So, suffice to say Luperon had got very old, and we were both relieved to finally pick up our anchor. In the end my work there dragged on for a full month more than we anticipated, and friends left the anchorage ahead of us themselves on eastern courses. We did of course maintain the normal Christmas customs, pancakes in the morning, big feed in the evening. Gifts tended towards the creative, rather than the valuable! I bought Kel a 2000 piece jigsaw for her 32nd birthday (right old bird), not knowing anything about puzzles, and we spend the best part of two weeks trying to get it done without success. In the end we packed it up in chunks and will restart it when we’ve stopped moving.

In record time we made it to Puerto Rico, where we pulled in to pick up an extra 20 gallons of diesel, before rounding the south western tip of the island and motoring though the night to the Spanish Virgin Island of Los Palominos off the eastern coast. The next day we motored the final 20 miles to the US Virgins, and pulled into the port of Charlotte Amalie, dropping our anchor just beside Alicia and Brian on Sarabande. We had an amazing time with the guys and also caught up with Mike on Gaia, and Sussura.

This week we arrived in the BVIs, and became legitimate citizens again. We’re currently anchored by Village Cay Marina in Roadtown. We were here in July with mum and dad, and it’s been nice to get some familiar drinks, and chinese food – what a luxury! We’ve got online and touched base with the families, and generally relaxed knowing that we’ve done the hard part already in getting this far.

Our next plan is to move to St Martin, the next island down the chain, to look for some more work. Sadly our work in Luperon didn’t turn out as planned, both of us earning less than we agreed at the beginning of our contracts, and we don’t have enough in the kitty for our planned trip to New Zealand. So we’ve re prioritised and plan to work for the next 4-6 months in St Martin in preparation for an 18 month cruise to New Zealand. Our boat needs a few extra pieces of equipment before we cross the Pacific, so our budget includes a mix of those things along with our living expenses – we’re currently managing to live off about $700 a month.

Kel and I remain astounded by the incompetence of the British Government’s naturalisation department. Kel applied to have her citizenship ceremony in the BVIs last summer and was given a date at the end of September. She was due to be in Panama at the time and was unavailable for the ceremony, but was told swhe would be contacted in the new year when a new one was scheduled. She went to the office this morning to discover that they had one last week and didn’t contact her! Hopefully they are going to provide her with one on her own next week to get it finished. We’ll believe it when it happens.

So we’re planning a weekend of snorkelling and reading, followed by a citizenship ceremony and then a trip to St Martin. Beats Luperon anyday.

 

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.

It felt like survival out there. Leaving Luperon was really hard. In our last few days there Gaia and Sarabande had arrived in the anchorage, and for a few days the 8 of us, including Tom and Karmen, hung out loads and swapped tales of our various trips since we were together in Turks and Caicos. Doubt about the way forward has been gathering in Kel and my minds since we arrived in Luperon as we worked out how little funds we have left and kicked around ideas for work in the next few months.

To top that off we met Luc and Andresa. Luc is a French catamaran builder who arrived in Luperon 14 years ago on a trimaran he built himself in Brazil. Sadly Andresa moved to France with their two daughters during our first week here, but we would love to spend a season relaxing with Luc.

Suffice to say leaving Luperon was a hard decision, and I think we only actually left because we’re meeting mum and dad in Tobago at the end of June.

Pulling out of the anchorage at 6pm on Monday we both felt there were some ominous signs. Chris Parker, our weather over SSB radio guy, had been struck by lightning on Saturday night and was out of action until Wednesday, so we’d only a 2-day-old forecast to work with from him. Added to that Bruce Van Sant, the author of what has become our favourite sailing reference book ‘The Thornless Path to Passages South’ was out of town on Sunday morning and didn’t do his usual forecast.

It was hard to decide whether it was only the sad feelings about leaving friends, but after the first hour or so both of us were in low spirits and weren’t enjoying the conditions. The winds were scheduled to be 7-13 knots, with 3 to 5 foot seas but already the winds were significantly higher and with an easterly swell to motor into we were only making 5 knots or so.

Aside from making slow speed the first night went as expected. Hugging the Dominican coastline we gained some protection from the night lee and at noon on Tuesday we were pulling into a sheltered anchorage at the eastern tip of the north side of the island where we jumped in for a quick wash and made some food for that evening’s passage. And that’s when things started to break down a little.

When I went forward to drop the anchor I realised that the pin that locks the anchor to the deck fitting had been bent by the force of waves crashing over the bow. I deployed our secondary anchor and then got working on removing the pin. I lashed the anchor to the deck with rope and thought nothing more of it. At about 5pm I was down below making dinner and Kel was at the helm just rounding the cape before we headed south down the eastern coast and crossed the Mona Passage. Kel shouted for me and as I ran up on deck I realised that she’d heard the anchor break lose and that we were in the process of losing 300 ft of chain and a very expensive 45lb anchor in the middle of the ocean.

Fortunately the chain jammed in the locker door about 200ft out and with some quick thinking and two pairs of bruised hands we managed to get a halyard onto it to prevent any more from heading over the edge. We were both amazed by how heavy the anchor and chain were in rough seas, the load increasing dramatically as the bow oscillated with each wave. It was obvious we were not going to pull this in by hand and would need to setup a winching system.

Thinking on the fly we rigged a system where we could tie a line onto the chain at the bow roller, lead it though a block on the toe rail at the shrouds to our largest cockpit winch. With one of us winching and the other tailing we could bring in about 20 feet of chain at a time. It took us over an hour to get the anchor back above the water and on deck. Shattered and emotionally downtrodden we decided we would continue down the coastline in the night lee before heading out to see at first light on Wednesday morning, at this stage we’d motorsailed for over 24 hours and only made about 100 miles.

The winds helped us out through the night and we both felt fairly good about the Mona, a difficult passage that causes problems for boats of all sizes in the wrong conditions. But when we tacked north east to head out to sea the winds died and we realised that we weren’t going to manage to sail across and thus would eat into our limited fuel much earlier in the journey.

It has to be said at this point that my maths really isn’t as strong as I think it is. We’d bought additional diesel cans in DR increasing our capacity to 55 gallons, and knew that our engine uses about a gallon an hour, thus we could motor for 55 hours. Our normal motoring speed is about 6.5 knots, and so we had a tank range of about 360 miles, which for a passage of 370 miles seemed fine. What we hadn’t considered was that (a) our boat speed would be much closer to 4 knots, and (b) whilst the journey was 370 miles in a straight line, the conditions would require us to tack back and forth along the coastline, increasing our distance travelled.

We stopped the engine for 10 minutes at 9am on Wednesday to review the charts and discuss our options. With only 35 gallons of fuel onboard and making about 4 knots we could motor for 140 miles in a straight line, certainly enough to cross the 70 mile Mona, but nowhere near enough to make it to the BVIs, and our intended landfall of Tortola. The sea conditions were perfect for the passage though, and if we turned back to refuel could we guarantee that we would be able to cross tomorrow? We couldn’t, and so opted to press on and decided that should the wind fail to kick in we would contact the US Coastguard and request permission to take on fuel at the other side. By tea time that night we’d made about 70 miles to the north east, and were more than halfway across the Mona.

Through the night we tacked again and were really fighting to sail at any angle with an easterly component, in the early stages only managing about 170º, although during the day this improved to about 140º. At 11am, about 15 miles off the Puerto Rican coast we radioed the Coastguard and requested permission to motor to San Juan for fuel. Thankfully they were sympathetic and we switched on the engine and motored along the coastline the remaining 65 miles.

Again we made much less progress than expected, at despite a projected arrival of 8pm we pulled up to San Juan Bay Marina at 11pm to be met by two US Customs and Border officials.

 

(heading out to sea for St Thomas, but I’ll finish this tomorrow.)