Some moody skies over Luperon

Second coffee of the day,  just sitting in Capitan Steve’s place ruminating on what has been an amusing two months in Luperon since our return. Actually I’m punching the keys of my new Asus EeePC netbook which is proving to be a fantastic investment, super-portable for the pocket, no more fighting over which movie to watch, and we’ve got a dedicated Windows machine to run our navigation and communications software on that doesn’t pollute our beautiful Macbook. Sadly the Macbook’s beauty is beginning to fade after just 12 months, grey screens every other day, arrow keys that don’t work, and a few bruises here and there. It seems that $2000 laptops do not belong on sailboats regardless of how pretty they are.

For the last week we’ve been partying like it’s our last night in town because several of our friends in the harbour are getting ready to move on at the first opportunity. That looked like it was opening up 10 days ago, and then every day since there’s been another squall line coming through, or a northerly swell, keeping people in port. I’m starting to feel like I can’t keep up with it… It’s also been great to have Tom from Ellida back, although Karmen doesn’t return for another month, and we’ve picked up some great friends in Dave and Danielle from Azure Mist (aka Loopy), Mark from Opal, and to reconnect with Mark and Karen from Sussura.

Leaving well has definitely been the hardest aspect of our sailing life to come to terms with. On land you concentrate on choosing the date and time, you pack your bags (for us 5 mins before departure) and then jump in the car. We rarely worried about traffic even in Belfast because it’s such a small city. On the water the weather dictates 90% of your decision-making, and the boat makes up about another 5% – some days she just doesn’t want to go, throws a fuel filter at the last minute or you notice a damaged component, and you are reminded that you’re the third in line in this relationship.

Hurricane Bill moving towards us...as Kel was planning her passage north from Panama!

So for the last 10 days we’ve been socialising in the evenings, open mic night in Shaggy’s Bar, sundowners on other boats, sundowners on our boat, karaoke… and during the day we watch people get their boats prepared and do the final fuel and provisioning runs. My musical talents are somewhat stagnant, but these piano lessons will hopefully pick things up a bit Rocket Piano. What’s emotionally difficult is that you can work solidly every day for  a week to be ready, and then when that day arrives your two senior officers (weather and boat) can veto your exit. It’s really hard to stay in a state of readyness without just wanting to get going regardless of conditions.

Alicia's 30th birthday party

Team Sarabande (aka Brian, Alicia, Louis and Stevesy) found themselves in exactly that situation last night. Some of our finest cruising friends, and people we desperately hope to stay intouch with forever, they’ve been working really hard for over a month to leave D.R. bound for the US Virgin islands to pick up some work. Brian and I have a 7am coffee date every day to listen to the weather forecast and talk crap. Last night they came to visit us at bedtime to say goodbye for the last time, due to leave at 3am. I woke up this morning and saw that they hadn’t left in the middle of the night as planned as the boat had taken longer to ready than they’d expected. Good on em I say, it’s so hard emotionally to ‘go back on your word’ once you’ve said your leaving, but it’s considerably worse to head out when you’re not feeling ready and get a hiding. I’m slowly learning to just not say when we’re leaving, until the anchors up and we’re motoring out to sea.

Having fun at the waterfalls.

Another lesson I’m learning is not to have an opinion on where this ship might be going.. not for weather, nor the ship herself, but for the captain who overrules me anyway. Whilst the generic ‘you’ is third in command, the ‘I’ in this case is most definitely fourth! Sailing is slow travel, and cruising even more so. In the last year we’ve had so much fun in places we really didn’t expect it, and little fun in places we had high expectations, so in firming up the plans for the next season of cruising we’re approaching it with new eyes. The first fresh perspective is how fast we like to travel, and contrary to life on land (Kel has now two outstanding speeding tickets in the USA) we like to go slow! So in the spirit of go slow we’ve provisionally reduced the scope of our travel plans for next season to just the south western corner of the Caribbean, Columbia to Guatemala.

We’ve a fresh perspective on the budget too. We’ve both managed to earn some lovely pennies in Luperon that will help us extend our trip for another year. But what we found during this year is that our money tended to vanish when we were near civilisation, or at least Walmart, and didn’t run away too fast when we weren’t. So we’ll avoid Puerto Rico (Walmartville) and we’re giving up the credit cards in lieu of cold hard cash.  We were not only astonished by some of our Visa bills this year, but also screwed by those sharp suited currency traders on a number of occasions, cash just can’t catch you out in the same way.

Anzuelo's still trying hard to be the cutest cat on the block.

Keli spent the month of August in Panama attempting to deliver a boat from Panama to New York for a guy we met through Luc called Alejandro. A charasmatic Spaniard who knew little about sailing, and it became clear later was a little light on the facts about the boat’s condition. She can tell the story for herself, but basically the boat left Panama three weeks behind schedule because Alej was still moving out of his apartment, registering the vessel (that he had owned for a year and that is a legal requirement), fitting an autohelm (that was promised before Kel arrived) and a host of other jobs including moving on a full sized desk! Kel and our good mate Mike from Gaia gave it their best shot but ultimately Sawasawa, a 1976 Del Rey 50, was not seaworthy and they had to pack it in. It’s for sale at the minute, but we’d advise against it even if Alej paid you his asking price to take it!

In Kel’s absence I concentrated on learning some Spanish and work at the factory. We’re still taking lessons, and just last week started meeting with Pierre and Florence from Venus and Natalie from P’tit Louis for 2hrs of Spanish conversation. Today we learnt that insults in Spanish are a little different.. my personal fav was ‘I defecate on your mother, who incidentally was a commercial sex worker, and who birthed you from her bottom’ – nice huh?

Only Brittney elicits this level of passion.

Dennis and Pat arrive this weekend for a two week visit so boat projects are in full swing. I’ve been working on installing the new alternator on the engine and am about half way there on the bracket, with the belt and pulleys to come. We’ve fixed the backstay tensioner – the backstay holds the top of the mast ‘back’, and the tensioner allows us to manually control the tension (this sailing lark aint hard). We modified the storage under the sink to allow for some additional order in the cleaning products department and to keep our ziplock bags in one place – ziplocks might just be my favourite invention. D & P will not only bring us a suitcase or two of goodies, but their arrival prompts us to get the boat ready for sailing and reminds us of the tasks that need to be completed before we leave Luperon. We plan to sail up to Turks and Caicos for a week or so with them and then spend another week traveling in D.R.

We haven’t really got stuck into tourism in the D.R. yet, but we did have an amazing trip to the waterfalls near Luperon when our excellent friend Andrew Iverson was in town. Brian and Alicia (s/v Sarabande) joined us and we hiked up over, under and through 27 waterfalls with our two Dominican guides before turning around at the top and jumping and sliding our way back down. Absolutely invigorating, we’re going to do it again with D & P next week. Other than that we’ve travelled to Santiago and Puerto Plata, two cities about 40 km from Luperon, and spent two nights in Cabarete, a tourist-orientated surf resort down the coast. I did pay $245 RD (about $7 or £4.50) for a can of Guinness when we were there which was more than a little excessive, but it’s been a while and felt worth it.

The Good (read: mad) Ship Brian: he's smokin'

So that’s an update. I’ve got most of October off from the factory which is great. I’m really not at the stage where going back to 40 hrs a week is appealing. We’ll keep at the boat projects this week and then enjoy our time with Kel’s folks before I get back to that. Kel has been teaching Thai massage to a couple of friends in the anchorage two days a week which is cool, and she’s also exploring a couple of options for delivery jobs in the next 6 weeks or so.

She also wanted the world to know that her hair is it’s own natural colour for the first time since 1987.

Boat projects are resuming with a vengeance in Luperon, and they need to. On Sunday we tackled the first of our larger items that we’d saved for a day free of interruptions, our starter motor. Our starter had been a little delinquent in Puerto Rico, but it was never a complete failure, just took a couple of times to fire up. In the Virgins however it descended and by the time we were coming West again we were starting the engine with two screwdrivers, crossing the terminals manually. It wasn’t damaging anything, but there was sparks and drama every time. Having consulted the oracle (read Nigel Caulder) we suspected that the contacts in the solenoid were worn, and so under the supervision of Olivier on P’tit Louis I pulled it out and gave it a refurb, complete with pictures below.

Firstly you remove the starter from the engine. In the Perkins it’s held on with three 17mm bolts, isolating the batteries and removing the electrical connections from the solenoid first. Once those are out of the way and the bolts removed it just slides right out, down into the bilge to get past the oil filter and then you can pull it vertically out of the engine room. The access to our engine room is pretty challenging, so I’d advise an hour of yoga before you start to get you prepped. Also in D.R. right now it’s above 35 degrees in the middle of the day so bathing in talc might assist with the sweating. When I was putting the starter back in I found myself completing electrical circuits on the engine block because I was so sweaty. A little tingle on the back of the hand keeps you fresh.

Once removed from the engine disassembling the starter is very simple. First remove the solenoid by disconnecting it from the starter at the copper strap that supplies the current and the pivot bolt that the solenoid acts on. It just pops off.

As soon as we opened the solenoid it was obvious what the problem was – which it great! The copper contacts for both the solenoid and the starter were knackered, hence the ‘sticking’ was actually the electrical contact not managing to supply the necessary current to either component. Olivier whipped out his static grinder, on the compulsory tools list for many a boat (but not ours), and we polished the contacts back to bright and shiny. The main power stud was designed to be reversible, so we spun that 180 degrees and it was literally good as new.

Solenoid repaired we then opened up the starter. It looked in great condition, but we pulled a trick right out of Nigel Caulder to give it a freshen up. You take a hacksaw blade and grind both sides of it to make it straight, rather than the original staggered blade. We then cut back the insulating compound between the copper contact points for the bushes to make sure they were fully insulated from each other. After that we wet sanded the copper, and again it’s gleaming and smooth.

Finally we greased the gearing for the starter and put it all back together. A 2hr project that’s brought the starter back to excellent working condition. And it’s dead easy, made even better by the amazing support from Oliver and a boat full of power tools!

Normal blogging will resume this week, and I’ll try to maintain the balance between the technical and the cultural!

 

A possible new crew member for Beannacht, he's on seatrial tonight.

Meet Anzuelo, which means fish hook in Spanish. We’ve been talking about a ship’s cat for a while and met another cruiser on the dock this morning who’d found Anzuelo by the roadside yesterday. We decided we’ll give him a day or two on the boat to see how he does and if he seems happy then we’ll take him to the vet for his shots – and just in time for my dad’s visit too, perfect!

It’s been a big week for work on the boat. We’ve taken out our leaking window and spent hours trying to separate the perspex from the aluminium frame. Age and salt water has fused the bolts in place and whacking them with a hammer appears to be the only solution. I brought the window to shore today to vent my frustrations and met Judith a local who’s been living at the marina for four years and has a Jeanneau, which is a similar boat to ours. Within about 10 minutes she’d called a local perspex supplier and arranged for us to go tomorrow to have a replacement window made for $36 – amazing! She’s even going to drive us there and back. Our windows are fairly heavily crazed – they’re covered in tiny horizontal cracks that reduce their transparency – and so I think I’ll replace both windows even though I actually only need to do the starboard side.

Otherwise we’re good. Not managing to write much because not much is actually happening. Essentially we’re using the time before mum and dad arrive to get some jobs we’ve wanted to do, done. We’re really excited about the arrival of our first visitors, sharing some of what our life looks like these days with people we love was a big part of the dream from the beginning.

Off to show Anzuelo the litter tray, but there’ll be daily updates of his progress from here on in!

PS> we’re struggling with a batch of baby houseflies who apparently like the sailing life at the minute. Kel’s allowing her less refined personality loose with the fly swatter, potty mouth and all. Anzuelo will have to sing for his supper, so to speak.

Beannacht tied up beside Johnny Depp's boat in San Juan. There's been a fuss all week about town and here's me thinking they'd heard we'd arrived.

Some days blog writing feels like hard work, or at least a low priority.

We’ve been in San Juan for over a week now, and it’s fair to describe it as a regrouping. The short take on the second part of the arrival story is this:

So having arrived in San Juan at 11pm we were met by two US Customs officials who drove us to their clearance centre and processed our passports. I didn’t have a US visa in advance, hence the need to contact the Coastguard, but amazingly they were able to issue me with a one off discressionary visa that is valid for a 6-month stay here. We were both knackered and at 1pm got back on the boat and slept till the morning.

So over a week later we’re still here and beginning to get our shit together and think about mum and dad’s arrival at the end of the month. Old Tom and (older) Hazel have very generously (like they had a choice I’m their eldest son) booked flights up to the British Virgin Islands, meaning that we’re only about 80 miles away and have a couple of weeks to regroup and put some more energy into the boat. So far we’ve not had much luck with visitors, the only other attempted arrival was Mike Toner and we didn’t arrive on time for him either… we’re working on it, but these sailboats just don’t travel as fast as I’d like.

 

Our leaving party at Luperon, Luc hosted the gang and we had a blast.

My 30^th birthday came and went on Saturday and Kel organised a few little celebrations to mark the occasion. Firstly a pancake breakfast with homemade applesauce – what’s not to love? Then a trip to a local car dealership to collect a Harley for 24 hours. Not a bike I would own, but a bike all the same. We went to the rainforest about 30 miles east of San Juan and stopped for ice cream or coffee every 30 minutes to give Kel’s ass a break. Harleys are not designed for passengers apparently, or the average Harley pillion is sterile, or perhaps should be sterile for they’re rarely pretty.

It’s been fun to be back in a big city again for a couple of days. We went to the mall for a few ‘essential’ items (read things we don’t need and can’t afford), and went to see X Men in the cinema, we hadn’t been to the cinema since Vancouver. It’s funny to look at the posters advertising what’s on and not recognise most of the actors never mind the movie titles. We’re similarly out of touch with most world news, although we do manage to follow most of the Lions stuff, which is great.

 

Stu's birthday breakfast

And so back to porridge, or rather Cornflakes with yogurt and honey. We started our list of ToDos that we want to finish before mum and dad get here. Today was taking out our starboard side window to fix a leak, and tidying the cockpit. Then to Starbucks for some Internet to watch the Lions game before some research on electricity – to buy a generator or not to buy a generator, this is the question. Or at least it was today.

 

Walmart saw us coming.. again.

Actually to buy or not to buy has been applied to almost everything in the last month or so, sadly the pennies in the bank are small in stature and we’re having to cook up some ideas for income generation to keep the sailing dream alive beyond the summer. A combination of our fantastic ability to spend money, underestimating the cost of setting up a boat for cruising, and the pound getting killed by the dollar for the last year, brings income to the top of the priority list. One of the reasons we’re really grateful for mum and dad changing their travel plans is that it buys us a couple of weeks to think through where we should go next. We’re both really committed to staying on the boat and either working where we are or working over the Internet. I’ve been developing an idea to provide remote support for organisations in Northern Ireland in creative writing – report writing and website copy – and Kel’s researching resorts that she could offer Thai massages at – without the happy ending. We’re both a bit nervous about the whole thing, but nows the time to stick our necks out and get on with it.

 

Logan's Irish Pub, a poor excuse for an Irish bar if ever we saw one. There's been no Guinness in Puerto Rico for 4 years apparently.

Anyhow, turning 30 has renewed my commitment to running, I’m off to bed so I can get up for a lap of Old San Juan in the morning.

Monday 23^rd March

We arrived in Georgetown on Great Exuma Island on Friday, planned to coincide with a period of stronger weather that we wanted to take shelter from, and of course the need for internet to watch the Ireland vs Wales match on Saturday. Georgetown marks the most southerly destination for many US and Canadian boats that spend their winters cruising, and we’d been warned that cruisers are herded like sheep with a tinge of military precision – perhaps related to the fact that so many Americans cruising are ex-military.

We navigated through the masts searching for a good place to drop the anchor and then I headed to shore in search of internet and a new inverter to replace our West Marine one that died for the second time. I found an amazing little wifi shack called J&K Productions that provides wifi for $5 a day or $15 a week – instead of the $10 a day we’re used to paying – and got connected to read the pre-match stories and check the bandwidth for iPlayer. With the main mission accomplished I collected Kel from the boat for a quick walk on the beach nearby and a beer in the tiki bar.

Since we last posted we’ve travelled from Norman’s Cay through some amazing anchorages and mooring fields – Shroud Cay, Warderick Wells, Cambridge Cay, Samson Cay, Staniel Cay, Black Point and Lee Stocking Island.

Warderick Wells was a particular highlight; it’s one of the main islands that make up the Exuma Cays Land a Sea Park, a protected area of 176 square miles where fishing and shell collecting are prohibited.

The mooring field at the north end of Warderick Wells is postcard perfect, although our little camera won’t do it justice. A crescent shaped bay sounded by islands on all sides, with a narrow deep channel no more than 10 metres wide arcing from the north inlet down to the southern end. The water colour was such a deep turquoise and the contrast of the drying sand bar at low tide was stunning. We walked some of the trails on the island and on one longer walk Kel met the island local mammal population – the Hutia. Hutia are like overgrown gerbils, a cross between a guinea pig and a rabbit, and as long as there’s even one palm leaf between you and the Hutia they’re content to watch you and sniff the air as if you can’t see them at all.

     

The park also provides dinghy mornings beside many of the best snorkelling spots so that you can visit them without damaging the seabed with your anchor. We spent a couple of hours every day diving on the various reefs and caves. At Cambridge Cay, ten miles south of Warderick, we swam into two caves on Rocky Dundas that were full of stalagmites and stalactites.

Harrington pulled off one of her amazing ‘tell little lies to get myself into more trouble experiments’ in Warderick which was very funny. We had stayed the night previously in Shroud Cay on a mooring ball and not visited the island to pay our $15 mooring fee into the honesty box – my fault I admit. On arrival at Warderick Kel went ashore to pay for our mooring there at the park office and had the following interaction with the office manager who is an amazing helpful woman:

OM “you were at Shroud last night”

K: “yes”

OM: “on a mooring”

K: “no at anchor” (beginning to turn pink)

OM: “oh, cause the warden knocked your hull and he was pretty sure you were on a mooring, did you anchor in the mooring field?”

K: “yea….we were close to the mooring field”

Kel came back to the boat totally embarrassed and relayed her story. Naturally I laughed hysterically, as I am doing now, and then asked her why she didn’t just say yes we owe you $15 for that. I went back to the office the next day and confessed that it was my fault that we hadn’t visited the honesty box and that Kel was trying to keep me out of trouble. By the end of our stay Kel had plucked up the courage to go back to the office to look a their book collection and buy another reference book for tropical fish and reef life – all was forgiven.

We’ve had some maintenance and repair issues on the boat in the last couple of weeks, and one of the reasons we came quickly to Georgetown from Samson Cay was to attempt a repair on our roller furling which gave up the ghost en route to Samson. The furler allows us to keep our head sail up all the time and just roll it in and out as and when we need it. Without it we have to drop the sail entirely and store it down below. It also makes sail adjustments a two person process, which isn’t great for longer passages. We had been struggling to furl in our sail at Shroud Cay and realised that the problem was the long aluminium extrusion that runs the length of the forestay and which the sail is fed into had cracked about 3 feet up from the drum at the bottom.

We knew that it wasn’t in great shape as it’s as old as the boat, but we certainly weren’t expecting it to expire in the first two months of cruising. The Bahamas has an import duty of 40% on all items so we’re going to attempt a repair to limp to somewhere like the Dominican Republic before ordering a new furler. They cost over two grand as it is without adding the import duty and shipping – we could be penniless pirates before June at this rate, something that’s provided it’s fair share of anxiety in the last week or two.

In another more straightforward fix I got our sail repair kit out in Samson to redo some fraying stitching in our mainsail. It takes about an hour per foot of stitching, which feels like an eternity, but once done the main is good as new (or good as a 23 year old sail) and I was feeling quite proud of myself.

Samson and Staniel Cays provided a few days of good entertainment. Firstly we took our dinghy to shore on Big Majors Spot to meet a herd of wild pigs that live on the island. They’re clearly smart hogs because on our first attempt, arriving with no food in hand, only one showed up and spent less than 3 minutes with us before deciding we weren’t worth her time. She trotted back up the beach and lay down in the sunshine. Better prepared we thought, we returned the next day with some scraps to feed the lads. A full compliment of pigs this time, but again our food offerings were apparently below their normal. They stayed and chatted for a couple of minutes, but before long went back to their sleeping positions in the shade of trees. It was still amazing to meet them and watch them interact with each other.

 

Just off Staniel Cay is Thunderball Grotto, named after the James Bond film that it featured in. Thunderball is a tiny island that’s been carved by the sea into a main cave with a large domed roof that the sun pours through to illuminate seabed and fish inside. At high tide the entrances to the cave are submerged, but once inside you can surface to get air and snorkel down a number of rocky channels that are filled with fish. Again it’s a no-take area for fishing, much like Exuma Park, and the increased number and variety of fish life is noticeable.

On land by Thunderball Grotto we walked on Staniel Cay to dump some trash – I have to say I’m depressed at how much waste we produce in as little as two weeks on the boat – and take a walk round the island. Staniel is small, but it does have three grocery stores and we took a walk to two of them to check out their supplies. Miss Flo runs the Pink Pearl Supermarket and we had a very funny interaction with this energetic lady in her 70s who could sell snow to Eskimos. We collected two bottles of (very expensive) Guinness for Paddy’s Day the following day and some conch and fruit for the boat. After we left the shop Kel remembered that we wanted to go the ice cream shop on the island and so I ran back to get directions from Miss Flo.

I walked into the store and posed the question, to which her response was “There’s the ice cream shop right there”, pointing to her freezer. I laughed and said “no, but there is an actual ice cream shop on the island isn’t there?” to which she replied “yes, there’s the ice cream shop right there” again pointing to her freezer. She finally conceded that there was another ice cream shop on the island but told me it was about a mile away near the airport. I thanked her and Kel and I walked round the corner, only to discover the ice cream shop three doors up. Very funny.

We celebrated St Paddy’s Day in style with some new found cruising friends from Canada, Australia and the States, no Irish to be found at Samson I’m afraid. Nathan and Tayanne have been on a similar route to us since Nassau and anchored beside us in Samson along with Ben who is single-handing his boat. On the way back from the shops on Staniel we’d also met Alan, Tony and Doonya who were anchored just off Big Major’s by the pigs. The guys joined us in the afternoon for poopoos – a Canadian expression for pre-dinner snacks like cheese and crackers – and drinks and we finished off the evening with some Bushmills and a nice Cohiba cigar.

So back to Georgetown, and rugby. We tucked ourselves into the web café to catch some of the France Italy game and check the bandwidth for the connection. Thankfully it was really good and we headed out for some lunch and a walk before we came back for the Ireland match. The nerves were phenomenal and we sat huddled by our laptop with our headphones on to catch the commentary. What a match, and what  lucky sod Paddy Wallace is! We were so sad not to be in Holywood with the folks or down in Lisbellaw to be shouting at the tele – we were there in spirit!

Due to weather, and our broken furler, we’re in Georgetown for the next few days. And then on to the outer islands, the Turks and Caicos, and then towards Dominican Republic. I’ll get some more blogging done this week tho before we leave.