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] | | More

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] | | More

There are people who have written to me and asked about the snorkeling and diving in the Abacos and they have tried to remind me that the beauty of this part of the world is all under water. They are right. I can't argue that point. However, that isn't why I am here.

I have to go to work every day. Okay, sure, I am in paradise if you are a sailor and a diver, but the fact is that I must finish this book. I know people who live in some lovely places in the world, but they insist on placing their desks away from windows or distractions of any kind. Writing isn't easy in the best of circumstances, and most of us are quick to leave the project at hand for the slightest reason. I decided to come over here this summer to get away from the distractions of every day life and find a quiet anchorage where I could write. What I didn't think about is how much power my computer would require.

I am the sort of writer who likes to work for AT LEAST eight hours a day. I talk to myself and pace and search the Internet for details. Now, I am on a boat running my laptop through a 200 watt inverter and it is sucking my batteries dry. I have three solar panels and a wind generator and often I find myself having to shut down because my batteries are crying UNCLE. Normally, this just means that I should start the engine to charge the batteries, but recently I've had issues with my engine overheating.

I am not a mechanic. My eyes usually glaze over when sailor guys start talking about diesel engines. But, hey, I need the juice to write. Suddenly, solving this raw water flow issue has become the center of my writing existence. I was down bent over the engine for the last couple of days pulling off hoses, checking the raw water strainer, pulling off the water pump and looking at the impellor and examining the diagrams of the raw water system in my engine manual for hours. Now you have to realize that these were hours that I should have been writing, but I can't write if I don't have the amps.

Finally, I figured it out. The wingnut at the top of my raw water strainer was leaking water out and I figured if water was getting out - then air could be getting in and I fashioned a gasket out of some gasket material I had and presto - water was flowing, the engine was cooling, the batteries were charging and I could write.

It's a domino effect on boats, but once you find the root problem, the sense of accomplishment is as sweet as the rum drink you allow yourself to toast the cure.

Fair winds!

Comments [0] | | More