How to get to Andros the Hard Way

June 16, 2016

Our long sail from New Providence Island back to Florida was cut short when we had to stop at Chub Cay in the Berries to wait out the storms.  Weather at this time of year is spotty, and at this location on earth, doubly so.

The stretch of water between Chub Cay and Nassau is a few thousand feet deep, and then, in the stretch of a few hundred yards climbs to the Bahama banks at about 10-12 feet deep.  70-100 miles west of the Berries and Andros is the next multi-thousand-foot deep trench: the Gulf stream.

During slack tide, water sits on the shallow shelf and heats up in the sun while other waters hide in the deep trench, getting quite cold.  When the tide changes, either warm water "spills" off of the shelf into the cold deep or cold water is forced out of the deep, vertically up the wall to the warm shallows where it creates rapid thunderheads.

Chub Cay lies on the edge of the shelf where all this watery madness happens and about 12 miles west of the Northwest Channel, the only place on the shelf edge that is deep enough (about 12 feet) for a ship to traverse.

The day after being rerouted to Chub Cay by storms, we made our second attempt at the Northwest Passage. It was a lovely, mostly sunny day with a very favorable 15 knot south wind that had us on a gentle reach under full sail to the channel, no need to run the little diesel.  It was so nice that with an hour left to the channel, I popped down below to fix some lunch.  While Sarah and I were eating, Robin suddenly lurched hard on-ear, almost putting a rail in the water while turning nearly 90 degrees from east to north.  I jumped on deck to see what had happened expecting we had snagged a crab pot or one of my sheets or steering lines had frayed, but instead we were in the middle of 50 knots of wind from the west, and a small black spot cloud had formed in the otherwise sunny sky.  Our Aries self-steering wind vane steers according to the wind direction, so when Mother Nature decided to change 90 degrees almost instantly, the Aries did too.

But now we were on a fast reach at full heel under full sail in 50 knots headed due north towards the rocky breakers about a mile away (about 8 minutes at this speed).  I called Sarah on deck while I started the engine.

This is the moment for jiffy reefing.  If you don't have jiffy reefs rigged, then my advice is: don't go out sailing until you do.  I have each reef on a single line that cinches both tack and clew to pull the whole slab reef out of the mainsail at once.  It runs to a cleat and winch set up on my coachroof in the cockpit.  Under 50 knots of wind and without changing point of sail, I was able to reef the mainsail, with one line, from the cockpit, by myself, while the self-steering wind vane kept course.  I pulled the foresail in completely and had the mainsail all the way down to the third reef in about a minute.  Then I took the helm and turned 180 degrees, directly south to get away from the rocky breakers,  But even with a tiny triangle of sail on the mast, our Yanmar diesel was struggling to maintain any headway against the building swells.  The wind built the waves from a slow one foot swell to 6 footers pounding over the deck within about 10 minutes.  The engine overheated almost immediately.  I throttled it down and waited/hoped for the overheat to stop, because I wasn't about to shut it off.  But with no underwater propulsion, we were forced to do what the wind told us.  At that point, the only answer was downwind, fast.  

I was proud of my jiffy reefs, but I would have given anything for a downhaul at that moment.  With just that little triangle of sail, we were still making over 10 knots downwind  I wanted to douse the main entirely and continue sailing under bare poles, but the wind wouldn't allow us to take down the last bit of main.

Luckily "downwind fast" was directly back to Chub Cay.  Unluckily, we still had some sail in the air, the wind and waves were still building, the engine buzzer was screaming and flashing overheat, and we still had an hour and a half back to Chub.

The next ???? minutes are kind of a blur of me gripping the tiller as hard as I could while we surfed 10-foot waves that were so steep we were beginning to plow the bow of the boat into the trough while we were surfing the crests.  Even with that tiny triangle of sail, we were making over 10 knots dead downwind, and I thought we were close to pitchpoling.  Our windspeed indicator pegs out at 65 knots, and it was pegged for long periods.  Moving 10 knots downwind plus 65+ knots indicated apparent wind speed = 75+ knots actual wind speed.  The stitches on the end of our flag and the top and bottom buttons of my shirt got ripped out by the wind.  I could barely hear Sarah unless her yelling was directly in my ear.  It wasn't raining yet, but the wind was whipping up so much seawater that it stung when it hit you, which was somehow everywhere on your body at once.  I have no idea how long this lasted, probably less than 5 minutes, but it was enough time to give Sarah a warning that we may be living our final moments, and that I loved her very much.  She was pretty okay with that being the end of it.  I was impressed.

About ???? minutes later, the worst of it had passed, we could start to see a clear sky ahead of us again, and while we were still in 6-foot waves, the period had slowed down significantly, and the wind had "eased" back to a steady-ish 45 knots like when it all started.  Clouds were now dumping freshwater rather than wind-blowing seawater.  A more seasoned seaman would consider this a great day to make some distance.

We anchored back at Chub in the late afternoon about 20 yards from where we had left that morning, though it was afternoon, it looked like dusk, and we waited for the insta-storm to pass while holding through the 6 foot swells.  It was almost worse than sailing.

A day later, we decided that if storms were going to keep us from making it through the northwest passage, then we might as well wait for our time at Andros rather than Chub.  Andros is the largest and one of the least visited islands in the Bahamas.  It has large stretches of forest and fields and more rural settlements.

The sail to Andros went well enough.  It was a pleasant day that turned a bit sour near the end with a light squall, but nothing dangerous. The holding isn't great in North Andros, and the best of it, on the eastern side of the bay was taken up by four other boats with similar plans.  So we took the less-preferable western side. The sand is very shallow on the rock bottom there, so I had to dive and dig both our anchors into the best sand pockets I could find on the seafloor, and we rode out another night of deep swells. 

It took another day for the storms to finally clear enough for us to take a trip ashore, but in the meantime, the stormy weather made for spectacular sunsets.

Rerouted by a Storm

June 15, 2016

We departed West Bay with the intention of bringing our Bahamian adventure to a close with our course set for Florida.  We were headed towards the southern tip of the Bimini chain, a location far enough south to make the Palm Beach Inlet without the gulf stream sweeping us too far north. We had not decided if we were going to stop there or continue overnight towards Florida.

The sky was bright, and the sea was a vibrant glassy sapphire blue.

Sailing past high altitude rainfall.

We were happily sailing along at approximately 25 knots in calm waters towards clear blue sunny skies when I casually looked behind me. The sky was turning black as rapidly moving dark clouds coalesced on the horizon. Waterspouts began dropping to the sea.  "AJ!" I yelled pointing towards the stern. Then promptly went below to get the off shore life vests while AJ started reefing.

 

When I came back up a wall of darkness was devouring the light. As it encroached on both sides, we found ourselves pointed towards an ever-narrowing window of blue sky.

The wind kicked up, we put in another reef and decided to hightail it to the nearest island, Chub key.

We made it to Chub in time to anchor before sunset. It was a long windy bouncy night in the unprotected anchorage of a sport fishing club resort island. Unbeknownst to us, it was the first of many stormy nights to come, and our Bahamian adventure was far from over. 

Stormy Weather and a Broken Prop

June 2016

We dropped anchor in Nassau Harbor, and while backing down to set it in the bottom, I allowed my rudder to overturn and strike the prop.  (I knew I should have installed turn stops).  The whole drivetrain started shaking and vibrating, so I dropped into neutral.  Our little Yanmar diesel still idled and revved smoothly in neutral, so at least I didn't bend a con rod or crankshaft, but a quick dive overboard revealed that our four-month-old two-bladed prop was a, still youthful, but much less useful, single blade prop.

Immediately I thought about all the hassle of trying to get a spare radio into the country a couple months earlier, and I knew we would have to source a prop locally.  Luckily, a local prop shop on the island had a spare used three-blade prop that could be modified to fit.  "Island cheap" at just under $500, but they still wanted another $450 for an in-water dive installation and wouldn't be able to do the install for two weeks.  I ordered the prop to be modified and they said we could pick it up in a couple days.

Nassau Harbor is a long East-West straight of water between the main island, New Providence, and the barrier island, Paradise Island/Atlantis Resort.  This means that during tidal shifts, the current rips through at about 3-4 knots in a different direction every 6 hours and lays slack between times.  Anchoring in a situation like this can be hairy because your boat drifts over the anchor and starts pulling hard 180 degrees opposite every six hours, so if your anchor doesn't properly roll over and re-set in the sand, then you will go adrift...  FAST... through a tight harbor packed with multi-million dollar boats.

The nice part about storms and heavy wind in the harbor is that you only swing on your anchor in one direction if the wind is strong enough to beat the ripping current.  Of course, then your keel is sideways to the current, and the boat starts sailing up on the anchor before reaching the end of the rode, stalling and falling back to do it again.
Geologically speaking, Nassau is a terrible place to anchor.
Geographically speaking, is a pretty nice place to break down.

Obviously, I was nervous hanging on anchor in Nassau harbor for a couple days without push-button propulsion.  With storms on the forecast, I was more than just nervous.  But, in situations like this, you've got to figure out something.  So I manually deployed another anchor, dove to the bottom to dig the anchors into the sandy/muddy bottom by hand, and scoured the area for anchor-clogging debris.

(With the anchor we pulled up a total of four pairs of jeans, a heavy-weather jacket, and a concrete cinder block wrapped in flannel shirts during this trip.)

The storms rolled in from the north over Atlantis Resort.

Everybody in the anchorage hunkers down for the blow and 90-degree shift in position.  

As expected, the prop was being fixed on island time, so we spent another week sitting in harbor without power. Every storm was nerve-wracking.  Watching the GPS drag alarm, sitting in foul weather gear, just waiting to spring on deck and fire up the dinghy (instead of the big boat's diesel) if trouble arose.

With a week of fast-moving storm fronts and killer oscillating currents, the anchors had to come loose at some point, and sure enough, when returning from a grocery trip to town, we found our boat had drug out into the shipping port turning basin, immediately in front of Nassau Harbor Control.  We meekly dinghied back to the boat, and Nassau Harbor Patrol was on us within minutes, demanding that we move.  I agreed, apologized for the disruption, and promptly failed to notify them that I lacked power and lacked a dinghy with the power to move my boat in the current.

One thing the Army instilled in me: Many problems that seem insurmountable can actually be overcome with rigorous output of brutal manual labor.  With this in mind, I realized "just" had to hand-over-hand haul our 9-ton boat about 150 feet to the first anchor, hand pull the anchor and chain out of the mud, drive it out into the current about 200 feet, and reset it before the current pulled the boat over into the commercial docks.  Then I could do the exact same thing with the other anchor. And if I did that four times in a row, then I could "walk" my boat out, anchor-by-anchor, a couple hundred yards into a safe spot in just a couple hours. So I did that, and I only had to dive 25 feet to dig the anchor out of the harbor's underwater anti-drag cables twice along the way.

Two days later and a week late, we got the prop from the shop.  I wasn't about to spend $450 on a diver for a half hour, so I gathered up my hammer, pliers, wrenches, prop puller and all my gumption and did it myself. Six breath-hold dives (plus a couple for go-pro selfies) to do the job from start to finish and POOF, one blade becomes three.

More storms were coming so within an hour or so of installing the prop, we were under sail en route to West Bay at the western tip of New Providence island to catch the first good passage westward.

Exiting the western Harbor entrance.

Physically and mentally, this was hell week, but there is nothing like taking some hell to make you feel like a superhero.  And West Bay turned out to be a great little natural day spa to scrub it all away. We watched the sunset from the deserted secluded beach while having ourselves a sand scrub ocean bath.

Hurricane Sandy

The fallout from Sandy brought an eventful week.  Our apartment flooded!  We had four days of 35 mph winds and intermittent downpours.  By the weekend it appeared to have calmed, but on Sunday morning the storm surge took the tide four inches above our apartment floor. AJ woke up early to go get some groceries, and when he came home he found the tide had risen to the point that water just starting coming across the doorstep of both doors.  The tide rose fast!  I jumped out of bed to grab everything I could off the floor.  Within 20 minutes the apartment was ankle deep.  Most of our stuff was already in boxes, so evacuation was fairly efficient.  Luckily the tide didn't reach the back of the patio where most of our power tools are. We had big plans for the boat on Sunday, but we spent the day evacuating and hanging things to dry instead. 

Power boaters sped by causing wakes that carried into the house. They speed by every day causing the docked boats here to sawhorse and jerk against their dock lines.  It's dangerous to be waked unawares while working, standing, or holding something sharp, hot, or powered. It's how I got hit in the head with an iron engine block on the mooring ball.  But high speed waking of flood zones in your 60 foot sportfisher?  The ass-hol-ery appears to be limitless.  The apartment drained as the tide went out, leaving behind a mess of leaves and mud.  We were sent to a hotel so the landlord could pull out his furniture and clean. 

After losing our back-to-work day to the flood, we decided to do at least one project, albeit small, before checking into the hotel. We put the name and home port on the boat.  It will likely never see it's home port, unless we take it up the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers to Lake Dardanelle, but we did register it in Arkansas at the Russellville DMV.  Largely for the ease of keeping our permanent AR address with our other paperwork.  Florida registration would have required a permanent FL address, changing residency, and a couple grand in taxes.  None of which we could manifest.   Plus, registration of a boat > 50hp is $25 in little ol' Russellville, and used boats have no sales tax.  The natural state has it's perks.

At the hotel we watched Sandy become a nor'easter on the news, as she hit the north east coast. 7 million without power already.  We were lucky to only get tropical storm category fallout. 

Before the storms interruption we were on schedule. The rudder was installed last Sunday, and the engine dropped in on Monday as planned.  AJ plumbed the homemade cockpit drain tubes to the new thruhulls just in time to keep the rain from draining onto the engine.

But, sadly our troubles with the rudder are not over.  When the rudder went back on, it rubbed hard against the hull on the port side, stripping the paint. The rudder frame was not welded straight.  It has a quarter inch bulge on the left side.

The rebuilder never showed up to inspect it as promised, so we dug another hole, took it off and returned it.  Our guy did the glass work, but hired out the welding to someone else, so he is not eager to completely rebuild it.  He said he would grind down the fiberglass where it rubs.  AJ went to meet him at the boat to fit it this morning.  I hope that's the last of it and we can move onto pluming the engine this afternoon. My poor poor rudder demanded it's third, and hopefully final act.  I hope we can splash this week.  This week which will be chilly! I'm wearing a hoodie this morning. Not because I love it, because I need it, but I'm happy to need it, because I do love it.  When the tide went out, a cold front came in; Now it is all the way down to the 50's at night!  It feels amazing.  With this weather, we can do double time on the boat. We'll probably knock out more in November than we did all summer.  When it's under 80 degrees, anything is possible. 

                       

Batten Down the Hatches a Storm's a'Brewin'

It was now October.  We had made a friend at the marina who was our age and living on a Choey Lee Bermuda 30 on anchor. He  would disappear for weeks at a time to do cruise ship renovations or First Mate a Mega Motor Yacht. He would come back and dump his earnings into prepping his boat for voyaging.   It was nice to have a friend who was doing the same thing in life.  The latest job he had landed was a yacht delivery.  He was to take it from Stuart, around the entire peninsula of Florida and up the West coast to Venice.   He asked AJ if he would like to do the delivery with him, for the experience and even a little pay.  AJ jumped at the opportunity. 

He felt bad leaving me on a boat alone on the ball with no power or water and a greasy engine in the middle of everything. But I assured him I'd be fine and he should not pass up the opportunity.  I really didn't mind, and was actually wanting to spend some time alone on the boat anyway for a lot of reasons.   I really wanted to be by myself so I could get to know the boat better and have the responsibility to myself. His absence was going to more than double the amount of labor required to carry out daily life activities.  AJ always motored or rowed us to the docks for instance. Men drive, it's what they do. They always get in the drivers seat without question or discussion.  So the only time I rowed was when I wanted to run to shore or back for something and AJ didn't, which wasn't often. Now, wanting to get to land, grocery shop, take out the trash, do the laundry, or anything at all would require me hauling everything on and off the dinghy by myself, and rowing back and forth. Not to mention maneuvering heavy bags and myself through the booby traps of my hatch and cockpit.

They set sail on a Friday. Darrin was against leaving on a Friday. Starting a passage on a Friday is like saying MacBeth in a theater. Superstitious or not, you just don't do it. Also there was a storm that could blow in in a few days and he thought it more prudent to wait it out. But the new yacht owners were typically impatient and insisted. So on Friday the 14^th of October they set out and headed South.

The first three days were calm and hot. I spent a lot of time in the lounge, as there was really nothing to do on the boat in it's condition. The cockpit was piled high with tools and rusty engine parts. We had laid a tarp under the engine, and it was now covered in oil and grease. So suffice to say I packed up a bag and the net book and rowed to shore for part of the day and the evenings.

Around the third day the weather started to take a turn. It became gray and dark. The wind picked up and the rain started.

If the wind is too strong or the chop too high or the rain too heavy I can't row to shore. For two days I remained boat bound and I tried to protect things in the cockpit from the rain best I could, but it was really a futile effort. It was all just getting rustier. I stuffed rags under the leaky windows and kept a close watch on the bilge. Since the power was disconnected so was the automatic bilge pump, I had to pump it manually. On the afternoon of the third day of rain it finally became calm.  I took the opportunity to bail the dinghy's, then rowed ashore.

That calm afternoon was unfortunately not the end of the rain but the calm before the storm. A couple hours after I got to shore it got nasty. White out rain came pelting down with wind that made the boats in the mooring field bounce around like plastic toys. I stared out the lounge windows and tried to see the details of my boat. We were on mooring ball 1 so we were on the row closest to shore, even still it was hard to make out much through the water and darkness. The dinghy was bouncing around like a ping pong ball. Later it looked as though our dinghy may have gotten swept under the wind-vane. But I could not tell for sure. The rain did not let up for hours, and I was getting anxious. Around midnight not knowing was driving me crazy and I had to go see what I could see. I put on my rain coat and rolled up my pants and walked down the dock barefoot to the closest point I could get to my boat. I walked bent over to stay balanced against the wind. When I reached the closest spot to our boat I tried to shield myself against the rain to see. The dinghy had gotten sucked under the wind-vane and was still bouncing and slamming around with the wind-vane beating against it the inside of it. I feared for the dinghy and the wind vane. Being so close and feeling like you can almost reach out and touch it only compounds the feeling of helplessness.  I also was trying to make out the water line. I was freaked about the bilge filling up and had no idea how much water had gotten in. Not being on the boat was driving me crazy. The waterline line is dark blue so it was hard to tell where the sea ended and the blue line began in the blackness but it looked to be floating high enough. I could not help but just stand there, staring, stumbling in the wind and replanting my feet over and over and over again. I could not take my eyes off it.  With lighter rain I felt a little better about the boat not sinking and started back to the marina.

Around 1 am the rain had calmed to a heavy drizzle and many of the other stranded folks to start motoring back to their boats. I was offered a ride. Once I was aboard I sqeezed between the engine and the counter pulled back the tarp and awkwardly removed a floor board from under the swinging engine so I could see into the bilge. It had a lot of water in it, but we were not sinking yet. It is hard to see the bilge in daylight as it is 4 feet deep and 10 inches wide.  All I had was the shittiest of flashlights that gave a dim flicker and had to be shaken every 10 seconds; "luckily" the water was high enough to see easily...  I climbed back out into the cockpit and pulled off the bronze lid to the manual bilge pump in the cockpit bench. The first pull was met with great resistance. Thank god it did not have to be primed this time. Pulling on the handle feels like lifting wights at the gym. It takes 1-3 seconds to pull it up.  I began pumping it as fast as I could with my right arm, but soon it become a two handed job with a foot braced on the bench to muster up every ounce if strength even from my toes. Pulling up up up, and slam back down. Curses to my 100 lb frame and puny wire arms. My curses were sucked up by the wind as quickly as they left my mouth. If i had been lifting weights there is no way I could have lasted that long. But in such a crisis adrenalin says it can be done. The labor of the pumping the bilge became my existence.   I had no other function or independent thoughts of a self to distract me. I was a bilge pumping machine. Nothing else.

Once it started sounding empty I slid back inside and shined the light into the deep dark narrow bilge. I could not see the bottom, but I saw a lot of hoses and pumps on the way down that were underwater before. It was time for bed. I used the rain to get the grease off my feet and tried to make it to the V berth unscathed. I laid in bed exhausted but hyper-vigilant from the adrenalin. I listened to the rain and bangs and creaks caused by the wind and wondered what they were and if I should be concerned about it.

The forward hatch is 3 feet above your head in the V berth. It's view is straight up the mast to the stars.  The rain and wind are sometimes so loud it is hard to sleep, but generally I find it peaceful. The clanks and taps and thumps and creaks can be trying but if the noises are random I can sleep through it. But sometimes the noises conspire and get on a rhythm. The rope on the mast slaps the top at a high pitch then slaps the bottom at a lower pitch in even time. Thwack thwack, Thwack thwack. Then the dinghy reveals it's treachery when it joins in with a Thud, th th th th th thud. then unidentified menaces finish the percussion symphony clang-idy clangs and tap tap taps. This makes me scream in my pillow. Luckily that night it was a chaos of bangs and creaks and howling of the wind.

AJ and Darrin were stuck in Miami through the storm. The delivery was delayed by 3 days anyway as Darrin had predicted. The 5-7 day delivery was already 6 days in and they had not made it past Miami. They ran into more trouble and delays every day. Guess they should not have left on a Friday after all. The boat was not as in as good as condition as stated on the survey. They had engine trouble and got stuck waiting for parts. By day 10 they had only made it to Marathon in the Keys. And they were going to have to be there a while getting work done. Darin told AJ he could jump ship since he didn't know how long it was going to take, and he had already been gone longer than planned. I drove to Marathon to pick him up.

The farther south I went the better the radio stations got. Stuart's stations play what my hometown played. The top 20 of yesterday and today. The songs you know all the words to but are not even sure who sings because you never bought the album and never listened to it on purpose. It's like you have known these songs from birth. Programmed into your brain. I hate these songs. But the closer I got to Miami those songs were replaced with songs I did not know and genres I'd never heard on the radio. I hadn't experienced such ear candy since Germany where the stations had no theme and the song progression would go something like: Nirvana, Meatloaf ballad, 50's BeeBop, Lady GaGa, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Bon Jovi, The Ramones, Abba, Sinatra, German Rap, DEVO, U2, German Pop, Patsy Cline. Anything from the last 50 years could come next. Anything.

I arrived in Marathon late that night and spent the night on the boat they were delivering. The next morning we drove back to Stuart.  I proudly showed AJ that we still had a boat, and then it was time to tackle the filth of engine and engine room and try to salvage the weather damaged parts. 

WE ARE GOING TO HIT RAINBOW CONNECTION! The tale of our first near shipwreck

In the those first weeks on the boat, of course AJ wanted to take it out sailing.  I was not feeling too excited about this as I still knew virtually nothing about sailing a keel boat. I  barely knew the terminology he was always spouting which always led to strained communication. "Oh! you want that rope! If it's the rope you want why don't you just call it a damn rope!" But no, a rope is a sheet and a pulley is a block.

We prepped everything for a sail up the river and back.  We warmed up the engine for half an hour,  then I went forward to cast us off the mooring ball.  AJ put the engine in drive and it did not engage. We were drifting. Drifting in a 20,000 lb vessel towards other 20,000 lb vessels in a mooring field with no steerage. AJ was frantically trying to engage the engine and steer, I was just frantic. We yelled god knows what back and forth until I screamed "We are going to hit Rainbow Connection!" Rainbow Connection was our nearest neighbor. It was the boat of a 23-year-old Canadian who had lived on that boat with his grandparents since he was 6, and lived on it alone since he was 18. Lovely boat. Lovely guy.    AJ barked back at me "We are NOT going to hit Rainbow Connection." He was at the helm and there was absolutely nothing I could do in this crisis, and watching only led to yelping about what was happening which didn't help anything. So I sat down in the cockpit and put my head down. I was just going to wait until I heard a crash. I was thinking that it was over before it began. I had never been more scared. I was not afraid for my life, we were swimming distance from a dock, I was afraid of losing the boat and being 100k in debt for someone else's. Enslaving us. This dream would be unresuscitatable. Over, all over.

Then he said, "We are going to hit Rainbow Connection". I bolted up and watch our boat drift closer and closer, the bows of our boats on a sideways collision course. Time nearly screeched to a halt all sound disappeared as I watched the boats move towards each other.  AJ managed to get the engine to engage in reverse just in time to swing us back and around. I watched the nose of our bow circle by Rainbow's bowsprit missing it by just a few feet. He backed out into open space until he could get forward steerage enough to get us out into the river.

I was pretty shaken up at this point and wondering what we were going to do now that the transmission was not working and we were in the river and how we were going to get back to the mooring ball. But AJ immediately yelled "It's time to sail! take the wheel!" and he ran forward to raise the sails. Once we were in the river we could gain control with the sails, not to mention sailing is what we set we had set out to do. I was not in the best condition to be sailing for the first time. But what else can you do? You must figure it out and adapt. Quickly.

The wind caught the mainsail with a snap, lurching the boat forward, causing louder than expected moans and creaks from the hull and rigging. Then the boat started to tip. It felt like we were falling over.  The slow even pacing of the lean made it feel like it was going to keep falling all the way into the water, but around 10 - 15 degrees it held.  You can feel the power of the sail pulling and tilting the boat beneath you. it was unsettling in its unfamiliarity.

I had the wheel while AJ tuned the sails.  I was watching the GPS to keep the boat centered in the river, while watching to go between the markers out in front of me,  and keeping a close eye on the depth sounder. I can't say it is a difficult thing to do per se, but piloting a multi ton vessel for the first time, with no prior experience on the water and just having nearly been in a shipwreck, I was struggling a bit to stay calm and process all unfamiliar scenery, forces and motion. But we relaxed a bit once everything was set and the course was straight and were able to sit back as be taken by the wind with little or no effort on our part. We made about 6 knots.

We left the engine running for fear of not being able to restart it and to hopefully get it to engage in drive so we could motor back through the mooring field. We managed to get it going forward well enough, barely 2 knots, to drop the sails and steer back to the ball. AJ drove and I went forward to the bow to grab the mooring ball as we approached it and tie us off. He steered well and I managed to catch the ball first go round, thank god. We tied off and were safely back on the ball.  whew! Eventful day.

We need a new transmission.

Our boat under way

       

"..Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me!.."