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.
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