A cruising sabbatical
January through December 2005
April, 2005. A beach in Bequia, one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been. Mary is as usual searching the bright white sand for her treasured emerald nerites. I am as usual tagging along, not doing much of anything, daydreaming. Next thing I know I have a stick in one hand and a stone in the other and I am batting pop flies into the sea.
Baseball season is beginning at home, and though there are no discernable seasons here in the Lesser Antilles, and in fact I don’t even like baseball that much, some biological clock has announced to my little muscles that in Fenway Park they’ve started to play ball.
You can take the New Englander out of New England, I think, especially if it’s to cruise for a year in the Caribbean, but you can’t take New England out of the New Englander.
Our hailing port reads “Kennebunkport, Maine,” though Skye, our 37-foot Island Packet cutter, has never been north of Chesapeake Bay. When cruising in the Caribbean, we get very excited when we see boats from New England, which we frequently do. After all, lots of New England sailors do this Caribbean cruising thing in one way or another, and those who aren’t doing it wish like hell that they were.
We took the easy approach. Year-long leaves of absence from our jobs meant we had something to go back to; we didn’t sell the cars or the house; our only pet died of old age before we left; and since our boat was already in a bareboat charter operation in St. Thomas, we didn’t even have to get her down there.
So if you want to talk to someone about hard-core tropical cruising, someone with serious miles under their keels, someone who has learned a thing or two, then talk to New England cruisers like Beep and Ed Grimley (Points East, June 2006) or Neil, Stacey and Liv Collins (next month).
We just wanted to live on a boat for a year in a warm climate and see exotic places and learn how to dive and meet some other cruisers and read a lot of books and toast endless spectacular sunsets.
So that’s what we did.
Climbing aboard Skye at American Yacht Harbor in Red Hook, St. Thomas, was something of an anti-climax after all the months of planning. We’d lived this moment countless times as we prepared provisioning lists, created graphics showing where everything on the boat would be stored, studied charts, read cruising guides, and mercilessly interrogated veteran cruisers.
When we climbed aboard Skye, she was pristine, in charter mode, and not yet equipped for serious cruising. We liked to think that was what we were about to do.
By the next day, she was littered with parts and tools as our friend Chuck Schweikert helped us install a Kiss Energy wind generator on a Kato pole on the stern, a couple of 64-watt panels on a rail above the bimini, battery monitors, a regulator and heat sink, a water purifier, a new stereo. The Kato dinghy davits, the Icom single-sideband radio and the Raymarine chartplotter had been added earlier. We installed the beautiful teak screens we had ordered from Teak Concepts and mounted the new 15-horsepower Yamaha outboard on the new mount on the stern rail. A sailmaker made us some awnings.
I unwrapped all the new tools that the Mack Boring diesel instructor had suggested I might need – including two torque wrenches that remain unopened and a collection of old dental tools I had begged off my hygienist at home in Maine. We unpacked all our books.
Then we went grocery shopping while we still had big Gringo stores available. We figured we’d eat tuna fish sandwiches twice a week for a year so we bought 104 cans of tuna. We ate the last of it one year later. We also did well on dish soap.
We added stuff and then more stuff. Then one day we left dock, and the feeling of having a year spread before us, a year in this tropical paradise, a year on this lovely boat, a year to do whatever we pleased whenever we pleased, washed over us in a great exhilarating wave.
We went west to the Spanish Virgin Islands, to Culebra and to Vieques, which is no longer bombed by the U.S. military but at that time was still studded with unexploded ordinance and the corpses of old tanks planes and trucks that had been their targets. Against the warnings of signs (Peligro!) we explored the interior, following the tracks of wild horses. If they hadn’t gotten blown to bits, maybe we wouldn’t either.
We enjoyed huge protected bays and white sand beaches and didn’t see another boat for days.
In Puerto Rico we were deeply touched by the friendliness of the happy people and the beauty of the land. We sailed west to La Parguera, where we started to meet the cruisers who had come from the mainland U.S. via the Dominican Republic. We climbed El Yunque and felt like great explorers.
Back in St. Thomas we added more stuff and fixed a few things then dropped south to St. Croix for a week. We cruised with friends in the Virgin Islands then waited with other cruisers in Gorda Sound for a weather window. It was time to leave the comfort zone for parts unknown.
On March 31 at 3 p.m. we left Gorda Sound on a good forecast and at 5:47 the next morning anchored in Marigot Bay, St. Martin. In a men’s room ashore a local told me it would cost me $5 to pee. Tough and punchy after a night’s passage, I told him to go to hell. Instead he went into one of the stalls and slammed the door. He was the worst pest we met in our entire year in the Caribbean.
We sailed north to Anguilla, then bounced down the Leeward Islands under day after day of hot sun, through aquamarine seas, propelled by winds that spent most of the time at 12 or 15 knots out of the east and southeast. Log entry April 13: “7:10 a.m.: Statia sighted hard on port bow. Lovely day.”
7:30 a.m.: Sandy says ‘what a beautiful day’ for the 3299th time.”
Between St. Kitts and Nevis we hooked our first fish, several of them, and lost them all.
In Antigua we added more stuff, including heavy-duty trolling gear. Mary flew home for a visit and I soloed to North Sound on the north end of the island for a delightful week in a remote anchorage with a very large barracuda for company.
At Dominica we followed a Rastafarian guide seven miles through the jungle to the Boiling Lake. At Guadeloupe we hiked to stunning tropical gardens and rock-hopped way up the Deshaies River to a waterfall.
In May we started listening more closely to weather forecaster Chris Parker (caribbeanwx.com) on the SSB and studied weather maps on the computer to track the tropical waves that were coming off Africa and bringing wind and rain squalls to the Caribbean every few days. A few of these would eventually develop tropical characteristics and become hurricanes.
For insurance and good sense reasons, we needed to be at least to Grenada by June 1, so our aimless sailing started taking on a purpose. Our dawdling had left us at the back of the pack. On May 29 we ran into fellow Mainers Stacey and Neil Collins at Les Saintes and the next thing we knew they were reporting on the SSB from Venezuela.
We rushed through the lovely Grenadines. We were out of the hurricane box by July 1, but just barely.
We canceled diving lessons in Canouan as Chris warned that one of those tropical waves was developing into something bigger and threatening the northern Caribbean. We stopped in Carriacou to help for a couple days with an archaeological dig, but by then the tropical system had become tropical storm Emily.
On July 12 we sailed down the windward coast of Grenada in calm seas and into one of the biggest frights of our sailing lives.
After anchoring north of Hog Island in Clarke’s Court Bay we learned that Emily was coming to Grenada and could well develop into a hurricane along the way. We chatted with local boaters and with Wayne and Susan on Daydream, the only boat anchored near us. We poked here and there around the bay looking for good protection. Local liveaboards said go here, don’t go there, and the advice was useless. We were on our own.
We ended up backing into some mangroves, laying down two anchors and taking five lines ashore. In sunny, still weather we stripped the boat.
We packed bags to go ashore, locked the boat, and jumped in the dinghy. When we realized we had nowhere to go we returned to the boat and waited.
And waited.
A kind of pre-surgery dread snuffed our appetites and our thirst for anything but water. There was absolutely, positively, nothing left to do but wait. It was out of our hands. What a strange sensation.
Darkness fell and we went below. It was a still, clear night. At 8:30 I talked to Chris Parker on the SSB and he told us we were going to take a direct hit on the south coast of Grenada. At 10 p.m. nothing had happened. A little while later Emily became a hurricane. Still nothing happened.
At midnight I talked myself into believing that somehow the storm had gone elsewhere. I logged onto the NOAA site. Hurricane Emily was now about 10 miles east of us moving at about 10 knots. Unbelievable.
At 1 a.m. Skye took the first hit from the easterly wind and leaned over, straining her lines. But they held, and I figured that if they passed he first test we’d be OK. We found a local radio station playing oldies and turned the music up loud. Very loud. At about 2 a.m. the station was blown off the air. We put on a CD and turned it up louder and nestled together on a bunk. We may have even slept. It was never uncomfortable.
At first light I stuck my head out. Skye had moved about 10 feet back into the mangroves but was undamaged. Out in the bay, where our friends on Daydream had chosen to lie to four anchors, not 100 yards away, their big aluminum sloop hobby-horsed violently in 50-knot winds and 6-foot seas. Around Skye, the water hardly rippled.
We had lucked out. The highest winds in our area had hit 110 knots on a ridge, 80 to 90 at sea level. Our friends had a night from hell, dragging, cutting anchors loose, catching lines in the prop, forced to wear masks and snorkels so they could breathe in the rain and wind, soaked to the skin and cold.
Later in July we had Skye hauled at St. David's, Grenada, and we flew to Maine for a short visit. On Sept. 16 we left Prickly Bay, Grenada at 5:30 p.m. and sailed west under a full moon for Los Testigos, a couple of remote islands that are most cruisers’ first contact with Venezuela. Chris Parker forecast a low that would pass well astern of us. Weather wouldn’t threaten again.
We avoided the violence of Venezuela by staying in the outlying islands, still managing to get scammed for about $1,600 in Margarita. We enjoyed lovely downwind sails in light breezes. It didn’t rain. The sun shone. Beautiful dorado and football tuna took our lures. The islands were spectacular, but time was running short.
At tidy Bonaire, from which most of the other cruisers continued west toward Honduras, we turned right and sailed alongside our friends Jim and Michele on Wind Machine to Puerto Rico. It was a sloppy three-day motorsail during which we ran low on fuel and suffered from the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning from an undetected leak in the exhaust elbow. We were probably saved by the three-hour watch schedule, which brought us outdoors just in time.
At about 9 p.m. on Nov. 9, we dropped anchor in Ponce, Puerto Rico. We still had a couple of months to go, but now we were back in familiar territory where we had visits planned from friends and family. We were close enough to the end to dread moving off the boat. No matter how we tried to deny it, our year-long sabbatical was winding down.
Mary flew home for Christmas. I had vowed to celebrate Christmas on the boat and did just that, all by myself, with a nice sail down the Sir Francis Drake Channel and a Christmas dinner at the Maho Bay resort restaurant.
Back in St. Thomas, I stripped the boat of all our gear and prepared her to return to charter. How could one entire year have passed so quickly? Had we learned, grown, changed? You’ll have to ask friends and family. Had we spent a lot of money? Probably. I don’t know, because I burned all the receipts I’d been saving.
Were we happy to be home? Sort of. But we missed the boat terribly. Cars suddenly seemed terribly dangerous. We sold our Kennebunkport home and moved to a little house in Portland a few blocks from the ocean.
The other day we got an email from Jim and Michelle. They were planning a trans-Atlantic in 2007. Would we like to join them on Skye?
Our year-long cruising sabbatical faded in significance as we considered the new challenge. A month has gone by, and we’ve yet to answer their question.
Sandy Marsters is former editor and co-owner of Points East Magazine in Portland, Maine.
