Sailing to St. Martin � A Near Miss!!!
03 January 2008 | View of St. Martin from Fort Louis
As with the last 2 days, we left our anchorage in Virgin Gorda Sound at 7 in the morning. The day was clear with white-painted clouds set in a gorgeous blue sky. We sailed north to round off the north end of the island, passing Saba rock where we had moored a few weeks earlier. Only one other boat sailed out of the harbor at that time but we lost sight of it quickly as it was a large ship, most likely larger than 80 feet. As predicted, the winds were light - 10-15 knots - and to our pleasant surprise the angle of the wind to our sails was almost perfect, coming from the East/North East and fluctuating during the entire trip between 30 degrees (for a close haul) to about 90 degrees (for a beam reach). We were awed as we had heard many bad stories about this trip that most of the time has winds coming from the East and counter to the currents. This passage is called the Anegada Passage - a difficult passage because of the conditions that are most often encountered.
Kikuyu "beamed with happiness" and sailed all the way to St. Martin in 12 hours, averaging over 7.0 knots which is a fantastic time for our boat as most vessels making this passage fight currents and wind and take over 18 hours to make the trip with waves pounding on their bows. We spent the 12 hours mostly on deck, enjoying the great sailing, the views and expecting a landfall around 6-7 PM where we hoped that Marigot Bay in St. Martin (the main harbor) was not too dark. As we approached the harbor we realized that in addition to being a great sail the trip had been "uneventful". As we had mentioned in one of our blog entries, in sailing there is always something going on that one must tend to - from easy things to difficult and sometimes risky & challenging things.
As it is customary for us, as it got dark we were all in the cockpit looking ahead for traffic and for the lights leading the safe entrance into the Bay. Maria got out of the cockpit to get a better view as we were having difficulty screening out the navigation lights out of all the hundreds of lights from the boats at anchor and houses surrounding the bay. The entrance to the bay was amazingly clear of traffic in sharp contrast to what Maria had experienced in her sailing course before when coming in this harbor at 4 AM and there were many cruise ships and other boats waiting for daylight to make the entrance to the island. When, all of a sudden, we heard a panic-stricken loud scream from a man that sounded as if he was in imminent danger. We all scrambled quickly to look for the source and there it was.... right in front of our bow, perhaps 20-40 feet away, a fisherman in a tiny little boat, with no life vest on. He was holding his net which we assume he had been busily setting or retrieving before he noticed out boat. He did have a small light on his boat that we are pondering how we did not see unless he had just turned it on before screaming. Kim quickly got behind the wheel, tried to steer Kikuyu, which at first did not respond because it was in auto pilot (a device, comparable to cruise control in a car, that steers the boat to a magnetic course), pushed the button to take the autopilot off and steered the boat into the wind and away from the man's boat and his net. We missed the fisherman by an arm's length and saw his jaw dropped down to his chest and his disfigured face as our boat's wave pushed his small vessel away. We were shocked! Our faces where long and we had almost no expression on them, saved for Daniel who was able to say to the fisherman "we are sorry" as we left him behind. We had heard stories of boats hitting containers or whales but not many about nearly running into fishermen. We have been aware that fisherman in small boats can be a danger but, in our experience, most often they are fishing at day light and/or not in the busy path of a bay at night. Our shock lasted for the next few days as we made all sorts of speculations of what would have happened to us had we run into that poor man.