except for seeing a cruiseship in the distance.

 

 

The next day, the kids played “Far Side of the Mountain”, a wilderness make-believe survival game they made up after reading the book series by that name.  We had bagels for breakfast (not me, of course.  the bagel diva is holding out until we reach home.)  Chris made tacos for dinner.  My neck and shoulders were hurting, a sign that I’m holding in all that sadness about leaving the Caribbean.  I took a hot shower – such a luxury only on Day Two! – and tried to come to terms with the close of this last chapter in our trip.

 

At 1700, we saw the first signs of life since the cruiseship the night before.  A U.S. Coast Guard plane flew overhead.  The kids continued playing nicely and were feeling fine.  I tackled my pile of schoolwork that needed to be corrected after our catch up sessions back in Soper’s Hole.

 

 

At 1951 (7:51pm) on 4/22/13, the log book states: “Kids in bed.  Erica on watch.  Turned on Tri-Color (the light at the top of our mast), got the flashlight ready.  I see those two stars in the sky that I always see first.  Moon is almost full.  Bright out.  No targets on AIS (like radar for other boats) for 24 miles.  All alone out here.  We are north of the Dominican Republic.  Wish we were stopping here.  Wind angle 97 degrees at 17 knots.  SOG (speed over the ground) 6.3 knots.  HDG (heading) 305 degrees.  Compass lights working nicely.

At 2130: Ate an orange so I don’t get scurvy.  Ha Ha Ha Ha!

At 2315: wrapped jib around headstay trying to go wing on wing.  Chris hurts his toe on the foredeck trying to fix it.

 

 

 

On passage, sometimes the kids sleep late.  Especially if the engine is on and lulls them.  But the next morning, at 0655, Porter popped up on deck, his lifejacket already on.  He crawled over to the starboard lazarette (bench seat) and stared sleepily up at the sails for a good fifteen minutes.  It was so cute.  I crawled onto the lazarette with him and snuggled the early morning away.

We made blueberry muffins for breakfast, which proves that the waves had died down!  Anything Goes was cruising along 70 miles behind us.  We played games in the cockpit all day, made guacamole, and watched dolphins jumping high in our bow wake.  We literally sailed right into the sunset.  Sounds too good to be true?  It was.

 

 

 

 

 

At 2045, I was on watch, reading my book on Kindle.  I was checking the AIS screen frequently because there was a ship in the distance that was headed right for us.  He was a long way off, but I wanted to alter course and/or contact the captain on the VHF if we got too close.  I heard the AIS make a beep.  That’s not usually good.  I went over to check it and it was off.  I turned it on and scanned the pitch black horizon to see if I could see any lights.  When the display came back on, we were still a long way from the ship.

I went across the cockpit to the port side wheel and instruments and saw that the autopilot had also turned off.  THAT IS NOT GOOD!  I grabbed the wheel and screamed down below to wake Chris up.  I looked up at the wind vane, looked at the sails, and tried to figure out what was going on.  Although this only took a few seconds, it was a second too long.  As Chris got up on deck, we crash jibed because the boat had gone way off course.  Unfortunately, the main was on a preventer (“preventing” it from jibing).  You may ask how in the world we jibed then.  The preventer is used just to keep the boom from banging around when you are too close to “dead downwind”.  If the pressure gets too much on the sail, the preventer is designed to break and allow the jibe.  Unfortunately (that’s a lot of “unfortunately’s” for one event…) the preventer did not break.  Instead, when the boat jibed, the sheet block diverter ripped out of the boom.  I’m not sure why these things always happen in the middle of the night, but they always do.  Chris went up to take a look, but there was nothing we could do about it.  Fortunately (yay!) the autopilot was not broken, which would have been most unfortunate.  It appears that the power flickered off for a moment, which turned off the AIS and reset the instruments.  When the instruments turned back on, they went into “Standby” mode (traditional hand steering) instead of “Autopilot” (the kind I like, so I can eat my Twizzlers and read my book in the middle of the night).  I was upset that I was not quicker at assessing the situation so that I could steer us back on course before jibing.  While usually good in emergencies, when it comes to sailing the boat under duress, I tend to panic and get all turned around.  Argh.

 

The final day of the passage was smooth enough to do all our “post-passage” cleanup as we ran along the south shore of Great Inagua on our way to the anchorage.  We saw low, flat land with white sandy beaches.  The water was an impossible blue.  The water was so blue that the bottoms of the clouds were blue from the reflection.  It looked so different from the Caribbean.  It reminded me only of Anegada, a coral atoll in the BVIs.  It was so calm that we took showers and I worked on catching up on our blog all the way though Dominica.  I’ll still miss the lush green hills and rainforests of the Caribbean, but it looks like this is going to be one spectacular island after another!

Welcome to the Bahamas!