The girls on WildChild have been pushing a pretty hectic sailing schedule lately so I have not had as much time to sit down and enjoy writing. There is much to talk about. As we have a deadline of being in Barbados by Dec17 9am for Elena’s US VISA interview we are deliberately just pushing our way thru the Caribbean south bound fast. We gotta make miles.
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Culebra
The stop in Culebra was just as wonderful as people said it would be. The bay has amazing great fabulous protection and is wide and open inside with lots of room to anchor, easy dinghy access to shore and a welcoming friendly local population. We felt safe and enjoyed the sights we found exploring life on land.
We found this very cool statue guarding the little canal cut thru to the outside by the bridge. The town is very touristy but the prices are not bad at all. I got kinda quiet at this time, except texting with friends, as my world fell apart in here. Despite the safety of the anchorage I had a crew problem crop up. To be gentle about it we could say that Elena is not emotionally stable. She swings between lovely and fabulous crew and these intense wild cold silent moods.
She has been moody ever since she got back from spending time with her family in Germany. I had thought her mood problems were being aggravated by the boredom of idle time in Luperon. Once we had started sailing again she seemed to have perked up, come back to life, but she remained moody as we sailed the south coast of Puerto Rico.
In Culebra she had a total emotional melt down, she cracked. Given that she is a dead silent kind of girl and doesn’t ever share her thoughts or feeling… I have no idea what happened. We landed the dinghy on shore and she was in another one of her cold silent moods, as I was securing the dinghy she just left, disappeared, I lost her for a day. She didn’t say a word. Eventually after hours searching the town I found her in a coffee shop but she refused to look at me or say a word. Things were bad. Later that night she cried for hours and cried most of the next day. I have no idea what about, she still wouldn’t talk to me.
We had a bad time in Culebra but it had nothing to do with the town. It took us a few days to figure things out and we set out sailing again.
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Sail to St. Martin
We found a weather window like Dec 2nd to Dec 5th to make the jump due east to St. Martin. The sail was pretty calm with gentle winds and mostly calm seas, calm is good. The first day out sailing did not turn out very well. We knew that the winds would be from the South East until around sunset then they were supposed to swing around to come from the south, perfect for making Easting progress. So our plan was to just sail out away from land heading south, then when the winds swung we could tac and beat directly east. Sounded like a good plan. The thing is… Mother nature never follows the plan. The winds that first day were light and very unstable.
As we were trying to sail close reach into the wind to make some amount of SSE progress we averaged like 2 knots. The winds kept swirling around a lot causing us to need to make constant course correction to hold our relative wind angle. Elena had her first accidental tac at the helm when the winds suddenly shifted 50 degrees across the bow. I ran up to help her fix it. Sometimes if you react fast enough you can just switch to manual steering and swing the helm hard over, before you lose all forward speed, and correct it. Elena did not react fast enough and we had to switch the motor on to bring her about.
We had storms all around us causing wild instability in our winds. As you can see this one in the distance. When these storms get close to you get a lot of shifting in wind direction and everything from a lull in the winds near it to a sudden burst of wind at the edges of it. They can be hard to sail thru because under them the winds are often falling down with the rain, you cannot sail in falling winds. They just lay you on your side.
Things started to settle in sailing by around 3am the first night.. we had steady light south winds and we sailed on course until late afternoon the second day. We lost the wind a few hours before sunset the second night and had to motor sail for a bit.
The second night also proved to be a stressful sail, the weather conditions and winds were good, but the marine traffic was the worst I have ever been in at night. You can see from this screen shot of the chart plotter… we had ships in the pitch dark all around us. At one point we had 7 cruise ships all around us.. plus many cargo ships and a tug boat hauling an unlit unmarked barge on a 700 foot tow line on a collision course with us. There were also several smaller sailboats like us… that do not transmit AIS that we detected on the radar and had to avoid collision with.
Suffice it say Captain Lexi did not get any sleep that night. I think I had to make 8 VHF hails to vessels on collision courses with us and warn them we were out in front of them in the dark and arrange collision avoidance course corrections with them, either they alter course or we did. As we were sailing tight to the wind most of the time we had right of way and limited manoeuvrability, where possible, I asked the bigger ships to slightly alter their course for us, every Captain was happy to oblige us.
By the time we arrived in St.Martin the 3rd day… we were both exhausted and just dropped the hook and slept.
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St. Martin
St. Martin is wonderful, everybody should visit there. It felt very European french style with such an easy check in system. We had been advised by friends that we could just go to the marine chandliery shop and sit down at a computer and enter information into a computer ourselves, pay 2 Eruos and viola, all check in. It is so easy… Why can’t every island be so easy about this process?
We did visit the town a little bit, did some light provisioning and got a few things we needed. Apparently the French have a cell phone provider called DigiCell that has coverage in most of the Caribbean islands. For a 3 month minimum you can buy 40GB of data a month for $40 euros a month. Way better rates than I ever get in Canada, in Canada they charge $25 per GB of data…! if you can believe that. Crazy stuff.
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Sailing to Guadalope
Anyway we only stayed here for 2 days then we left again and made a south jump down to Guadalope, another french island about 120 miles south. This was a hard sail. The good news is we had plenty of wind so we were sailing along at good speed. The good news is we only had to sail between 50-60 degrees into the wind most of the time so we were not so tight to the wind as before going East.
The problem… that kicked us worse than I had anticipated… and I can confess was probably my Captains mistake, was when analyzing waves against swell #1 and swell #2, when synthesizing those vectors into a combined picture in my mind, I got it wrong.
Okay I know you are saying Captain Lexi you are clearly making things way too complicated, but the reality is things can get complicated out here, nature is complicated.
So here are the interesting new things I have learned about wave analysis. All 2 meter waves are not the same. In fact the experience of all the different types of 2 meter waves can be quite different. We found one of the bad types of 2 meter waves for like 24 hours smashing into it on this passage.
I tried to include some pictures for you, to try and show you what it looks like, although the appearance on a picture of a wave smashing into the boat is far nicer than the bone jarring experience of it. Neither one of us could sleep in this smashy smashy sail. Neither one of us ate very much, we both got dehydrated, as we both dreaded the idea of going down below to the head and trying to pee in such horrible smashing conditions. So logically we simply avoided drinking, which of course is a bad solution. This is why we keep Gatorade on the boat, for sailing days like these, when we get dehydrated and need to replace those essential electrolytes.
What we were experiencing was swell direction about 140 degrees off wave direction. This caused the waves to be in opposition much of the time. This caused them to rise and fall suddenly and unevenly and chaotically. There was also a second deep long period swell coming out of the north from the north Atlantic giant nasty nasty storms that was super imposed on our particular wave nightmare. We did not get any long even waves rolling along parallel and in unison, as one might on a lake. We had waves that were only maybe 200 meters long for a minute or two in not parallel formation that had steep sides and uneven rhythm.
Every so often it sounded like someone was smashing the sides of WildChild with a big sledge hammer. The whole boat would shudder and shake, then the spray would come sailing into the dodger window or sometimes right into the cockpit. We hate getting soaking wet while at the helm, it just maks your day uncomfortable. Of course it is way too hot here to even think about wearing a rain suit or something, its why my Captain uniform is a bikini.
Hour after uncomfortable hour we smashed our way thru these horrible unsteady waves. Sometimes they dropped out from under us unexpectedly and we fell. Sometimes they suddenly rose up underneath is and we lurched into the air. Sometimes they smashed into the bow sending spray high into the air.
When sailing like this your core muscles get sore, tired. You are constantly flexing all your muscles to keep your body steady against the continuous assault of gravity and waves energy. You get so worn down. It was a bad sail. We are some pretty tough sailor chics, and we took the beating for about 30 hours until we finally slowly came into the wave shadow of Guadalope nearing sunset the second day.
What interested me here, is that as we sailed into the swell protection of the island, but were still completely in the open unprotected from the wind driven waves, we still had 2 meter waves, but they were easier to manage. The waves slowly lost their chaos, lost their steep sides, lost their random direction variations. The waves slowly became parallel and more uniform, more even and similar. As we sailed the boat moved into a more steady rhythm rolling up and down more evenly.
Yes when we were in the wave troughs we could not see the horizon anymore, and yes when we were on a wave peak we were looking down quite a bit to see the wave trough, but the motion was easier to live with, almost soothing. Still 2 meter waves, but like only wind driven nicer cousins of the waves we endured the previous 24 hours.
So 30 hours later we pulled into a small, well protected harbour called Deshaies on the north western tip of Guadalope. We arrived with an hour of daylight left, the anchorage was quite crowded and rather steep sided and deep. We eventually nosed our way in between 2 large CAT’s and a few monohulls and found a place in 38 feet of water to drop the hook. I had to set the sentinal anchor too to reduce our swing radius as all the boats here are too close together. We just went to sleep.
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Deshaies
This place is just lovely. Again a very quaint little European French village feel to it. Relaxed and lovely people, easy check in. Yesterday we wandered around a little bit to see the place. There seems to be a feel to the french lifestyle and culture, like they seem relaxed and to just be enjoying life. It is hard to describe but I was trying to articulate this to Elena yesterday. She has done a lot of world travelling. When I asked her to describe the feeling in America she said police state, lots of rules, lots of cops, a kind of tension. When I asked her to describe the feeling of the last 2 french towns we have been in she said, very relaxed, easy going, gentle and kind, easier somehow. Like a civilized freedom. DR feels very free but not so civilized. PR feels civilized but not free. These french towns feel both free and civilized. We have no worries about crime and just feel relaxed wandering around, unconcerned about the police pulling us over to grill us about some mysterious offence breaking some obscure rule they conjure up. It feels nice.
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The path ahead from here
We are currently still sitting in this well protected harbour. I barely have cell signal and have been having trouble getting wind forecast information. The ocean is having a mood swing the next 3 days and sailing conditions are not good. With the help of friends I have been trying to make a plan.
You can see this was the wind information for yesterday (Sunday). Just the usual typical East trade winds here all day everyday. I am thinking of jumping from here 120 miles south, on the wave protected western side of the island chain, down to Martinique.
As you can see though, Monday (today) and Tuesday AND Wednesday we have nasty strong winds gusting to 30 knots coming at us. This also means that in the gaps between islands, where you get a funneling effect, the winds can be almost double that.
Also you can see from the wave forecast model, that these strong winds, coming all the way from Africa, have had a lot of fetch to build up the wave heights. Remember that when the forecast model shows this as the wave height you still get waves x0.5 and x1.5 this number, depending on the swell effect.
It does look as though our chance to jump out to the East, into the exposed open wavy nasty ocean, will be this coming weekend. The forecast looks good for the last leg of this jump Saturday and Sunday. Arrive in Barbados Dec15th in the evening. Have Dec 16th to check in and recover. Get Elena to the US embassy by early morning Dec 17th. It seems the embassy is too far inshore to walk to so we will have to find and take a taxi.
This is the plan….
Mother nature just has no respect for my plans. When sailing nothing ever goes according to plan.
There is so much room for error in this plan, so many ways for this to go wrong.
Crossing those gaps tomorrow and Wednesday, during the nasty strong winds, into the nasty waves has so much potential to break the boat.
If anybody still has a working magic weather wand.. and is willing to use a little magic to help us out… I’d be grateful. We really need Wednesday to calm down. We really need Saturday and Sunday to be good sailing conditions, calm those waves down, give us a bit of Northy-ness to the trade winds.
Cheers sailors…
Captain Lexi…
. …. the worn down and weary, the nervous…