The final leg of our cruise was a crossing from the Abacos in the Bahamas to North Carolina where we intended to haul Mupepe out of the water and store her on land for the next few months while I return to my business.

While in Bahamas, the 7 days weather forecast was for very light winds and no favorable wind as a high pressure system settled over the Bahamas and southern Florida. Not having the luxury of time we headed out to sea. Motor sailing until we got in the heart of the high pressure and motored for a day and a night on calm sea but at the northern edge of the weather system we finally found some wind and had a good sail for 10 hours on still flat seas, but then the wind direction changed and we no longer could lay Charleston, still about fifty miles away. The crew choice after 3 days and 2 nights at sea was to end this crossing sooner then latter so the motor came back on. About 10 miles from the port entrance, the engine started squealing like a stuck pig, the v belt was worn and slipping. I had a new belt hanging in the engine compartment waiting just for such occasion but at installation, I found out I was sold the wrong size belt, it was even longer then my worn out belt. A worn belt is better then no belt at all, so the old one was reinstalled but now we had to sail in and save the engine use for emergency. We made into port under sail but we were still in the shipping lane when the tide reversed on us and all of sudden our boat speed dropped from 4 knots to less then one half and we started loosing steerage. I did spend the last hour with my head in the engine room pouring some water on the belt to keep it from overheating. It was a great relief when the anchor went down at 2 am.

After 2 glorious sunny days visiting old Charleston and repairing Mupepe we where ready to go again, We had one good day forecasted before a predicted gale, so we sailed to Georgetown 60 miles to the North, where we went in and continued our journey in the Intra Coastal Waterway. The waterway is like a winding river and must be motored. While underway I noticed my bilge pump coming on a couple of times, investigating the source of the leak I discovered that my engine was overflowing with cooling water, a leak had occurred in the heat exchanger. The overflow was running out of the radiator cap onto the alternator and the salt water did not take long to short it and drain the power out of my batteries, it is a good thing that a diesel motor do not need electric once running. Mupepe made it to Wrightsville Beach where we where to meet our friends Dick and Patty. They had taken a motel room for the weekend so we brought our batteries to their room and recharged them, giving us enough power to end the trip 2 days latter. It was real relief to tie up at Bocks Marine docks.

That night our cat Harley was enjoying land for the first time in 3 month and in the middle of the night we heard cat fighting and screaming. Next morning she was nowhere to be seen, Eileen asked everyone in the yard to keep an eye for her and she made signs that we posted around the yard , 3 days latter she was found dead, floating in a slip. A very difficult and sad landfall to end our long journey home.

Hauled out at Bock Marine

As we work our way north, however, the isles in the Abacos (north of Nassau) have a different topography from that of the Exumas (the isles south of Nassau). The Abacos are a little hillier, and have much more vegetation. Actual trees! The anchorages are sparsely populated and a treat to admire from the deck of Mupepe after a long day of sailing.

Mupepe at anchor off Royal Island

Since Nassau we have been three aboard- our long-time friend Patrick van Nyen from Belgium  joined us there, and will be crewing for the remainder of the trip. It’s definitely more relaxing when the work is divided by 3 rather than by 2.

Patrick is happy at the helm

Today finds us at anchor at Allans Cay. Tomorrow we sail to Grand Cays where we will re-fuel, top off our provisions, and wait for a good weather window to cross the Gulf Stream to Charleston.

We haven’t been off the boat at all since February 18, in San Juan. Since then, we’ve been stopping only to sleep at an anchorage, and from Aricebo in Puerto Rico to Big Sand Cay in the Turks & Caicos, we didn’t do even that. And now I can honestly say that I KNOW I don’t like to sail through the night. It’s no longer a suspicion, but a tested theory. Here’s what our 52 hours from Aricebo to Big Sand Cay was like:

Weather-wise, the first day and night we had a good strong breeze from the east with fairly large sea swells; the next day the winds died down quite a bit, but the seas were still up; and on the last both the wind & seas had died down ( so that we ended up motor-sailing the last 4 hours of the trip). For those of you who have never spent much time on a mono-hull, that means that the first day and night, since we were sailing on a reach, Mupepe was leaning to one side at what feels like a 45 degree angle while simultaneously dipping her bow in & out of the water with the swells. So to do anything on board (walk, use the toilet, get food out of the cupboard, etc) requires defying gravity and holding onto something solid with at least one hand at the same time. And since you can’t open any of the portholes or hatches (=windows) and this is a warm climate, the interior of the boat gets incredibly stuffy. Add to this the fact that you don’t wash any dishes because it’s  too difficult to do one-handed while being tossed about, and you can easily imagine that the best place to be is in the cockpit. Which is about the size of the interior of a car, only with much harder seats. For 52 hours!!!

Then there’s the matter of sleep. I took the evening shift, 6 until midnight, and Leon took the night watch (midnight to 6). Here you are, dying to lie down & get some rest, and the only feasible place to stretch out is in the salon. Besides the stuffiness, it’s incredibly noisy down below when you’re sailing on a windy night- all the rigging slaps & bangs and every jar in the cupboard rattles, as do the doors. Not to mention that the water tanks are right under the beds, so you hear the water sloshing back & forth in the tanks.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more uncomfortable, Harley (our cat) found a way to make it so.  Either unwilling or unable to defy gravity to jump into her littler box (which, I will admit, was located on the high side of the boat with its opening toward the down side) she decided to defecate right where she was-which happened to be on our bed. So now we have the aroma of cat turd added to the melee.

Fortunately, for my sanity, the next morning the wind died down quite a bit, so sailing was considerably smoother, relatively speaking.

52 hours later, our GPS tells us that we are 10 miles from our destination, Sand Cay. We are elated & begin to eagerly scan the horizon. Nada. 3 miles later still nothing but water on the horizon…we begin to panic…. did we enter the wrong waypoint in our system & are on the wrong course??

Where's the Cay?

We quickly double check our current position on the chart…it looks correct…we should be just 7 miles from our long-awaited anchorage. Finally, a couple of miles later, we see it- a flat little oasis of sand in the midst of these large seas. A tiny uninhabited spit of sand, with no one else at anchor with us. But at least we get to drop anchor…….

Now I can say that I am SO glad to resume our habit of dropping anchor every day by cocktail hour.

For the next 7 days, we journey across the large expanse of seas from the Turks & Caicos to Georgetown, the first settlement of any size in the Bahamas. We did anchor at Mayaguana Cay (pop. 400) & Rum Cay (pop. 70), which are beautiful snorkeling grounds, but didn’t go ashore. During this week we saw more sea mammals than we did other boats. Total other boats sighted=10; mammals=20 (a large pod of dolphins, and a pod of about 6 orca whales that swam with Mupepe for a while).

Dark blue to light blue, as we go over the bank, frpm 600' to 30'

10 days & 670 miles later, we are both SO glad to pull into Georgetown, a veritable cruisers’ “city”, with about 300 boats, including several cruising mega-yachts, at anchor off Stocking Island. Ribs, fries, & a Rum punch at KB’s Chat n Chill hit the spot.

Eileen

Albacore Tuna for dinner tonight

Culebra is only 7 miles long & 3 miles wide,  but we found there just about everything we needed. Interesting flora & fauna, friendly local residents,  a cruising community, and readily accessible services.

Culebra fauna

Culebra Flora

The Dinghy Dock Cafe: where you can sit all afternoon, have good wifi access, chat in between with cruisers, divers, and land tourists. And if you’re thirsty, 3 of the local beers (Medalla Light) will cost you less than $5.

Get exercise and a dose of culture, too:  a solid hour hike to the peak at the eastern end of the  island brings you to the Culebra Museum, just past the cemetery.  And if you’re lucky enough to be there  at closing time, the young lady who operates the museum may just offer you a ride back downtown, as she did Leon & I.

Cemetery

Or just a mega dose of culture: a free outdoor performance on the plaza by the wind ensemble of the Berlin Orchestra (taking R&R on Culebra after their performance in San Juan).

Flamenco beach:   warm clear Caribbean waters with a gentle surf and a wide expanse of white sand backed by palm trees, and a concession stand where $5 buys 2 cold beers and a generous portion of fresh tostones.  Just a 45 min. walk (or $3 taxi ride) from downtown.

Flamenco Beach

Bahia Marina:  a brisk ½ hour walk from town along the coast, then up to the peak of a hill, just when you’re hot & tired there’s….Bahia Marina Resort with a swimming pool that’s open to the public with a swim-up bistro

Bahia Marina Swim-up Bistro

Services: 2 supermarkets, the post office, an ATM, & a library, all within the 5 blocks comprising downtown

And best of all, a well protected flat anchorage, and 3 different free docks to tie up your dinghy.

What more could a cruiser ask for?

Nada mas, diga Eileen

One promising anchorage

Culebra is just 20 nautical miles from St Thomas, US Virgin, and is a world away. St Thomas old downtown is now a huge market for Gold, Diamonds, Precious Watches, heckled to the thousands of consumers the Cruise ships deliver to the town everyday, in contrast Culebra is for the Culebrians as they call themselves, and they are willing to share it with us the cruisers that do find them.

The other Gems ???….Grenada, Carriacou, Bequia ( St Vincent), Les Saintes and Deshaies ( Guadeloupe), that is about it.

Just another pretty anchorage-Jost Vandyke

Our sea hitchhiker, Richard, left us here in Culebra and caught the ferry to Puerto Rico on his way to the Dominican Republic where he is planing to spend a couple month learning Spanish. Being from Quebec we had a french speaking boat for a while.

The Sailing that brought us to this point has been just phenomenal. We sailed very tight to the wind all the way to Martinique and then the island chain angles more to the west giving us a better angle on the winter winds that are north easterlies and above all on the waves plus great speed.

Since St Martin our heading has been straight west or downwind . It is our least favored heading as the boat rolls uncomfortably from side to side. Only 90 more miles to endure before turning North.

Mupepe, my trusty sailboat is giving only the best, so far only one light bulb died on us, I can not say the same thing about my dinghy. For you non cruisers, the dinghy is the last but crucial piece of equipment that connect the passengers of a sail boat at anchor to the land where they find water, food, friendship and other miscellaneous they need to keep the voyage going. When Mupepe is at rest the dinghy is working hard ferrying us here and there ….well! The dinghy is falling apart but I have been able to patch and glue it to usefulness. …to be continued.

The dinghy transom is coming unglued

Cruising is not all play

Some " 5200" boater super glue and stainless screws , voila!

The day before we were to pull anchor in St Martin for our 80-mile sail to Virgin Gorda, Richard pulled his dinghy up alongside Mupepe  and inquired whether we were heading north sometime soon and in need of crew. H is story: a young Canadian, after finishing his university studies in mechanical engineering, went to France & Burkina Faso to work for a few months. Rather than flying home from France last fall, he decided to take a crewing position on a sailboat with a couple heading for the Caribbean Isles.  Three  months later, here he is in St Martin, where the boat he crewed on plans to stay indefinitely. He’d like to get home to Quebec by summer, and preferably by boat, so here he is hitchhiking. We don’t really need crew for the next 3 weeks, but he seems nice enough, and we’re willing to give him a ride at least to the BVI.

The Baths, Virgin Gord, V.G>

Today ,4 days later, finds all 3 of us together on Norman island, BVI. Richard has fit nicely into our family- he has great sailing experience, good stories to tell, and AWAYS pulls the anchor. He even does dishes! Leon & I feel like we have gained a son for a few days.

So far, we all find the BVi quite agreeable. SO  different from the East Caribbean isles, but nice in their own way. It’s funny how just  80 miles brings you to a different culture. These isles are much more manicured,  less  rich in local culture, and more touristy. I know that all sounds perfectly awful, but on the plus side is the natural beauty of the islands- the rock formations, beaches, and water life. Oh-and then there’s the floating William Thornton bar in the bight here. Most  entertaining to observe the “wildlife” aboard (for a short period). The other big difference is the number of boats plying the waters!!!  In the East Caribbean, particularly from St Vincent north, during the 10-hour day sails we generally saw only a handful of other boats all day. One day, in fact, we didn’t see a single other boat the entire day.  In the BVI, by contrast, the first day we thought we had accidentally stumbled into the middle of a regatta.

Hiking on Virgin Gorda

Tomorrow we are on to the last of the BVI on our route- Jost  Van Dyke. The day after-we’ll be back in the USA- St Thomas or St John will be the first stop.

Hiking to Devis Bay at The Baths, V.G.

If you’d like to read more about Richard’s Atlantic crossing, here’s the link to that boat’s blog: www.mahanga.over-blog.com

More  later….

Richard practices celestial navigationRichardd, the sea hitchhiker

Harley surveys the harbor

Dropped  anchor  here the day before yesterday. St Martin-  the northernmost of the East Caribbean Isles. Half of the island is Dutch (St Maarten) & half is French. As you probably would have guessed, we are anchored on the French side. It’s not just the proximity of the good bakeries & cafes that draws us, it’s also that in the anchorage on the Dutch side (Phillipsburg) is also where the cruise ships dock, as well as other commercial vessels. So the neighborhood on the water is less pleasant, and on shore in that bay are all the usual services to go with mass tourism: a casino, souvenir hawkers, duty-free gold jewelry shops, resorts, and golf courses. We much prefer little windy streets with small cafes & shops. And there’s still a marketplace at the waterfront for souvenirs, should we want any.

We are  resting here for a few days- doing laundry, minor boat maintenance, re-filling the water tanks, etc, before we start out on the second “leg” of our journey. We’ll have a very long sail the day that we leave (about 80 miles) to reach the US Virgin islands. The islands from there to and including Puerto Rico are all new sailing grounds for us, so we will be going much slower once we get there, checking out the new sights. In the last 10 days we have sailed about 500 miles, & in the next 3 weeks we plan to sail only 200.

We will be leaving the East Caribbean Isles with some sadness,  as  it’s  a wonderful corner  of the world in many ways.

No middle of the road with Leon. As usual, it’s one extreme or the other. By mid-January we had only moved from St David’s Bay (where Grenada Marine is located) to Prickly Bay, an anchorage 2 hours’ sail up the west coast of Grenada. After 4 days there we sailed to Carriacou, a smaller island, but still part of Grenada. We finally checked out at Grenadian customs & immigration on Saturday, January 13, and set sail for points north the next day. Since then, in one week, we have anchored in Wallilboo Bay, St Vincent (site of the filming of the first “Pirates of the Caribbean”; Rodney Bay, St Lucia (some of you know the Sandals resort at that location); Le Marin, at the south end of Martinique; St Pierre at the north end of Martinique; Portsmouth, Dominica ; and today I am writing this at anchor in Deshaies, Guadeloupe.

Stowing the dinghy

Since our travel time was shortened by a month, and we still plan to park Mupepe in NC at the end of March, we decided to skip tourism from Grenada to St Martin, as this is the 3^rd time that we’re sailing this route. So…rapid run north until we reach the Virgin Islands. With that in mind, we’ve sailed about 40 miles each day, in moderately heavy trade winds (20-25), and good size swells in the passes (6’-8’ average, and 10’ in St Lucia’s pass).In addition to being moderately heavy trade winds this year, it is also a wet year: every single night we can count on rain on& off, and most days we run into at least 1 or 2 squalls while sailing.

Anchor must come up

Fortunately, the day we sailed St Lucia’s pass was also the one shorter leg- a 25 mile run- and as we anchored early afternoon we took the opportunity to put the dinghy down & go ashore.  Le Marin has one of the best internet cafes in the East Caribbean. At the Mango Bay bar & restaurant they have a section for wifi users, & they let you sit as long as you like with your own laptop, & the connection is both fast and reliable. All of this, AND they serve a wide selection of drinks, including Leffe beer, and GOOD French Fries (Martinique is the birthplace of Josephine Bonaparte, and is still a French territory).  There, we re-connected with the rest of the world once again (mostly catching up on work stuff, sad to report).  Our compass heading has been from 30 degrees to (today), a true 360. So northward bound we are. My skipper has so far kept to my request that we anchor each day by cocktail hour. So our routine this week has been simple, predictable, and enjoyable:  Pull anchor at 7 a.m., drop anchor somewhere between 3:30 & 5 pm, cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, an hour or so of boat chores (tidy up from today’s trip & get everything ready for tomorrow’s), dinner, evening relaxation  (read, computer stuff, look at the stars, whatever).

Hooking the Mainsail

This evening, as i am preparing supper below, I am reminded why I love the French territories: a knock on the hull-who’s there?- the bakery delivery guy in his dinghy- would we like to place an order for fresh baguette and/or chocolate croissants to be delivered around 7 tomorrow morning?…mais OUI!!! Deux baguettes, et deux croissants, svp!!!

Captain’s note:

We are now taking a break from sailing, in a beautiful bay in front of the picturesque village of Deshaies in Guadeloupe. This is the first day we will not sail at all since we left Grenada. We had stopped for a half day in Martinique to provision and fill our water tanks, otherwise we are on the move; we are trying to get to the Virgin Islands by February 1st. From Grenada to Martinique it was a long sail close to the wind, the trades were strong and the ride quite wet. Since Martinique the Islands angle more to the west giving us a much better angle with the winds and very fast and dry rides. This is sailing at its best. The crew have got their sea legs by now and that includes the cat. Mupepe is doing absolutely everything that is asked of her. I am knocking on wood but all systems on board are working flawlessly.

Mupepe ready to sail

We lift anchor every morning at about 6:30 am and by 4pm we usually enter some quiet bay on our route and drop the anchor in time for the cocktail hour ….Got to keep the crew happy! We are not playing tourist for now since we have already visited most of the Eastern Caribbean. We will be tourist again as soon as we get to the Virgin Islands.

Skipper Eileen

Sunset

Under way

Anchorage at Dershaies, Guadeloupe

Rainy day home on Senaca Lake

A welcome gentle rain is coming down on a still Seneca Lake, the leaves are just bursting open on the tree branches. I am back in Upstate New York. The transition from the warm tropical trade wind to cool north east US has been easy this year, temperature record was being broken all over our region and on the high side at that! Nature responded and the spring chores around the homestead got under way on an accelerated pace.

I left Grenada on the last day of March, concluding a wonderful cruising season. In the past 5 year winter sailing season, Mupepe would typically plow a wake 1500 to 2000 miles long across a section of the Atlantic but this year our tracks was not much over 300 miles and mostly up and down the coast of Grenada. The slow pace of travel allowed for deeper relationship to develop with the local folks and the surrounds.

Jason show his country: Can you tell where the trade winds comes from?

Jason

Jason, not only made new sails for Mupepe but in the process we became friends…, he took me around his Island and showed me is village, the places where he played ,while growing up and had me meet his family and we ended the day with the traditional Grenadian dish cooked over an open fire: the famous “Oil Down”.

Jason and Wife and Sister in Law and kids.

Cooking an " Oil Down"

Before tucking my boat away for another summer, I invited my new found friends for a day sail, bucking a stiff trade just for the joy of sailing.

The crew

Here is a hard working crew.

Jason view his country from seaward.

Is Bumpy's Girl friend getting "mal de mer"

Every where in Grenada I found gentleness, respect and this indescribable sense of being welcome and within it awoke something….I Love You, Grenada. Grenada I miss you but i know your future is in good hands.

Grenada future.