Sailing the Caribbees

May 3, 2014

Bahamas and the rest

We're sliding along under power on a nearly flat sea off Long Island on our next to last day of our 6-month journey. Somehow procrastination has gotten the best of me and I've lagged in my journal updates. So, before its too late, here's a look at our adventures in the Bahamas and the return trip home!

We arrived from our passage from Puerto Rico to Clarence Town, Long Island in the SE Bahamas and spent only two nights and a day there. While there, though, we got a chance to swim in one of the Bahamas legendary blue holes. Dean's Blue Hole has the distinction of being the world's deepest known seawater blue hole. This is the site where many international freediving competitions take place. We had it all to ourselves late in the afternoon and all went for a dip where the white sand perimeter spills steeply down into the vast crater. This blue hole is quite small in diameter but goes straight down over 600' and is reported to open into a cavern going down over 4000'. None of us found out how deep.

On our way back, we stopped along the side of the road in the settlement of Mangrove Bush where some of the Knowles family, well known for their boatbuilding in this area, along with a group of other locals (some helping but most sitting around chatting and drinking) were working on their Bahamas A class sloop and readying it for the annual regatta being held in Georgetown this year. The Knowles family has been well represented throughout the 60+ year history of the annual regatta, with most of the wins coming under the command of the late Rupert Knowles, known as one of the Bahamas leading Boatbuilders in his time. We were able to meet his son and one of his grandchildren who were finishing up a new boom and had just painted the new enormous mast replacing the one broken in a tangle with another mast in last year's regatta. These sloops carry about 14 crew, used mostly as movable ballast; they sit out on planks extended on the windward side to keep the boat flat. These are full keel boats, wood plank on frame built of mostly locally sourced wood (except the spars - Spruce from the NW US) with huge towering masts and booms that go on forever. They carry an enormous mainsail and a small jib - no spinnakers - it's all mainsail. Unfortunately we were north of Georgetown when the regatta was scheduled and missed out on an exciting event.

Our next stop was Georgetown on Great Exuma. Georgetown is a very popular stop for cruisers and one that seems to catch quite a few who decide there's no reason to venture further. There are numerous anchorages within a few miles of town and endless slices of white sand beach to explore. As a result, there's a cruisers net on the VHF every morning where people keep in touch and keep abreast of when and where the next beach barbecue is happening. We did not spend much time here but met a few kids from some other boats for an afternoon of waterports and playing. We also ran into some friends from Newport, Patti and Roger Martin, who were cruising on their little Presto! A perfect little speedy pocket cruiser they trailered down to Florida and cruised across in. They were shooting off to the Jumentos Cays to do some exploring around those shallow cays where you were very unlikely to see anything resembling a crowd.

Our time in the Bahamas being short, we sped 50 miles north of Georgetown to Staniel Cay in the Exumas. We anchored at a spot called Big Majors, known for its resident pigs who are fond of swimming out to your dinghy begging for food. Apparently this provides no end of amusement to folks so that there's a constant stream of people coming over from Staniel Cay and the surrounding area with people shrieking and laughing as the pigs surround them snorting for food. Inevitably many scraps end up floating out of reach and litter the water as they wash out with the tide. Whoever cares for the pigs till slaughter has obviously got a good thing going.

Around the corner next to Staniel Cay we explored Thunderball Grotto, of the James Bond Thunderball. The grotto is in the middle of a small cay where you swim under the lip of the cave and into this magnificent grotto filled with fish and coral. Here, as at the beach with the pigs, the fish are well accustomed to being fed by humans and school around you inside the grotto. The quality of the coral, quantity of fish and clarity of the water made the snorkeling around the outside of the cay some of the best we've had all season.

From Staniel Cay, there were so many places to explore along each cay going north every few miles but unfortunately they'll have to wait for another trip. From the time we entered Dotham Cut a few miles south of Staniel Cay from Exuma Sound, we were now sailing on the Exuma Bank with the Cays protecting us from the easterly trade wind swell and depths averaging between 10 and 20 feet deep, the water was flat and an unreal variety of blue, and the wind was strong and steady - perfect sailing! Our next stop was Waderick Wells in the Exuma land and sea park. This is where we really experienced the most brilliantly "gin" clear water we have ever seen! I had always heard about how beautiful the water was in the Bahamas and after spending the winter in many different anchorages in the Caribbean with clear blue water and perfect beaches I was expecting just more of the same. I mean, how much more beautiful can beautiful be? More beautiful! Unbelievably better than postcard beautiful. The color contrasts and varied shades of blue to white were beyond description. The snorkeling here was fantastic - absolutely the best we've had this winter. In addition to the water clarity, the abundance of marine life was spectacular. They seemed to know they were in a marine park and that we were not allowed to catch them. Huge spiny lobsters were stuffed into every crevice in the big coral heads, large grouper swam close by, eagle rays, huge parrot fish, queen angel fish and very healthy colorful coral kept us in the water until we were too cold to continue. The cays themselves are very dry and scrubby with mostly thatch palms and other succulent desert type plants growing out of the coral rock and petrified sand dunes. We spent one afternoon hiking around the trail network seeing mostly birds and lizards, the latter of whom had a particular affinity for perching atop the many cairns marking the trails. At the top of Boo Boo hill lies an every growing heap of drift wood name boards and missives from the many yachts that have visited here over the years. The land and sea park request is to take nothing but photos and leave nothing but footprints but this is one exception. Orly was frustrated by the prohibition of not being able to collect shells and pretty found bits and was happy to leave the park so that she could continue her shell collecting!

From Waderick Wells we stopped at Hawksbill Cay (still in the park) where we picked up one of their moorings in the south mooring field and remained the only boat in sight through the night! A protected anchorage with moorings in a spectacularly beautiful setting during the prime of the Bahamas season and we were all alone. I guess what I've been hearing about the Bahamas is true. Hawksbill is where the photos of the kids jumping off the end of the boom were taken. We did some exploring in the dinghy and snorkeling along with some knee boarding and could have stayed here for days or weeks happily.

It was at this point, however, that a passage plan and weather window started to form for heading north. We moved once more north in the Exumas to Allen Cays for one night and from there sailed across the bank to Royal Island and Spanish Wells where we sat out the next nasty weather cold front. There in Spanish Wells we met some more friendly cruisers. One couple was recently retired and spending their first winter of many to come cruising the Bahamas on their comfortably fit out Catalina 42, and the other was a family with a 10 year old girl cruising indefinitely. They introduced us to Budda's Bus - a local Spanish Wells eatery in someone's back yard where the kitchen operated out of an old school bus painted like the bus of the Merry Pranksters ala Neil Cassidy. Spanish Wells is a small community of neatly kept houses and gardens whose approximately 1500 inhabitants seem to be related to one another in some way or another. They have a peculiar accent that's hard to pin down, but mostly sounds like a lazy way of speaking and slurring their words. We took part in a nightly stroll to a home ice cream stand open from 7:30-10:30 with a choice of two different flavors that change each night.

After the bad weather passed we headed over to the Berry Islands where we spent one last night before topping off our fuel in Great Harbor Cay and heading off through the Northwest Passage towards an intersection with the gulf stream just 20 miles off West Palm Beach where we turned northward bound for Beaufort, NC. We positioned ourselves in the middle of the stream where the greatest effect from the current was to be found and found ourselves traveling at 10-12 knots speed over the ground with our boatspeed through the water closer to 8 knots. Shortly after entering the gulf stream before the wind came up while still motoring we hooked a big Mahi Mahi and, with the handle for the reel broken, fought hard to reel it in using a screw driver as a handle to reel in the line. This does not work well! We finally got him in on the transom and this is where I lost our dinner for the next few days. I should have immediately gaffed him but I grabbed the line and pulled him up on the transom where he thrashed and snapped the line and took off with the wire leader, lure and all! Poof. I was too dejected to fish after that! The following mornings weather report promised reasonably strong adverse North winds so we diverted from our path to Beaufort and instead headed for Charleston, SC. We had been traveling in the Gulf Stream for at least 24 hours and had logged over 230 miles in a 24-hour period - great numbers for MERIDIAN! We pulled into Charleston shortly before midnight and cleared customs back into the US! The north wind blew through overnight and weather was good to continue on the following day so after Mege and the kids shopped for some warm clothes and some fresh provisions from the Whole Foods ashore (back in the land of plenty), we headed out again for another 3-day passage around Cape Hatteras and up into the Chesapeake to Annapolis. This trip was mostly benign conditions with some motoring along with some good sailing but the last night and day of the trip turned a bit nasty. The forecast was for winds to build from the east around 20 knots and the reality was winds from the east at 30+ knots. This came on shortly after dark and stayed with us until our arrival in Annapolis the following evening around 5pm. Unfortunately this was a bit too much for Mege and she stayed curled up with the kiddos down below (who were quite happy and oblivious to the tempest up on deck) and I managed to steer us safely through the maze of huge commercial ships and shallows of Chesapeake Bay through the night until I roused Mege around 6:30 the next morning. I have no ambitions to be a solo sailor. That was enough.

The next afternoon we escaped the flooded streets of Annapolis to spend a night visiting some wonderful cousins of Mege's outside of DC. The following day we did some light touring past the Washington Monument, the reflecting pool and up to the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial before heading back to the boat to prepare for a predawn departure on Friday morning. Our passage since then has been very smooth with some flat motoring out of the Chesapeake dodging tree trunks and tons of floodwater debris up to and through the C&D canal along with a great sail down Delaware Bay. We plan to stop for the night in Block Island around midnight to get some rest before sailing the last 40-mile leg of the journey back into Padanaram on Sunday morning.




OK, so it's been about 3 weeks since I had planned to finish and post this! To pick up where I left off, we had a thrilling sleigh ride from Block Island into Padanaram that Sunday morning, at one point hitting over 16 knots surfing down a wave. We made the 40 miles in 4.5 hours! We were greeted by Max Taylor and friends in a powerboat out by Dumpling Rocks and escorted in to a slip at the yacht club dock on the opposite side from the one we departed from almost exactly 6 months before. Family and friends were there to welcome us home with cheers and screams (of joy by Orly's friends).

I barely had time to catch my breath and unpack before I received a call from our friend Jesse asking me to fly back to Puerto Rico to help him sail his schooner REBECCA OF VINEYARD HAVEN back to Bristol, RI. We had a fast and flawless passage on Rebecca covering about 1460 miles in 7 days 8 hours with a very capable crew of 4.

Finally trying to re-acclimate and reflect on our journey and what it's meant for all of us. Some of our hopes for this experience were to try to slow down time in a way; to soak in time with our kids before they grow into adults in what seems a blink of an eye. Well, time doesn't go slowly no matter what you do! The days still seemed to fly by. However, we were together all the time for six months without the distractions and fast pace of our regular lives ashore. All our responsibilities were right in front of us. The maintenance and upkeep of our home, all 45 feet of it, certainly took some time each day, but it was mostly shared by all of us. School work did not take the kids away from us for a full day 5 days a week, but was incorporated into our everyday routine for anywhere from 2-3 hours, giving us time to explore ashore, play on the beach, swim, snorkel, or simply relax and read or play games. Although we were equipped with an ipad and two laptops on the boat, wifi Internet was limited, and screen time for all of us was very minimal (as you may have noticed from my infrequent postings). As a result, the kids became voracious readers, each reading at least 40 books over the course of our trip. Orly read through several classics and adult books including Jane Eyre, A tree grows in Brooklyn, Bee Season, Cat's Eye, The Book Thief, and commented that some of the titles that were assigned to her from school were paced too fast in comparison to the slower paced subtle plot developments of the above mentioned books. Asa also tore through books like The Hobbit at an astonishing pace. If there were no other take-aways from our trip, we feel this invigorated love of reading was a gift for life. We had plenty of relaxed times onboard playing card games like hearts and rummy as well as playing the one board game we brought, Settlers of Catan. Many times we ended the day all quietly reading in our bunks and started the following day the same way. We met many other cruising families (from France, Canada, Sweden, as well as the US) and the kids found it didn't matter what language was spoken or whether the kids were the same age or whether they were boys or girls - they were kids and someone new to play with and no time was wasted in having fun! Our kids grew in a way that I think would not be possible were we not traveling on a boat. They grew in self-confidence, self-sufficiency, independence and responsibility. Our relationship with our kids became cemented even closer than before. Orly observed early on in our trip that "this is the most time I've seen Dad in my whole life"! This was the main goal for me - to be able to spend uninterrupted time with my children while they are still kids and to be able to change the pace enough to really focus in on our family in a time of life that's so fleeting.
Mege really thrived in the simplicity and structure inherent in living on a boat. The economy and clearly purposeful tasks of day-to-day necessity - keeping our environment clean, keeping everyone fed, keeping us well stocked with fresh provisions. Mege loves a routine and before the broken ribs when I was keeping us well stocked with coconuts, the routine involved fresh coconut water with some passion fruit juiced in to start out breakfast, followed by some fresh fruit and always tea of course; breakfast for the kids followed by schoolwork help, a paddleboard or swim, some quiet midday time for reading and reflection, a late day hike or walk on the beach when the intensity of the sun was not so great - these were the ingredients of a typical enjoyable day. This is what kept us healthy and happy throughout our journey - no trips to the chiropractor! The challenge now is to not slip right back into our old patterns, to enjoy life while still keeping up with all the responsibilities and activities that make life at home so fast paced in comparison. This trip has reinvigorated our spirit of adventure and the possibility of doing something different and hopefully it's instilled that feeling in our children. The kids still seem to be so in the moment and it may take them several years to reflect back and realize how this year has affected them and helped shape who they are. Right now they're doing a great job of reintegrating with their classes at Friends Academy and looking forward to summer just two weeks away! Mege and I, after so many months surrounded by water, are happy digging our hands into the earth and tending our garden back in our home. As much as I love sailing, there's always something wonderfully comforting about the smell of earth and trees and grass.



Much love to all!
Jeff, Mege, Orly and Asa