I'm sitting in the main salon of my boat tied up at the Blue Water Marina in Bimini listening to the sound of lapping water, distant music and the thrumming of a boat's generator one dock over. At least tonight, I'm still awake past nine. Last night I was dead to the world at this hour.

I made my first overnight passage alone and nothing went wrong and I wasn't scared out of my wits. Partly it was due to my own ability to dream of the worst. I can be pretty negative when I think about all the things that might go wrong. But in a sailor, that can be an asset. I remember one time when I was sailing with a fella and as we were returning to his boat, I saw that it was heeled over and cross-wise to the wind. I said, "Look, I'll bet we're aground. Did we check the tides?" We jumped aboard and I went below to open the tide program on my computer and he checked the depth finder and found we had plenty of water beneath us. It was just the current holding the boat sideways to the wind, which then was heeling us over. He said to me, "You're so negative! You always think of the worst that can happen."

Guilty. It's true. I do. But much of the time, by thinking about the worst and planning for it, I avoid some of it.

Friday morning, I ran the dog ashore in the dark, and then came out and boarded a boat made ready for departure. But I still had to get the outboard off the dinghy and the dinghy into the davits, so it was 7:00 by the time I was motoring out through the narrow cut in the reef, dead into the wind with the full main up and flapping. The swells were running about four to five feet, and in the cut I was headed straight into them and the boat was rearing up and slamming down with horrendous crashes. I just kept hoping that the next slam wasn't going to be onto something solid. The dog was terrified of all the noise, and there was nowhere he could run. It seemed to last forever because we had to get far enough offshore to clear the next reef, lovingly called The Boilers. Finally, I was able to bear off.

It was a lovely close reach for the thirty miles down to Hole in the Wall, but as the wind kept increasing, I finally had to throw a reef into the main. My boat develops way too much weather helm with more than 15 knots forward of the beam. The Autohelm was making some ugly noises too, so I steered for part of every hour to give it a break. When we rounded the corner and turned downwind, the fun part stopped. Without a spinnaker or a drifter, going downwind is the pitts. The boat slowed from six knots to three and the jib became useless. The swell was too much for wing and wing. I shook out the reef and tried sailing on main alone with a preventer to avoid a gybe, but still, I wanted to get to Bimini before the fourth of July. So back on came the engine and I was able to add the lovely odor of exhaust to the hot, rolly, ship dodging motorsail across the Northwest Providence Channel. The joys of sailing.

Just at dusk, around 8:30, we were off Little Stirrup Cay and I nosed my way in to see if we could find protection there for a few hours sleep, but the wind had too much east in it and the swells were wrapping right into the anchorage. I turned off into the night and told the dog, "Sorry buddy, it's gonna be a long night."

And it was a black night. We were out of the main shipping channel, but I still worried about pleasure boats and fishing boats. It was so dark it was difficult to make out the horizon. At one point I was startled by something that seemed to light up the whole sky to the south, and it was just a shooting star or meteor, but the sky was so dark, it looked brilliant. At midnight, I switched on the radar just to check and I saw two targets nearby, within four and six miles, but there was no sign of any lights. Thinking about the possibility of hitting some unlit boat, I decided to leave the radar on the rest of the night. The moon was supposed to rise around 2:00, but there was so much haze on the horizon, I didn't see the little sliver until nearly 3:00 and it did little to lighten the sky until 4:00. By that time I was wondering why I hadn't brought some Red Bull.

Dawn was sweet. There was no lovely sunrise thanks to the haze, but I could see the horizon and I felt I had a chance of seeing something before hitting it. Yeah, that's thinking negatively, but hey, it's darn creepy motoring along at six knots all alone in what looks like a black void. But it's also exhilarating and awe inspiring to be out there under so many stars completely on your own.

Well, there was the dog. And come dawn, oh what he problem he was. He had finally agreed to go to sleep in the forepeak around 2:00 after driving me crazy in the night, but at dawn, he woke up and decided he wanted to go up to the foredeck to do his business. I had him on a 15-foot tether that allowed him access to the cockpit and the forepeak, but he couldn't get out of the cockpit. I walked him up to the foredeck on his leash, but he looked at me with that dopey dog grin that said, "This is fun." I said, "No play, go pee-pee." He looked at me. See, like a person, he demands his privacy. So, I took him back to the cockpit. He tried to get out and go forward again. I couldn't let him go up there without a tether and I didn't have a tether long enough to send him up there alone. Finally, I crawled into the forepeak berth, opened the hatch, stuffed him out there on his leash, closed the hatch and waited. He looked down through the plexiglass and knew I was there. He wouldn't do anything. I was ready to hand him out a magazine! The things I do for that dog. Finally, he peed and managed to do it all over his leash.

I arrived in Bimini at 11:00 a.m. and tried to anchor on a coral pan bottom and even dove on the anchor to try to set it, but it just couldn't dig in and with 15-knot winds, I finally came into the marina, exhausted, but happy that through imagining all the terrible things that could go wrong, very little had. And boy, after only one beer, did I ever sleep well last night.

Fair winds!

Christine

Comments [4]

The time has come to say good-bye to my summer sail through the Abacos. I have been down here at the southern end of the sea of Abaco going into Little Harbor and enjoying beers and the company at Pete's Pub - and going out and anchoring off of Lynyard Cay and snorkeling and playing fetch with my dog Chip on the long empty sandy beaches. It has been a glorious five days.

I caught up with my friend on CIRCE and we got together with the folks on HOT LATTE-TUDES and snorkeled on the reef off the southern end of Lynyard. They found three conchs and that evening, we enjoyed a lovely dinner aboard with cracked conch, conch salad, rice and peas, fried plantains and fresh mango. I caught up with the ARTFUL DODGER in Little Harbor and together with Marlene, another solo woman sailor, we explored the caves at dusk with a flashlight spooking each other out. At Pete's Pub, I met Stanley from Cherokee who told me stories about lobster fishing and what it is like to stick your hand into a hole and have a moray eel clamp his teeth on one of your fingers. And snorkeling off a little protected reef, I saw a baby turtle with a shell about a foot and half across asleep on the reef, and when he took off on his slow and gentle flight it was magic. In the span of an hour, I saw him and a sleeping ray on the bottom and a pair of amorous lobsters enjoying their dark hole. And last night as I put my steak on the grill off the stern, a pair of dolphins surfaced and blew not two feet off my stern and they proceeded to swim circles around my boat as Chip barked at them. In the past few days I haven't written as much as I would like on the book, but I have lived well and gathered memories that will work their way into my fiction one of these days. A day spent on the reef is never a day lost.

So now my alarm is set for 5:00 a.m. when I will run the Intrepid Seadog to shore for his last leg lift and then I will hoist the outboard, hoist the dinghy in the davits and hoist the anchor. The cut through the reef here is only about a tenth of a mile wide and I'll have my laptop out in the cockpit on the seat with the GPS NavX running and I'll make my way out to the open Atlantic. The weather forecast is for only 8-10 knots of wind, so it may be a motor sail. I have a little more than 150 miles to cover. I've prepared everything I can think of and now I am enjoying an evening glass of wine and then to bed. It will be a 30-hour sail, at least and I'll see if I can stay awake and if I can coax the aging pup to pee on the boat tomorrow night.

I'm excited. My greatest fears? Ships and falling overboard. I have fashioned a line to trail that will be tied to the power cord to my autopilot. I always wear my safety harness, too. But I know myself. I got myself one of those fancy PFD harnesses for this trip. It's got this high collar in back. I hate it. I always start out with the harness and then as it gets hot and itchy, I often abandon it. I get cocky. I've sailed tens of thousands of miles and I've never fallen overboard. The thing is, nobody who ever fell overboard though that it would happen to them. It's always a surprise. I've considered gluing a piece of salami to the stand-by button on the autopilot in the hopes of teaching the Intrepid Seadog to go for the salami should I go overboard, but it hasn't worked out yet. In the meantime, I'm going to force myself to sweat it out with the harness. Someday, I think I would like to sail across an ocean by myself. Tomorrow's 150-mile sail is just the beginning.

Fair winds!

Christine

Comments [1]

I've been sitting on a mooring in Hopetown Harbor, Elbow Cay for about five days watching all the boats come and go here in this very busy little harbor. There are ferryboats, fishing boats, dive boats, dinghies, charter boats, and cruisers. The harbor is so small and tight with moorings, they don't allow anchoring. As soon as anyone gets settled here, they become part of the crowd on the boats and in the waterfront bars all watching the next guy to see if he knows how to pick up a mooring the proper way.

This is an aspect of boating that I really dislike. It doesn't matter if a guy has been boating for three months or thirty years, he figures he is in a position to laugh at the next guy who comes along. Now, I am using the male pronoun here because it is mostly guys who do this, however like all generalities, there are exceptions to the rule. But the fact is, boating is a male dominated sport and while the men sit around and make fun of everyone else, they then turn to the women in their lives and ask them why they don't want to give boating a try. Well, duh!

I've been sailing for more than thirty years now, but the other day a fellow gave me a lecture on the proper way to tie a line around a cleat and he told a story about a woman who just couldn't learn to do it right. The relationship fizzled as a result. I'm sorry, but there just isn't a proper way. Yeah, there are ways that will cause the lines to bind under extreme pressure, and it will make it difficult to free that line in a hurry. Sometimes, when I want a line to hold for just a few minutes, I just circle it around a cleat a couple of times - and for what I want in that moment that works. Like most beginning sailors, I once read all the books on how to do things, and I have evolved ways that work for me. There are so many different ways to do things on boats, and I just don't like this idea that you must do something BY THE BOOK.

Years ago when I sailed down to the Marquesas in the South Pacific, we arrived to find a small red Chinese Junk anchored in the bay at Nuku Hiva. We later met the Brit singlehander on board and he went by the name Eric the Red. He was on his second circumnavigation. He had no money and when he left Panama he had sailed to Cocos Island off Costa Rica in the hopes of provisioning with free fruits and vegetables that he foraged. He didn't find as much as he'd hoped and with a boat that did 4 knots at best, he had been some 40 days at sea and when he'd arrived, he'd been eating the barnacles off the bottom of the boat and he looked like a POW. Eric didn't do anything by the book. He was writing his own book. Literally.

When I was married, my husband and I built a 55-foot sailboat from a bare hull. I was there in the boatyard every day working on that boat, 365 days a year for 3 years. We sailed that boat for 14 years and I used to ask to learn how to dock her. He always said to me that his boat couldn't take my learning curve on docking. In all those years, I never once docked the boat.

Here in Hopetown, I have watched bareboat charterers take five or six tries to grab a mooring. Yeah, there are better ways to do it than that, and they will learn, but we all were once there on that learning curve, and if you want to learn, you have to be willing to allow for mistakes and for other ways of doing things. I don't mock them or feel superior because I know I may very well screw something up tomorrow. Maybe it's my nature as a teacher, but I just don't get off on sitting around with a drink mocking others in order to make myself feel superior.

These days, I sail alone on my own boat and I am enjoying every moment of my learning curve. I have learned to dock without disaster most of the time, but tomorrow morning I have to go to the Hopetown fuel dock and I make no promises. I follow few of the rituals of the sea and most traditional sailors would not call my boat shipshape. I do lots of things my way. Here in this rather snazzy harbor, I've been rowing my inflatable dinghy because I need the exercise, and because I have no seat in the dink, I use a big fender. My dinghy also has a hole in the bottom that I've tried several times to patch - most recently with 5200 - and it continues to leak and I'm always ankle deep in water. I bail it with a super shooter squirtgun. Not exactly by the book.

So, like Eric the Red, I am writing my own book. I think that's what makes the cruising community so interesting. And next time you're sitting in a bar laughing at someone who misses a mooring or who gets pinned to pilings by a cross current, think about the people around you and how many of them are either saying, "forget boating" or, like me, "someday, I'll get my own boat and do it my way."

Fair winds!

Comments [3]