That Sinking Feeling

The morning sun was just beginning to make a showing across the dark night sky, dusting the mooring field of Wallilabou Bay in purples and pinks. Headset on, engine warm, we whispered through pulling up the anchor in the pre-dawn light. The air was still.

Minerva anchored and tied stern-to-a-tree next to the mooring field in Wallilabou Bay, St. Vincent 

The boat boy that had agreed to come out at this ridiculous hour was quietly floating alongside Minerva on his busted up paddle board, his two small dogs sitting on the board with him, looking up curiously at Chloe. He had freed us from the shore and I had just stowed the really long stern line.

The air was still and eventually all of the anchor chain made it back onto the boat, the echoes of the chain through the gypsy the only noise in the bay. I secured the anchor. Lance put the boat in forward gear and then... KERTHACK WHAM THUD THUD THUD. Minerva shuddered. The birds took flight.

Lance slipped Minerva out of gear and popped open the engine compartment and reported over the headset "We're taking on water. Lots of it".

Sure enough. The shaft had somehow shifted away from its rightful place and water was spewing in.

Like a caped superhero, Lance leapt onto the warm engine and started to wrestle the shaft into its rightful place. There are normally 4 bolts holding it into place, now there was only one but he found the missing 3 in the bilge. I slipped past him and opened the tool compartments to produce the tools that we needed as he shouted his list. I was handing him the last socket wrench and a big rubber mallet when the wind popped up. It was sudden and strong, and blowing us down into the mooring field where the other boats slumbered. Of course, it would have been helpful if it had been blowing us out to sea, but what fun would that be?

In Wallilabou Bay, it's deep all the way up to shore. We had dropped our hook originally in 70 feet of water and then backed in, had a boat boy tie our stern line to a tree on shore that was about 50 ft away. Now we were at least 200 feet from shore and the water under the boat was at least 90 ft deep. I dropped the hook, pulled out all the dock lines and deployed the fenders on the downwind side. The boat boy was still hanging around on his paddle board, I handed him the longest line and while he paddled to shore with it I extended our stern line by tying one knot after another as fast as I could; 6 lines later we were tied to a new tree on shore and no longer a threat to the other boats.

Re-stowing the line locker post-disaster

By then Lance had 3 of the 4 bolts back on. The 4th just wouldn't go. We caught our breath while timing the slow leak, then tentatively fired up the engine and put her in gear. There was a small shimmy, and the pace of the small leak held steady. We put her in reverse. Smoother, no leak. We had an appointment to keep with the government vet for Chloe's clearance (hence the reason for starting the venture at such a ridiculous hour), the wind was good to sail us there and the leak had slowed to a trickle so we re-released the stern line, paid the boat boy a bonus, and made our way to St Lucia. We set an hourly alarm to count pumps with the manual bilge pump, and after 6 hours of checking agreed it was not leaking worse than before.

It was hours after we were underway before we really noticed the burns Lance had received from his engine hug. Open wounds. Not too serious and easily treatable but best to avoid contact with tropical seawater until healed. So no diving in St Lucia for us.

Pigeon Island near Deshais, Guadalupe is home to Jacques Cousteau's national park

Martinique, Guadalupe, and St. Martin followed. Eventually Lance was able to get the 4th bolt on but it fought him all the way and didn't feel like it was happy there. We monitored the situation regularly and while the leaking remained minimal and steady the new prop shimmy was unsetting. We decided to get professional help before heading across the open Caribbean sea or into the lonely Bahamas.  A damaged prop or propshaft could mean a haulout and a potentially lengthy or expensive repair and we started strategizing our options this close to hurricane season.

Our good friend Ton was in St Maarten and dropped by, and much to our relief pointed out that the part that was damaged is meant to be sacrificial, its job is to protect the engine from prop or shaft shenanigans, and the bolts were simply loose. So it did its job but gave its life. In a rare stroke of luck the replacement part was readily available at the local chandlery. The shaft was not damaged. One beer and an hour later, Minerva was back to 100%.

The sacrificial part. It's clearly visible why the bolts didn't want to happily go back in place.

We are once again free to roam. And it's time to high-tail it out of the hurricane zone. We are still undecided in which direction we will go, but are definitely feeling the need to get moving to somewhere safe for the season.

Imposter Syndrome

We sailed out of Curacao under a stiff wind, almost exactly on the nose. Somehow, impossibly, just like we came in.

The first rays of sunrise illuminate a wet deck and safety equipment at the ready. Jacklines lead from the cockpit to the bow and tethers keep our life vests connected to the jacklines in such a way that if we do fall, we fall ONTO the boat instead of off of it.

The first night we lost track of our boat buddy Bliss in a squall. Sometime later in the night we noticed the mainsail was shaped weirdly because the foot of the sail was working its way out of the boom track, before we had a chance to fix it the outhaul shredded and snapped loose. The big winds and steep waves made it just too much to attempt to solve any of it safely in the dark and so we decided the best course of action was to take down and secure the mainsail until we could get some sunshine on it and make a plan. The beauty of a ketch is that in high winds she often performs better with just the headsail and mizzen sail, ketch sailors call this "running jib & jigger" and Minerva is quite comfortable this way. I clipped to the jacklines, crab-walked/crawled out to the mainmast, pulled the sail down and secured it while Lance watched from the wheel, calling out warnings for the bigger waves so I could pause long enough to cling to the mast or boom until it was safe to take one hand off again and resume sail wrestling. Sail secured, I crawled back to the safety of the cockpit, unclipped and passed out until time for my watch. The morning light revealed a half dozen problems with the mainsail and boom, all of which would have to wait for a calm day at anchor before being addressed.

The rivets that keep the metal plate on the end of the boom end perished, and the metal plate came off. We found it on the deck before it went overboard, fortunately. Without the plate in place, the lines were able to escape the little troughs they should live in, chafed and shredded.

Then the autopilot died. We tried some basic troubleshooting but in the end resigned ourselves to hand-steering and shorter watches for the duration of the passage. Good thing we meal-planned for one-handed eating on this passage.

On the third day the wind shifted a bit behind us, we flattened out the boat and flew into Christiansted like a rocket, our Curacao flag still flying because it seemed too unimportant to hassle with in the rough conditions, short-handed as we were with the manual steering. It was somewhat shredded from the season and the long ride in. We didn't take it down until Minerva was resting on her anchor alongside our buddy boat. Our American flag at the stern was every bit as shredded.

 

There were already a couple of other sailboats anchored with Bliss. One of them was a beautiful charter boat named Kai. Shortly after we had settled the bureaucracy, removed our tattered Curacao flag and hoisted the USVI flag, the crew of Kai came over and gifted us with some fish from their freezer. Rather than let it thaw while getting some work done they shared the bounty. This is the cruiser way.

The happiest view - finding your long-lost buddy boat at your destination

They told us they had been scrabbling to figure out our Curacao flag, wondering what far away lands we had sailed in from, and how they were hoping we would anchor our "real sailboat" out by them so Kai and her crew could share the anchorage with the other "real sailors".

When they said those words I looked around and it took me a moment. "Oh... you mean us? Real sailors?

Our hair and skin is salty. Our mainsail is secured tightly, obviously done on the fly but done properly nonetheless (not to mention one-handed while often airborne). The dog is still wearing her life jacket and anxiously eyeing the frozen fish - she recognizes the way they zip-seal her favorite meats in the Caribbean. We are yawning but nonetheless going about our business settling Minerva after a long passage; tidying lines, securing sails, checking the chafe guards on the anchor bridle.

They're talking about us. I scratched my salty eyebrow and blinked the resulting salt from my eye. I suppose we are real sailors.

Huh. Wonder when that happened.

Goin' to shore for the first time after a long passage - this is the face of a very happy sailor dog