They say that sailboats and captains in harbour they rot, that's a line from a song I wrote a few years ago about a place called Luperon in the Dominican Republic. Salinas is a little like Luperon with a bay full of boats, some never move, they just swing and sway on their moorings and the place becomes too comfortable to leave. I can see how that happens, you make friends, you know how the place works, where to get stuff, it sort of becomes home, and in a small way that's happened to us.
Tonight though, we are leaving, bound for St Thomas to escape the wrath of the US homeland security, should we dare to overstay our visa.
So this is it, the culmination of all that planning, all those courses, the flotilla holidays in the Med, bare-boating in Scotland, crewing on Hearts of Oak learning to be sailors, or at least learning how to sail, navigate, read the weather and not fall overboard.
There are butterflies in my tummy, I feel excited and anxious, that's how it should be, we've prepared the boat, and charted our course and we're ready, all that's left to do is to stow everything away securely and set sail. It's about a hundred miles, not exactly an ocean crossing and we'll be in sight of land the whole of the journey and Picaroon is a well found vessel, we just hope that all this work and preparation will carry us safely to our destination with no nasty surprises.
Yesterday we fitted a new bank of batteries, six in all, for our house bank, the batteries that keep the lights on, chill the beers and lift the anchor. They're important, and for the last four months we've been nursing the old ones back to life but in the end it will give us peace of mind to have this new set. They live in two boxes underneath the cockpit floor, three in each box and they're incredibly heavy. Just one takes some lifting, in fact I don't lift them, I just about struggle to move them along the deck wiggling and walking them to the hole they live in. The old ones came out one at a time with a block and tackle, the new ones went in with help from Ian, our South African friend, on Solvesta, which we did in the dark of Friday night with the aid of some cold beers and a flash light.
Although we've got this fancy electronic chart plotter on board we've taken the precaution of buying one of these new fangled tablets and downloaded some other charts called Navionics. This will serve as a backup should our Garmin fail, and we've also some old fashioned paper charts, so we should know where we are and where we're going. Jackie has been pouring over Bruce Van Zants', A gentlemans guide to passages south, the Caribbean cruisers bible as well as checking the info on a website called Active captain, and has plotted our planned course, revised it, reviewed, it, made a plan A and a plan B, I'm not sure if we have a plan C.
So that's it, we will sail over night to avoid the strong easterly winds that blow in the daytime, because that's what all the advice says, but it will be our first voyage in the dark. The idea is that you sail overnight and arrive at the next anchorage at dawn, or if it takes longer than planned you arrive in the daytime anyway. That way you can eyeball the hard bits that stick out of the water, called reefs, sometimes they don't stick out but in the daylight you can see the breaking waves. The only night sails we've done were on a couple of courses, in Scotland and Wales, in the Firth of Clyde and the Menai straights. Both of these only lasted about three hours and were so close to land that there was a confusion of buoys, street lights and car headlights. This short voyage will be under a moonless sky with hardly any lights at all.
The forecast is for light south easterly winds, and at an average speed of four knots we should make St Thomas by Tuesday, or Wednesday, all being well. We've been a bit bumped into making this voyage but it's time, time to test ourselves, and Picaroon and begin the adventure that we dreamed of way back in 2008 when we bought the wellies for our start yachting weekend.