Snow Pony At All

When You Don't Have a Life You Spend a Lot of Time Tying Knots or Ocean Passage Adventure Part 2

So now we are anchored way out in Marigot Bay, St. Martin. In the morning, after getting yelled at by a customs boat for not flying our yellow Q flag or French courtesy flag, and after a much appreciated breakfast, we hauled up our anchor and moved in a little closer to shore where the waves were smaller still, and a trip ashore is barely a minute away in the tender. Motoring a biscuit's toss distance around a mess of other boats in the dark when everyone is tired, with a chance of dragging anchor in the night didn't sound like a preferable course of action as soon as we arrived from sea so we took no chances. But once everyone was rested enough and could plainly see our surroundings, there was no harm in poking around for a spot closer in.

The morning was generally pretty lazy and laid back other than that. We learned that we wouldn't be able to pass the class because we couldn't use the sextant on the way down. I figured my index error in the bay, so at least I could take mine out of the box but the requirement was to plot a fix using two lines of position from the sun and a running fix. Something I knew how to work out better than both the instructors aboard and I was even explaining to all of them how to use the almanac, how to find local apparent noon and how to use the star finder. All this didn't count if the seas were too rough to even see the horizon, hold the sun steady or being too sick to even think about doing math on paper without losing whatever lunch I hadn't lost an hour before. The captain understood at least; after all, he wasn't even certified for the class himself, and he has been taking it up with the folks who write these requirements. Sure, celestial navigation is important when your electronics die but the school of thought that no electronics are to be trusted is outdated. I'd be at a loss if I had to use anything other than the electronic knotmeter and depthsounder in this field because these classes always discouraged the use of anything beyond that, although everything beyond that is standard practice aboard almost any large boat I might potentially crew on.

Soon after I explained all I was going to explain and we covered some other topics we got the ship's documents ready to go ashore after we got around to hoisting our Quarentine flag. In the old days, when a ship's crew had small pox or the plague or any other deadly disease, a plain yellow flag was flown to warn other vessels to stay clear and definitely don't even think about boarding. When coming into a new port, the ship was required to anchor way out in the offing with the flag flying for an extended period of time, (I believe forty days) or until everybody died. I'm not sure exactly how it has evolved since then, but these days the yellow flag is flown to signify a vessel registered in a foreign port before she cleared customs in the port she is visiting.

With no real plan of action or goal in mind once we were legally allowed to wander all over the island we "boarded the dingus" and set off to find the imigration office. This was around noon, and this was the Caribbean, so once we found the locked door with a sign telling us to come back after lunch at 1400, we had a choice of being illegal aliens for a few hours and eating crepes by the marina or being responsible and go back to boat. So we were illegal aliens for a while and ate crepes by the marina. We bummed around for a little bit after this in the market where clothes with all the same pattern were sold from a couple dozen stalls and eventually made our way back to the customs office. Only the skipper goes in while the rest of the crew waits outside, and the other groups that tried to knock on the door while ours was busy inside got a very stern talking to. We watched all the people in their vacation costumes come off the cruise ship busses and talked to an elderly couple who owned the cruising trawler we could see it the bay while we waited.

Now that we could legally roam the island, we went back to the boat.

We took down our Q flag and hoisted the Tricolour humming the French National Anthem because we are twelve years old and went below to estimate our estimated time enroute back home. We had a whole afternoon to spend on the island and we could have either checked out the fort or take a ride in the tender and explore the Dutch side of the island. We chose the latter and didn't regret it. We pounded on the sunscreen and packed the bug spray and grabbed a few gas cans to fill up while were there and disembarked.

I forgot to mention in the previous part that our dinghy was a mess. The assumption was that one of the captains had spilled oil all over the floor and never bothered to clean it up. We got it the best we could, but it never really went away. Many things had been said about this captain about how "he just doesn't care anymore" and "he gets so morally offended when you approach him with stuff like this." When we did fill up our spare gas cans we quickly discovered one of them had sprung a major leak and was dripping fuel at an alarming rate. This was the cause of the mess in the tender. "Let's not tell that captain about this..."

On the way to the other side, there are a few large, sullen wrecks. Tugs and frieghters thrown up on shoals when their anchors dragged in a hurricane. But grounded ships weren't the only neglected vessels: at least half a dozen smaller sailboats, some without masts, swung at their anchor, abandoned and weather beaten, burdens to their owners I'm sure.

Not everything on the mooring balls in the lagoon were in a sad state! What looked like a floating log cabin from a distance was in fact a neato restaurant accessible only by boat. There was also a famous ocean racing yacht made fast to the wharf. Don't ask me what it was, but it was famous I'm told. By far the most impressive spectacle, however, was the absurd amount of multi milion dollar celebrity mega yachts all anchored in one place, hiding from taxes. They lose all sense of scale when they are together like that and the amount of money sitting in that lagoon is impossible to mentally calculate. I believe someone said the total cost of all these ships in the lagoon exceeded the country's national debt. The most puzzling question on everyone's mind was how the hell did they all fit through the tiny drawbridge to get in there. The bar overlooking the bridge has daily times posted when it opens and people can gather around hoping for a chance to see a million dollar miscalculated steering adjustment. We were lucky enough to be on the water when we saw one of the yachts making for the bridge from seaward. We stuck around fairly out of the way and watched her come in. The ships are just narrow enough where they need to be to sqeeze through but it's touch and go the whole way, deck hands hanging fenders bigger than themselves over the side and walking them aft until the cement wall is left astern. My helmsmanship is not that good, I'm afraid.

Having enough of that, we went back to the boat and had tacos made with everything we didn't eat on the trip here. Everyone else talked about their favorite beers and breweries back home and I just sat nodding with a coke with a slice of lime in it. Scurvy prevention.

The next morning we discussed some more offshore topics and emergencies and went over everything we needed for the passage back. It looked like the wind wasn't going to change from the east, but at least this time we would be sailing with it, not against it. The first mate and the other student wanted to check out the marine supply store, but I decided to stay on the boat to have lunch and plot our course. This course would be much more direct but I didn't want to sail directly with the wind and risk the boom flying over in an accidental jibe, so it consisted of two legs at angles to the wind. We would rig a preventer line in case we did get caught by the lee, and with only one tack change it wouldn't be too much of a hassle.

The away team returned and the other student showed me a few tricks to transfer the course to the larger scale charts, shaving off a few miles in the process. The captain pointed out that if we erred too far north we'd end up on a dangerous reef but overall the course looked good.

We set off in the afternoon and I weathered a much more pleasant watch below. In fact, I might have actually been sleeping when I was called to go on deck. At this point I learned to wear my foulies at night, even if I didn't think I needed them. The breeze was not that chilly until the spray soaks you through and you are left there at the helm wishing you could get dry. Steering takes a lot more effort down wind and I wasn't particularly looking forward to it since I know I have trouble keeping a course on a run. But the captain said I was taking the waves really well and I wasn't even thinking about it too hard. I'm glad I could do something right!

Island Retreat's average speed is about five knots- walking speed- and that is what we planned for in our course plotting. On this heading we were averaging six to seven knots and more than once we were pushing ten when I surfed down the face of a wave. This kept spirits high and we were way ahead of our original time line. I was even well enough to check out the chart down below without getting sick. The other student may be brilliant with her dead reckoning but it's not like I didn't know what I was doing and I plotted our position like a boss under the light of the red head lantern. I did have to hand the helm over after an hour though, to give my arms a rest and to point out stars. There were two or three cruise ships who's bearings never changed, and I thought we may end up right under them but they eventually moved away. (They don't smell very pleasent to leeward either, by the way)

At one point in the night we were hit with a heavy squall and had to heave to and ride it out. The first mate said it was exciting. That's one word for it, but I would have used terrifying. In the middle of putting the helm over we heard a loud bang in the rigging. Not something you want to hear. While I was finding some way to lash the helm the first mate inspected all the shrouds to make sure the mast wasn't going to topple over. They were all sturdy and tight, but a block in the boom vang tackle had exploded. At this point the captain woke up and told us everything we were doing wrong but we got the block replaced. Come to find out, the captain had actually jury rigged that tackle over a year ago and just never got around to fixing it the right way!

On the captain's watch, we talked about my boat for a bit and how to go about fixing my loose rudder gudgeon as well as my future prospects. The simple fact is that I need more experience on bigger boats. I can sail my little Boston Whaler well enough on the small lake but there are just some things you can't learn on a day sailer or from a book. Ideally I would find a bunch of skippers and pester them to take me sailing all the time but no one in my area has ever seen a sailboat besides mine when I'm out.

Before this class, I used to say I wanted to live on a boat. Now I am not so sure. The amount of money needed to keep these bigger boats in ship shape as well as physical space and uncomfortable living conditions, especially in winter would leave no room for my other hobbies like astronomy that I've grown quite attatched to. I'd imagine some might say sacrifices have to be made in order to follow a dream, but what if the dream is outdated? What if life's winds and seas make it difficult to reach a destination you've planned for and need to make a course adjustment. I don't get too attatched to goals and plans for this reason. I don't want to work hard getting somewhere just because I didn't know enough about the lifestyle and gave everyone an image I'd have to live up to and then feeling unfufilled in the end. I was most animated and talkative on the boat when I was talking about astronomy and stars so I don't think it's a bad thing to explore this a little more. Not living on a boat does open some things up that I was resigned to living without. Larger telescopes is, of course, the more important one. I still enjoy sailing and the feel of the helm and putting the theory into practice but from what I have seen, the general live aboard lifestyle would start to wear me down after a period of time and I would eventually want to find a way out of it.

We also discussed where I would like to be, since Pennsylvania is out of the question for more reasons than no boats around. I don't handle the heat very well so I don't think I'd stay too far south and I really liked the Chesapeake Bay, preferably Annapolis. Once I get settled there I'd like to find a small boat I could spend a weekend on if I needed to. I'm not sure if I could keep Dawn Puffin down there in the meantime, but she would need to be sold at some point anyway, alas. While ocean passage making may be a grind, island hopping, (or day sailing from river to river on the Chesapeake) is still something I would enjoy.

While being a custodian may not be the most glamorous job compared the other careers taking these classes, being on a low level is somewhat freeing in a way because I can only go up! We talked about just cleaning boats down there, (getting to know them better in the process) and working my way up. Since all I do is clean classrooms now, cleaning boats or working at the marina shouldn't be that much different. The captain knows me well enough to know I like to teach myself everything and suggested several youtube boat repair and detailing how tos. He also suggested getting into sailmaking. It sounds like a very interesting science and something I would enjoy doing if I got good at it.

At this point the first mate told us to be quiet because she couldn't sleep.

During a day watch, I went below to check our heading. We were reeling off the miles so fast we were way ahead of shedule and in a few hours we would hit that reef we wanted to avoid. When I came back up and they asked me how the course looked I said "well, eventually we are going to end up where we don't want to be" which was apparently a lot funnier than I intended it.

Nothing much happened between then and when we sighted land again. I had some more unreasonable difficulty telling a few islands apart but it was easy enough once we were back in the Sir Francis Drake Passage. There was a point where you can see on the water exactly where the waves died down and we sailed down the channel for a while before starting to motor sail. Once again I was "technically off watch" but everyone was on deck now and going below at this phase would just be unfair. Another squall was fast approaching astern and at this point the captain pointed out that he and I were both off watch and could go below! I went below only to grab my jacket and came back up again. The squall wasn't nearly as intense as the last one and was actually very pretty. There was the strangest rainbow on our starboard beam that sort of hugged the water... We could see both ends but it was very low; if it was solid and we headed in that direction we would crash into it.

We were approaching a small bay and I was asked to go below and see how to handle it. There were many marked reefs and rocks and I said just keep the green buoy to port. Apparently this was the wrong answer, go check again and for the life of me I couldn't understand why we wouldn't want to keep the buoy to port. Well, I wasn't told that we wanted to go IN the bay! This is where the customs office was and we had to clear back into the US before finding our mooring at redhook. We anchored and I put out way too much snub line and at this point I was getting tired and discouraged. While we were in the bay we saw the first mate's boyfriend's boat motor by and when we came back from the office she suggested making the tender fast amidships instead of astern so we could board easier. This didn't really make sense but whatever, we tied off and hopped up. A few moments later her boyfriend's boat was astern and she lept aboard leaving all her stuff behind and sailed away. Ah. No one could blame her though, she didn't get much sleep and was as sick as I was and I'd be lying if I said I didn't start to feel like I wanted to get off the boat as well.

We got the stink eye from a french boat in the bay as we upped anchor and motored back to our home marina. A Canadian boat was anchored too close to our mooring ball but they had engine problems and everyone was friendly about it. Since we were a day ahead of schedule the capatain suggested spending the night in a quiet little cove so we weren't going to stay long in the Canadian's way.

The other student and I decided to take our first land showers all week. It wasn't our only shower all week but it was much better than using a hose. As we got clean and dry and felt nice we took the tender back and got caught in the middle of yet another squall, getting soaked through once again by the time we got back to the boat.

Once on board we let go our mooring and motored for Christmas Cove to defrag over night. It's a pretty little cove with a neat rock in the middle of it. All the mooring balls were taken so we had to drop anchor instead of taking the lazy way. If I wasn't already tired of these latitudes and kind of disapointed in my skills, along with the fact that I studied the celestial navigation theory so hard for nothing, I probably would have enjoyed it more. Which is not to say it wasn't a nice spot for what it was! I was just very burnt out. The rest of the crew took a nap down below but I stayed on deck for a while and played around on the internet. After I got bored of that I went down below too and soon after that the captain got up and started washing the dishes "very loudly" so we didn't screw up our sleeping patterns. We hung around until nightfall when we decided to check out the yacht club across the water. They were just closing up but the bar tender let us in. It was a cute little building; I just sat there rocking, drinking a Jamaican grape fruit soda and looking around while everyone else talked about Boston and Detroit.

We came back to the boat and had dinner (an indian insta mix that looked like space food, over rice) while listening to the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou soundtrack. The other student mentioned she felt like we were the interns all week and I couldn't think of a better album with which to close the voyage. We talked a bit about how navy pilots took a lot more unnecessary risks than airforce pilots, how to photograph planets and the capatain's racing boat, Sparkle Pony and went to bed.

We motored back to Redhook in the morning, getting caught between a ferry and a lee shore and after we moored we took the tender back to the Bella. I called a taxi, said goodbye and went to the airport. Aside from getting pulled aside for a "random" search I'm prone to get, presumably because of my pirate like appearence, and being almost certain I was going to be "volunteered" to stay behind because the flight was overbooked by one and my boarding pass didn't have a seat assignment on it, the trip back north was largely uninteresting.

I'm not disenchanted by sailing in and of itself, and in fact I'm very excited to get Dawn Puffin ready this spring, but this will be the last off shore passage I intend to make for a long time. With the watch system and my sea sickness and being so worn out at the end of it, it's too much like work. I don't think the class is worth it, but I don't regret taking it and having the experience. Most people think of sailing as just putting your feet up on deck, reading a book while the cool island breezes coast your boat along to fabulous white sandy beaches and half dressed island native. I consider myself better for being out there, slammed by the waves and getting sick more than once trying to plot a position in the middle of the Caribbean sea, out of most communication ranges where others have never been out of the state and think our miserable little town is the only place in the world. In most cases we would have waited for the weather to change in our favor instead of plowing into it in order to get there in back in time to catch a flight. In a way, it was better for us to take the hard way and know what it's like than go the easiest course possible and get caught by the lee later with our false confidence putting us into danger. I didn't get a shiny sticker but I did at least learn something on this trip. The only downside to this mode of thinking is getting a little depressed coming back to an area with such a narrow minded mentality and no ambition at all to expand their horizons...

I think all I want in life is to sail around when I want to, study astronomy and other mathematically complex sciences a lot more, watch cartoons and drink tea with friends, maybe over a game sometimes. This is something well within my ability to achieve. It may not be a glamorous lifestyle but my philosophy is that it's all the same in the end if you're happy. And if that doesn't work out or something new comes along, I'll change course again and make for some other goal. You just have to be honest with yourself and go with the flow. Have goals and dreams, but if the wind changes, keep your options open.

It's Fun in a Masochistic Kind of Way or Ocean Passage Asventure Pt. 1

The last week of January of this year saw me aboard a sailboat in tropical latitudes. This was part of a two part Celestial Navigation and Ocean Passagemaking class I signed up for more than a year ago, but was cancelled twice for various reasons since. Finally almost everything worked out: there were no serious accidents, no crew members ditched at the last moment, the class was paid for, my flight was booked, I thoroughly understood all the material I was given and instructed to study, my sextant case had a Twilight Sparkle sticker on it and then I didn't pass. Here's how it went down!

The adventure started off with a bad enough omen when I found out at the airport that my flight flew way earlier than I was notified for and was over booked besides. After some waiting and waning enthusiasm, someone finally came to the desk to help me sort it all out. There was only one flight to St. Thomas a day from Newark and there was no way I was going to spend the night there so I went home to try again the next day. After getting out of bed at 3am the next morning (keep in mind my normal bedtime is 2am on a good day) and braving the 3F temperatures with nothing but my tropical foulies and a fleece sweater, I made it on board the plane to Newark. The airport I fly out of is such a hole in the wall, it's impossible to fly anywhere without connecting somewhere else, usually Newark or Philly.

The class included a couple of days of classroom work and the captain said my tardiness won't effect sailing but I'd miss the entire Celestial Navigation review. Since I was so proud of myself for studying this stuff so hard and confident I knew it so well, I wasn't concerned.

After an uninteresting day in the air I finally arrived in the US Virgin Islands where you are instantly greeted by kiosk of free booze samples as soon as you get off the plane. I proceeded to board an overcrowded taxi going to the marina as soon as I found my bag. The first time I've been to this island, I was riding one of these taxis at night with a woman who was certain we'd been kidnapped and were being taken deep into the jungle never to be heard from again. There is a bit of a culture difference down there.

I was instructed to find S.V. La Bella Vita when I got there, and on the pier I ran into the captain I've sailed with on both previous classes. Awesome, we're sailing together this time too! I'm apparently the first student he has taught all the way through the monohull courses. Other students have been through all of them but with different Fairwind captains. He had to go run and get a light for the binacle but told me to make yourself at home; the Bella is air conditioned. On board her I met the owner of the school who I imagined differenlty in his emails, the girl who was to be first mate on our trip and another lady who's significance I've forgotten if it was ever made clear to me. I always imagine people silently judge me at the start of these voyages by my quiet nature and cartoon shirts. Am I going to be one of those students everyone has to do a little extra to make up for my shortcomings? Normally I prove I'm fully capable by the end of day, however. Normally.

The captain came back and we took the tender out to Island Retreat, a 40ft Island Packet I've sailed on before and was to be our home for the next week. She's a heavy boat, designed to take a beating but slow and easily stalled. I met the other student who had just taken the previous class and was once a navigator on military planes. Her dead reckoning skills would later prove to be several levels beyond my own. Interesting person though! She has the same breed dog as I do at home. We made a checklist and went through everything the boat needed for a safe ocean passage. We were missing a small scale chart of all of the Leeward Islands and after taking the tender to several different boats, the captain just bought a brand new one when he got the provisions. Shame to give it to us.

Later that night we went ashore to one of the unique little restaurants one finds on these islands. They always remind me of the informal, outdoor family cookouts in the rural area in which I live. I suppose, in another world, I would enjoy this lifestyle: drinking and playing with boats in the land of perpetual summer. As it is, I don't drink and I don't deal well with long periods of heat. This is not to say I didn't enjoy myself; the live band played a lot of traditional maritme songs I like (as well as some of the filthiest jokes I have ever heard) and the food was good. I'm just sort of a shut in nerd most of the time and I have trouble keeping a conversation with most people. If I don't relate to the company that's one thing, but even if I have everything in common with the person at the table next to me I end up keeping to myself anyway. I'm always afraid people will think I'm having a lousy time or that I don't like them because I'm so quiet, but the truth is I like to take everything in and just go with the flow, speaking only when I feel like I have something worthwhile to add to the conversation. Ponies and such just didn't fit in with the environment and I don't really have many sea stories under my belt that I haven't already spun or they just didn't segue into the current one being told. I did show off my absurd familiarity with the celestial sphere when the School owner asked everyone at the table what planet was currently visible in the sky. Without a second's hesitation or even breaking eye contact I replied with just one terse word: Jupiter. I've been tracking Jupiter across the sky for months now, it was like asking my what that big, bright yellow thing in the sky was in the middle of the day. Needless to say, I got some sideways looks! He was using a star finder app on his smart phone to identify the objects which is not really a bad thing. Of course, when you show off like that, you have to be prepared for the inevitable "ok, smartass, what's THAT one?" The constellation was behind the trees and I had no other points of reference so I had no idea. I guessed Procyon but it was Canopus.

Ok Phano, did you do any sailing on this trip?

Either earlier that day or the next morning we plotted our intended course. The goal was to sail to St. Kitts and return by Friday morning to take our final exams and catch our flights. It's east and a bit south of St. Thomas, maybe 150 nautical miles. (I don't remember thr numbers well) Our extended ocean weather files showed the trade winds blowing stubbornly from the East for most of the trip with a little north in it near the end of the first leg. Island Retreat doesn't sail very close to the wind so we had to plot a bit of a zig zag course. We decided to steam North through the Drake Passage, sheltered from the waves which were consistantly 2-3 meters all week and then sail close hauled to Saba Rock, tack there, avoiding an underwater shelf that would kick the waves up even more, and sail north to St. Kitts on the other tack. We established an SSB radio check in schedule with one of the other captains and let go our mooring by the afternoon.

This is where I started getting disapointed in my navigation abilities. I thoroughly understand how compass fixes and dead reckoning works, but for the life of me I couldn't tell the islands apart and find them on the chart. I'm still not sure why I was having so much trouble with this as I've had no problem doing it the last time I was in these waters both in the day and counting lighthouse flashes at night. It was extremely frustrating and also a little embarrasing. I eventually made a fix I had confidence in and then we started the watch schedule. This is where it all went down hill.

Two things will make me sea sick: long periods of time below deck or at the nav station, and a confused sea where the waves come in no sensical pattern and are impossible to really predict. And when this does happen, I just skip lunch and put down the hand compass for a while until it wears off. Put all these things together, extend their duration and add a stifling cabin with all the hatches closed to keep out the spray and it's total hell. When my watch was finally called four hours later at around 8pm, I told the rest of the crew I was a little queazy and the first mate said she wasn't feeling so hot, either. The watch system was set up so that when I come on watch, I'd be on deck with the first mate for two hours and then the captain for two hours before I make a log entry, update the dead reckoning and pretend to sleep for another four hours. I was offered the helm and a glass of water and as I found the proverbial grove and tried to keep a course as consistant as I could with the waves slamming into our bow, slowing us down substantially, I felt much better and could enjoy the agitated plankton glowing in our wake and on the crests of the black waves. Since sea sickness occurs when your brain has no idea what the hell is going on, steering the boat makes you feel like you're in controll of the motion and it subsides dramatically. Until you are asked to go below to update our dead reckoning with our average course and speed and you come right back up and leap direcrly for the lee rail. In the panic you have to remember to clip your teather on something sturdy to avoid falling over board in the dark while your slumped half over the side. That would ruin your whole night.

At one point someone had given me a granola bar to snack on. I musy have finished half of it and stuffed the rest in my pocket when I needed both hands to deal with a wave. When I got off watch, after coming up on deck one last time.. I just washed the salt off my face the best I could and totally crahsed onto the berth. When I came to again not long after, I discovered your pocket is not the best place to keep a half eaten granola bar when you are trying to sleep on a violently tossing boat. I was reminded of a part in one of the Horatio Horblower novels where the titular character jams a scrap of paper with a magnetic course scribbled on it into his pocket just before boarding a prize ship and regrets it later noting "life at sea is just one continuous crisis." His revelation was a lot less crumbly.

My next watch was a little smoother. It was still night which was completely disorienting but it was a gorgeous night and I think I prefer it over sailing in the day for no real reason that I can think of. I still couldn't eat anything and the nav station was out of the question, however. I felt bad about that because I like that stuff despite realizing I'm not as good at it as I thought I was and, as much as I liked to be at the helm, I wanted to help get the boat where she needed to go in other ways too. We were required to hand steer for at least two hours each watch but I ended up steering the four hours straight because it's the only thing I was physically capable of doing besides hauling a line or two when we shortened sail. (Around sunrise the boat healed over way too much in gusts and we had to reef the genoa- the over sized jib) Even if the autopilot didn't drain out the batteries and could steer better than me (it couldn't) I don't know if I'd use it anyway.

I don't seem to recall the chronological order in which the following events took place. I had lost all track of time and only knew if it was day or night and anything more specific than that was anyone's guess. In the middle of one of my day watches, when the first mate went down below to plot our position and wake the captain, being as sick as I was she didn't stay down there long and lost it over the side. Almost immediately after she sat back down in the cockpit, an enormous packet of water completly drenched everyone on deck and I uttered one of my infamous one-liners I came to be known for by the end of the voyage: "It's fun in a masochistic kind of way." The captain threatened to quote me on the school's website.

At one point in the day, I was technically off watch but decided to stay on deck for a little bit longer and only begrudgingly gave up the helm. I was feeling well enough to have a little food and ate some kind of cold rice dish as we listened to the emergency channel on the VHF radio. Apparently there was a small plane that crashed in the ocean between two islands. We were out of range to help them in time and we were calculating the odds of survival in theses kinds of waves, but about a half an hour later it was announced that one of the mega yacht's tenders from St. Martin came and picked the entire crew up. Everyone survived!

After thirty some hours of slamming into the head seas and getting sick over the side and juuuust briefly spotting land, (presumably Saba) the other student worked out the dead reckoning and determined it would be another twenty hours at least to get to St. Kitts and our current heading put us directly into St. Martin. The discussion to change our destination took all of ten seconds. If we had continued on to St. Kitts, we'd get there in the night and have to leave again in the morning. On St. Martin we could spend a day goofing off or just plain sleeping on a fairly horizontal bed. And if you've ever been sea sick, you'll remember that optimism is not something that you feel very often and another twenty hours of beating to windward wouldn't sound like a particularly comfortable experience.

I think it was the next time I was on watch, at night, that we could see the lights of St. Martin. There were supposed to be several multi colored light houses to guide us into Marigot, but all those fancy aids like sector lights and range markers end up being disapointments in the end because they get completely lost in the city lights behind them. After just plain sailing around for the fun of it (which was a mistake because by the time I was done I was so tired I hallucinated if I didn't concentrate on the glowing compass hard enough) we just used the GPS to guide us into the anchorage. The other student was roused and once again I was technically off watch but I refused to go below because, despite how tired I was, I wanted to help anchor and try to spot the sector lights. We did see one, although how one would ever see it a mile out is beyond me. The next day we looked it up in the guide book and their description is written as "the bay is marked by lighted buoys big enough to sit on when they sink your boat."

Huh.

We doused sail and dropped the hook way out and left plenty of chain. After making sure we weren't dragging, we shut down all our instruments, tied of the halyards and noted down our final log entry for the passage.

This is where I will leave you for now. Next post will cover the things we saw ashore and the trip back which wasn't nearly as trying as the trip down, as well add my thoughts on the whole thing and on life in general.