It was windy...
Note: What follows was originally email, as dated. I didn’t take too many pictures.
Date: 10/20/98
Subj: Sailing, sailing....
Hi y’all.
Sorry about this broadcast email....
I’m going on vacation. Finally.
This’ll be a sailing vacation. Telephone and email will be severely limited while I’m away. Thus this note. Please do not send me email after tomorrow—unless it’s an emergency—until after November 14. I should be back a few days before then. I’ll probably send another broadcast email to confirm I’m back safe and sound, albeit a little wet. (Oh, okay: ALL WET; but who would notice?)
Some of you know about the delay in this vacation, September being hurricane season and all. I’m leaving here Friday, October 23, for Marion, MA. This’ll be by car, and will probably be the most dangerous part of this trip!. Saturday dawn, October 24, I’ll be sailing on the 40-foot sailboat called Aeolis. We should cross the Gulf Stream two days later (if I remember correctly; it’s been a while since I’ve made this trip), and reach St. George, Bermuda, about five or six days later. It depends on the wind.
In Bermuda, I will call Joann by telephone. I will be carrying my laptop computer, but I don’t know how accessible email will be. (I’ll probably take a moped to a hotel and connect somehow.) Because a client hasn’t paid me a substantial amount of money, I’m not planning to do much work on board, so my emailing should be short and sweet. And the long distance charge, relatively cheap.
After about four or five days, a change of crew (except your humble scribe), and assuming the boat is in ship shape, we’ll sail off to Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands (BVI). I’ve travelled that route in reverse, and without much wind (mostly motor sailing). That trip took six days. With wind, it’ll probably take that long or longer.
I’m planning to buy a one-way ticket back from BVI once I get down there. Uh, a one-way ticket back up to here. Or maybe Joann will fly down and we’ll decide to look for a house by the ocean down by the equator. In which case, I’ll definitely send you email.
Tell Bill and Monica not to do anymore funny stuff until I return and can read about it among the funny stuff y’all have sent me thus far.
And in the meantime, a la “Hill Street Blues”: Hey, hey, hey. Be careful out there.
And enjoy.
Sincerely,Larry
Date: 11/22/98
Subj: It was windy
Hi y’all.
About a week has flown by since returning from my sailing vacation. Probably a good idea to check in and tell you (a) I’m back and (b) you can start sending me email again.
In a nutshell, it was a fun trip, despite the 30+-knot winds and 14-foot seas. And, truth be known, I think I’d rather be back out on the high seas pitching and roiling, rather than bitching and broiling.
In our last episode, I was taking a 2- to 2.5-week vacation helping sail a friend’s 41-foot sailboat, the Aeolus III, from Marion, MA, to Bermuda (leg one) to Virgin Gorda, BVI (leg two). The first leg is sometimes called “Route 165” because the rumb line from MA (and basically Newport, RI) to Bermuda is along compass heading 165 magnetic. On the first leg, we had five people, including the (useless) 14-year-old son of one of the crew. On the second leg, there were five of us.
One thing to remember while reading through this (long; I’m sorry) travelogue is that we were supposed to leave maybe mid-September, then most likely the end of September/early October, and then the departure date was pushed a month to October 24. The main reason for these changes was because La Nina was messing up the normal hurricane season, which is usually September. Coincidentally, I caught a CNN broadcast near the end of August that featured someone from the national oceanographic/weather service saying that while predicting the weather throughout the US this fall will be next to impossible, one thing was assured: This will be a very bad hurricane season. Nice to know that, thankyouverymuch.
And sure enough....
Most of the trip involved sailing through high winds (20-30 knots steady, gusting to 40) and high seas (3-6 feet OR 8-14 feet; typically waves from two directions, too often from three). One of the few times the seas were calm and the winds negligible was when the skipper and I were fixing a busted water pump on the diesel engine—without which we could not generate electricity nor safely enter the harbor in Bermuda. Nice of the weather to oblige; not only did neither of us get seasick “down below” (amongst diesel fumes), but we didn’t have to worry too much about things rolling and dropping five feet into the bilge.
(You can pretty much kiss those things that fall into the bilge goodbye. The bilge is deep, narrow, messy, and under the propeller shaft. In other words, yucky and inaccessible. Given the sensitivity of compass and electronics, sailboats typically don’t carry large magnets to fish things out of the bilge. However, because the “BFS”—big fuckin’ screwdriver—I dropped while fixing the engine was too important to lose, and a replacement would have been too expensive and troublesome to buy in Bermuda, I fished it out with a paper fly swatter taped to the boat hook.)
The first leg was a typical Gulf Stream crossing: relatively cold (this October crossing, versus a June crossing, required 2-3 layers of clothes AND gloves), fast (five and a fraction days), and windy (20-30 knots). For me, the crossing was atypical: Not once did I fear for my life! Though there were times, especially around sunset, that I was at the helm steering the boat when the winds would pipe up and we had too much “canvas” out. My heart does more than just pitter patter when holding onto a 3-foot steering wheel while standing on a 30-degree tilt and trying to sail a boat straight in a sustained 30-knot gust of wind.
But those instances were rare... during my watch.
The first leg had such notable memories as one crew member, Spencer, a tall fellow and a doctor, in full foul weather gear at the 10 PM change of watch, twist away from a hand grip in the main cabin and pitch himself at a large wooden tabletop, which broke away from its pedestal, and land—sitting—on the “low” side, on the settee. Hearing the noise, I rushed down the companionway, pushed the tabletop off him, and noticed that his head on one side was three inches from the boat’s metal clock and three inches on the other side from the mouthpiece of a musical instrument sticking out of the book rack. “Are you okay? Are you okay?” I asked in a bit-less-than-calm tones, looking at his dilated eyes in the darkened main cabin. He assured me he was. He being a doctor, I figured—hoped—that he should know. He was okay, albeit shaken up.
Spencer later admitted to Jim, the skipper, during one late-night watch, in the midst of a cold driving rain in 20-30 knot winds, that he now understood why people enjoy such sails in the North Atlantic. “Exciting” is how some people describe it.
The diesel engine overheated about three nights out. The fix required rerouting some hoses so that salt water from the sea, rather than fresh water in a closed system, would cool the engine. It also meant figuring out how to string three almost-one-foot lengths of varying diameters of thick hose into one long length. Rube Goldberg would have been proud.
One problem though, which we didn’t realize until we were about to drop sails to motor through the “cut” into St. Georges harbor, Bermuda: We should have removed the thermostat to the water pump. This wasn’t obvious at first. A couple of football fields away from the cut, with stiff winds around us, the skipper turned on the engine. After a couple of minutes, I said I smelled something, and it wasn’t coolant. The first guess was that it was just a mix of coolant, salt water, and diesel fuel burning off after two days of not using the engine. Then, while I was down below, forward, pulling inflatable bumpers from below the V-berth, I happened to look back. There was Jim, struggling to pull up the floorboards over the engine—it’s kinda hard to do that without the BFS. He finally got one up, and dense, black, diesel exhaust immediately filled the main cabin and poured up and out of the companionway and past the cockpit.
This is right out of a Clancy thriller: Because the sea water was still cold, the thermostat remained closed, so no water was pumping through the plastic (sea) water muffler, which melted, producing a hole for diesel exhaust to go escape rather than through the exhaust pipe. Granted, boats typically sink because of this in Clancy thrillers. We didn’t, but to anybody watching from afar, it must have looked impressive as all get out! (Spencer leaned into the companionway at one point to tell me, “As your health advisor, I suggest you don’t breath too much of this smoke.”)
A calm, sunny, and cool day out in the Atlantic on the way to Bermuda.
We arrived in Bermuda on a Thursday afternoon. Good thing.That night, there were gale-force winds north of Bermuda. This was exactly the direction where we, and many others, sailed from. The crews of sailboats arriving Friday and Saturday looked noticeably beat. Two sailboats had to be abandoned. One had rolled, seriously battering the crew. They had to stay on board for another 12? 24? hours before the winds and seas died down enough for the Coast Guard to pick them up. The crew of another boat, a 45-foot Morgan (expensive), couldn’t take it anymore and were picked up by a German freighter. Anybody want a Morgan? It’s somewhere floating on the Atlantic.
Friday we sort of puttered around (after picking up some mopeds). The next few days were spent mostly cleaning the boat, fiddling with the engine and later connecting the hoses back to where they were (a new water pump would come in with the next crew), laundry, showers on solid ground, etc. Saturday night, Jim and I went to a Halloween party/fund raiser at one of the forts in Bermuda, which was attended by both Bermudians and boat crews. Dark ’n Stormies (half rum, half [nonalcoholic] ginger beer) were mostly free ... and still tasted good despite a terrific rainstorm for about 30 minutes.
Jim, the last of the crew members other than yours truly, left the boat Monday afternoon. Tuesday afternoon, I finally went to a beach to veg for about five hours—long enough to get a mild sunburn.
The new crew, particularly the boat’s co-owners, were expected to arrive starting Tuesday noon-ish. The hope was to leave Thursday, after replacing the water pump, fixing some odds and ends, and after the last crew member arrived Wednesday. By 6 PM-ish, Paul, one of the co-owners, showed up. (Despite that, flying is still faster than sailing.) By that time, the skippers from four other boats had told me the weather/sea conditions for the next few days courtesy of two low-pressure systems just southeast of Bermuda and some hurricane called Mitch. Their final analysis: The earliest anybody would be sailing out of Bermuda will be Saturday.
Gee, what a shame. We’ll have to stay in Bermuda a couple more days.
The water pump was easily replaced, we ate some decent food, and we listened to the weather report. I actually did some work on my laptop for a half a day—now that the engine was capable of producing electricity (to recharge the computer)—but other interests took precedence.
Aeolus III was tied up to one of the town docks. This dock is really a wall, some of it concrete, some of it wood dock against concrete. Tied to it were many boats, some rafted to others. The dock is on the north side of the harbor, which can be a problem if the winds come from the south or southeast. Normally, the winds from that direction are mild. This changed with Hurricane Mitch, which passed Bermuda 150 miles at its closest.
By late Thursday afternoon, most of the sailboats had gone to the other side of the harbor to anchor in the lee of the southern part of Bermuda. We joined them, albeit late, and we dropped two anchors, which is a normal safety precaution. Dinner was relaxing and excellent. We sat at the now repaired (reglued) tabletop. Aeolus III hardly moved. We drifted off to sleep around 9:30, 10 PM.
Around midnight, the winds started up. By 4 AM, they were howling. At 4:30 AM, Paul was afraid that we were dragging anchors. We reset the anchors in winds of 30 knots and steadily increasing. At 5:30, I stayed on watch, saw the wind-o-meter bounce up to 40 knots from a steady 35, read a book, watched the stern of the boat whip back and forth 120 degrees, and confirmed that we weren’t dragging the anchors. At 10 AM, the wind was blowing a steady 40+ knots with gusts up to 50, waves were a foot or so, foam was flying of the wave crests, and skittering across the harbor, and one of the smaller sailboats still tied to the town dock was bouncing 30 degrees—lengthwise.
I went down below at 10 to take a nap. At noon, I came back up and asked whether we were in Virgin Gorda yet. It felt like we had been sailing that whole time. At 1 PM, the other co-owner, Ron, was making noises about going back to our spot on the town dock. And we did just that at 3. By late afternoon, I was being hoisted to the top of the mast to inspect some mechanism (normal wear and tear; totally unrelated to Mitch). The next day I went back up the mast and spent about an hour and half tightening things ... and asking for Dark ’n Stormies along with various Allen wrenches and screwdrivers.
We sailed out of Bermuda Sunday morning. South of Bermuda was warm. We had a few days (and nights) of 20-25 knot winds; swells were at least 14 feet.
During a rain storm on the Atlantic. The neat thing is that the waves were 2-3 feet before the rain storm. The rain just beat the waves down flat... or almost flat.
One night, one of the hoses out of the water pump developed a pinhole leak. Another Rube Goldberg job to fix that, though this fix was far more exciting because it was late at night and the seas weren’t so calm.
Interestingly, there wasn’t really that much rain during either of these legs. During the first leg, as we were sailing into a storm cell with 30+-knot winds, I decided to wash my hair... while at the helm. That worked fine until shampoo got into my eyes. (This is why people often use Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, rather than the pine-smelling, environmental-friendly stuff that I was using.) About two hours after I had washed my hair, a wave crashed over the cockpit and my hair was back to its damp, seawater state. On the second leg, I finally washed my hair in a rain storm we passed through about three hours from landfall. There was barely enough rainwater for rinsing; I had to stand by the mast and beneath the mainsail for enough runoff to get the (baby) shampoo out.
Then we arrived in Virgin Gorda. Sunny. Calm. Bright blue waters. And your faithful scribe seriously wilted from the heat (80+). There’s a reason why I don’t vacation in warm climes.
I read five books. Did essentially no work. Wrote bunches of postcards. Did some other non-sailing stuff, and some serious thinking.
Now I’m back.
Yesterday, I glanced through three weeks of NY Times regarding Hurricane Mitch and found out it devastated two countries. And a nearly 300-foot, four-masted schooner once owned by Onassis disappeared in the storm with 32 crew members on board.
And yet, this is one of the few vacations in a long time where I’ve NOT needed a vacation afterwards.
Talk, write, email, and see y’all later.
Virtually,Larry
Date: 11/22/98—a few minutes after the previous message was sent
Subj: And there were a lot of shooting stars
Hi y’all.
I forgot to mention this: There were a lot of shooting stars at night, about two or three per hour.
Later,Larry
