Monthly Archives: April 2013

We hadn’t made water for a few days. Escape Velocity uses a lot of water even when you’re being careful. The heads use fresh handmade pure water to flush. Even the Spectra watermaker uses water to back flush after making water, and our product output is about half of what it should be so we try to keep up with it.

We have copious amounts of power between the solar panels and having to run the diesel engine due to not having any wind, so yesterday we cranked up the Spectra watermaker and in a few hours we figured we’d have a full tank of water…nice.

Now, dear Escapees, the cockpit on EV can be a surprisingly noisy place especially running an engine and without any wind the rig and sails tend to slat about and if you add in the woosh and splash of Atlantic Ocean waves into the mix, you can’t hear much else.

As it was nearly time to shut off the watermaker Marce asked me go down to check the pump pressures and if the tank was full to shut down the system. She had just checked fifteen minutes ago. Disaster! The pump motors were running but obviously not pumping anything and a closer look at the pressure gauge reveled that the pointer needle had actually broken off! This is not good.

This passage has been really slow except for the first twelve hours when we could head up North a bit and had a nice breeze to sail in. The new equation is how much fuel can we afford to burn getting out to 66 degrees West and still have a decent reserve in case the trade winds continue to play tricks on us verses how long can we hold out on the water we have in the tanks because there won’t be anymore. The amount of fuel is especially nettlesome because while there are three marks on our fuel gauge between E & F they might as well be labeled eenie, meenie and minie for all the information we get from it. Supposedly somewhere on this yacht there is an official graduated stick. Really?

We are very good at conserving water. We sailed in a friend’s 34′ boat eight days out of Annapolis to Bermuda with a thirty gallon water tank and four people aboard having several gallons left when we raised St. George. The boat didn’t smell so good but come to think of it EV has taken on a bit of a funk as well.

In the mean time we’ve broken out the reserve fuel jugs and one by one we decant them into the main fuel tank while there’s no wind to splash fuel everywhere.

Water pressure pump is off. We’re flushing with a bucket of salt water. Dishes are washed in saltwater and rinsed in fresh. Last night we had a brief rain shower. It was glorious. It’s funny how sailing reduces life to the really important basics. Stuff like we just past 69 degrees west longitude.

Big day!

It’s well known that when things start to go pear shaped it doesn’t take long before everyone joins in the fun. Yeah, we had our own little theory back in the 60s, Henry tha K (gag) and his little sidekick Robbie McNamara (full vomit) sorry, called this little ditty the “domino theory. ” Yes and how’d that turn out? Obviously proven to be full of crap. However, here aboard Escape Velocity we’re having our doubts.

Dear Escapees, the story starts out innocently enough, like so many do, with a decision that needed to be made before dark. The prudent sailor always reefs his sails before dark because a squall could come up during the night and reefing sails in the dark is difficult enough without the extra entertainment value of high winds and rain, unless you’ve been stuck behind headwinds and current and you finally get a decent wind direction, the first in days. I added that last part, the part about being frustrated and impatient.

At change of watch we both saw a flash of cloud-to-cloud lightning, no thunder. Besides NOAA just said there was no squall activity in our area. I awoke to Marce yelling at me to get up and get out there. I could hear incredible noises coming from outside, it sounded like a freight train in a hurricane. We were so over canvassed and it was too late to drop the sails so I angled EV a little into the wind and let all the sails out so they feathered into the squall, we were doing over 11kts. spilling all the wind that I could. I have no idea how strong the winds were because the wind instrument doesn’t work, and just when I needed a working autopilot most, it overheated and we fell into an area that has no GPS coverage, really Lat. Lon’s from Mars which meant I had no course from any of the seven GPS’s on board. All I had to follow was our Richie compass, cheerfully glowing on the binnacle and even after being swung it is none too accurate. Marce just kept saying it’ll be over soon, it’ll be over soon, like a mantra. I snapped back, “oh yeah, how do you know?” She had turned on the radar which clearly showed that the cell was moving off. Smart girl, my #1.

The squall was tough on my nerves and the tears in the jib but the seams have stopped them so far.

That was a lot of dominoes in little over forty-five minutes.

The following morning a little brightly colored bird flitted down for a rough landing in EV’s cockpit. Exhausted, he could barely keep his head up. He looked like a swallow that had been painted by Liberace (ask your grandparents.) Don’t know if he’s a domino or a good omen. Time will tell.

We’ve decided to begin our twelve step patience, self improvement program this morning. The nice breeze died and backed around to the East, right on the nose. We’re as close hauled into the wind as Escape Velocity can get and still move forward and that’s only 3.5-4 kts. We’re actually heading more toward Bermuda! Maybe we should’ve laid in more food.

By noon we’d fallen off the wagon, burning diesel like the Queen Mary…well not really, but we decided to start one engine and motor-sail in something closer to an Easterly direction. That didn’t take long, I feel like the vulture on a limb talking to his buddy and says,” patience hell I’m going to kill something.” We’re averaging only 4kts. With just one engine and the sails up bashing into waves and current, and all I can think of is drop the rags, startup the Str’b engine too and point her ninety degrees East and power up to 7-8 kts. Lets get East, out to 66 degrees West, so we can head South.

The single engine theory holds that running the second engine doubles the fuel consumption, I can attest to that, but only adds a few extra knots to your speed, yes but I still want to kill something! EV actually has a spare 50gal. fuel tank very far forward in the starboard hull but we’ve never used it, it leaked at one time, supposedly repaired and we’ve been cautioned not to use it but 50 extra gals. sounds pretty good right now.

Bear in mind that we are still supposed to be sailing along in a perfectly reasonable 10-15 kts. of S-SE breeze!

As we settle into the familiar routines of passagemaking, watch following watch, grabbing a bite when you can, scanning the horizon every fifteen minutes or so, a quick look at the rig and instruments, especially AIS, maybe radar too, But I never fail to stick my head out over the side decks , listen for the whoosh of the large Atlantic swells passing beneath our twin sterns, and marvel at the amount of stars there are out here in the middle of nowhere. It is amazing!

Back in the early seventies I went to a party in an old apartment in West Philadelphia. Sometime during the evening an inordinate number of people started gathering in the bathroom, and not for what you might think. Turns out the decrepit ventilator fan had a reputation for sounding like horse race commentary. Jack thinks we must have all been high and had a mass auditory hallucination, but believe me, you could clearly hear a horse race.

“…and they’re comin’ down the stretch and it’s Bob’s Your Uncle in the lead with Mad Hatter comin’ along the outside….”

You couldn’t hear actual words, but the tone and rhythm were absolutely pitch perfect. That ventilator was a marvel.

We have something like that on EV. At some point every day one of us hears a radio on in the background. Seriously. Sometimes it sounds like a soap opera. Sometimes it’s news. Last night I heard gospel selections from the Alan Lomax collection. Drew heard it when he was here. We’ve spent hours searching for the source of the sound and come up empty every time. We can enumerate every radio onboard and know whether it’s on or off. But still we can’t find the phantom radio.

Friday was a bad day here in Royal Island anchorage. It’s pretty but rolly and completely without services, as far as we know. We stayed aboard and tried to hear weather broadcasts on our little Sony backup receiver. So many contradictory forecasts that we both had meltdowns. Marce said its now your job and went down to our cabin and flopped face first on the bed and was done for the day. I tried to twiddle the knobs on the radio and heard voices on several occasions but did I pickup anything useful, like go or no go…no.

By evening I made my makeup meal, spaghetti & wine, it seemed to help.

Morning saw us in a similar mood but after the throughly contradictory forecasts I said let’s just go. Sail covers off, not as easy as it sounds, anchor up with a large smashed crab stuck to it, bad omen? We’ll see.

We powered through the narrow bouncy entrance and raised sail. This feels really great, we even sailed right through Little Egg and Egg pass out into Providence Channel with nowhere near the SSE wind they promised just moments ago, but we will keep her heading as East as we can, as long as we can but still sail.

The breeze is still backing around towards East which is pushing us higher and higher North.

A bit of sloppy sail handing caused extra stress on our old worn out jib. Now we have two small tears in the bottom panel which should go nicely with the tear in the top panel that Colin put in the jib while doing our rig survey. Ah-no I’m going to have to go forward to put sail tape on the lengthening medium sized tears, hopefully it’ll stop when it hits the seam. Luckily our brand spankin’ new jib is in the forward locker, but wouldn’t want to try to bend that on in this sea state.

Fingers crossed, touch wood, the winds will let us sail East or nearly so.

We never intended to spend any time in the Bahamas. We really want to get to the Virgin Islands so I can clear up some remaining mysteries in our family history and so Jack can see how much has changed since he lived there in the 70s. We also want to get to Puerto Rico for the same family history reasons and also because we both like it.

We stopped at Spanish Wells with the hope that a fair wind would find us and give us a lovely fast 1000-mile passage but it was not to be. The winds howled from the east for the entire time we were there making us glad we’d picked up a mooring. Boats came and went but mostly heading south to the Exumas, north to the Abacos, or west back to Florida or other east coast destinations. No one went east because it was impossible.

For the non-sailors: sailboats can’t sail into the wind. If we want to go in that direction we have to zigzag back and forth, or tack, just like a skier slaloms down a hill but in reverse, because we want to go uphil, or windward. The alternative is motoring and that not only gets expensive, but we can only carry so much fuel onboard so we have to factor that in to any decision.

We saw that Friday and Saturday the wind was to turn SSE, then Sunday and Monday east again but very light. We figured we’d make some time sailing eastward Friday and Saturday, then continue under power Sunday and Monday and that would just about get us to 65 degrees longitude where we could turn south and enjoy the SE trradewinds all the way to the Virgin Islands.

That was the plan. We moved the boat to Royal Island to be in a better position for a fast exit to the Atlantic and I spent all afternoon and evening Thursday making food so we wouldn’t have to cook for the first few days. I made a pasta salad, a wild rice salad, curried lentils and tofu, tuna salad for Jack, faux tuna salad for me, and hardboiled a half dozen eggs. We also have the “snack bucket” which is perpetually filled with packets of crackers, granola bars, nuts, trail mix, gum and whatever else our guests may have left in it. We’re ready.

Ivanhoe…that’s his name and his nickname too, showed up 3 hours early to de-barnacle Escape Velocity. That’s a change of pace. He had just finished working on Lenny Kravitz’s boat, who knew? He worked hard but carefully. Money well spent.

Slipping #3 mooring was trickier than usual because of the peer pressure from all the skippers in the field kept making me come out before the storm and reeve another line to the mooring ball. What a mess. Of course it was blowing quite hard which always complicates these things. Marce powered into the tempest and I unwove the cats cradle, I think we handled it well and did our classic pirouette right into Ronald’s fuel dock, we were showing only an eighth of a tank, ouch this is going to be painful at $5.96 per gallon plus four percent surcharge for using a card. She only took 50 gallons. Now dear readers math, not being one of my talents, caused me to scratch head, because we only have a 100 gallon tank. It may be time to find the official Manta graduated fuel stick, every Manta has one.

One last glance at Spanish wells and we were off. As I nosed her out of the inlet, more concerned about shallow water than anything, I noticed that we were running at 7.6 kts with very little throttle. Thank you Ivanhoe.

Our goal for today is to stage ourselves at Royal Island anchorage for an early morning departure in an attempt to get as much Easting as possible before the Trades fill in and make it very difficult to get out to 66 degrees West before we can head South to the Virgins. Yeah I know, It takes patience to sail, this adds hundreds of extra miles.

Other than a narrow entrance Royal Island has a beautiful anchorage, and supposedly Roger Staubach’s resort development company started developing this island and you can still see some ruins and a gone to seed golf course, but first one must ask permission to tour the grounds, what where are we Fort Lauderdale?

As a general rule I enjoy seeing impossibly successful guys screw up but we passed on this one, and stayed on EV. Very peaceful after Spanish Wells. So peaceful there’s no WIFI, no cell, no Sat. phone, no SSB. but it is beautiful. Marce says she hears voices in the SSB radio!

Impossible.

I don’t know what made me think of it. Maybe it was knowing the iPhones have been turned off, and texting and emailing are incredibly spotty here in Spanish Wells, but I remembered that we had won two Kenwood family band radios at a West Marine promotion back in Pittsburgh many years ago. Six AA’s and they were working as good as new.

We knew we would need to communicate because today’s mission was to find a replacement for my Brudda bottom cleaner who turned up so high that he couldn’t sit up straight, and with a serious expression said he couldn’t start on our boat because he was waiting for his man for a joint to keep his focus on the work. Oh, well sure I grew up in the 60’s, I understand trying to corral one’s mind toward work. Chasing the dragon. But with all his excuses about rebalancing his finely tuned blood chemistry Marce said there’s no way he’s touching our bottom.

It was blowing like stink out of the east again 25+ kts. and a dinghy ride was like taking a saltwater shower. After gaining the docks I just started asking everyone for a diver and eventually somebody said yeah, my sister’s husband is a diver. Nice guy, almost twice as much but I bet he shows up. After a radio consult with Marce a deal was struck.

Walking back to the dinghy I noticed commotion in the mooring field. A small modern sailboat that had been weaving back and forth on the mooring ball, had broken free and beached herself. Bandit pulled it off the bank and was trying to drag it to another mooring against the wind. He obviously needed help and yelled over to Marce who was watching the drama on deck. “Where’s your launch?”

Marce told him it was ashore, then called me on the radio and said you had better get back here, they need your help. More salt spray but I got there and quickly realized that Bandit couldn’t hold the sailboat in position and reeve the new line through the mooring ball at the same time. Tricky in so much wind but in fifteen minutes we had her tied up to the new mooring. Jim Dandy to the rescue. As I headed back towards Escape Velocity I got a polite smattering of applause from the trawler that took a least 1/2 hour to pick up her mooring in the high wind.

Well, we’ll see if our new diver shows up. Tomorrow will tell the tale.

We’re trying to catch up with our blog posts. Sometimes we post out of order but we like to get them in the right place chronologically. This is just a reminder to scroll back a few days, maybe even a week to be sure you haven’t missed anything that we posted after the fact.

Jack and I are complete Internet addicts. We’re used to constant connectivity via our smartphones and we knew that leaving the US and our unlimited data plans would cause a little adjustment to our communications. Today we’ve been hit with the reality of the situation. We canceled our cell phones. Now we’re completely dependent on available wifi and our SSB/Ham radio.

As you know, the radio is on the blink. Dave in Annapolis and Ron in St. Thomas have spent some time over email making troubleshooting suggestions. Yesterday Jack and I made one last attempt to bypass the antenna and tuner to determine if the problem is radio or antenna related. I reported our findings (no change) to Dave in Annapolis via email, since we have a good, if uneven, wifi connection here in the mooring field. He wrote back this morning and said he would share our dilemma with two of the more popular radio nets and give out our boat name and location in case there’s anyone nearby who can take a look.

A few hours later a couple dinghied over from the next mooring and asked if we were the ones who had the radio problem. They are Dick and Moira from Equinox and we invited them aboard. They had a few suggestions to try for the SSB but more important, they’ve cruised the Caribbean a lot and have so much experience that we’d love to tap into. I took out a pad and started asking questions. We learned they had spent time at St. Katharine’s Docks in London and our eyes lit up and we asked if they knew Ed and Sue Kelly. “Of course!” they said.

Ed and Sue are our heroes. They are a couple like us who took to the sea and are living a fantastic life aboard their catamaran Angel Louise. Unfortunately they don’t have a public blog (get with it, Ed!) but they’ve been good friends to us even though we’ve never even met in person. They are cruising matchmakers. When they see via Spot locators or blog posts that people they know are in the same anchorage they encourage meet-ups from wherever they are, which currently is Turkey.

They sailed through the Caribbean, across the Atlantic Ocean to London, then across the European Continental Divide via the Rhein & Danube Rivers to Constanta on the Black Sea, and south via the Bosporus and through the Dardanelles to the Aegean Sea and Marmaris. What a journey! And they’re not done yet. This season will find them sailing west through the Mediterranean to Portugal, Spain, France and back for another winter at St. Katharine’s docks in London. They are an inspiration to Jack and me and a reminder that life is short and we need to get moving!

What really strikes me is that even without cell phones and text messaging this far-flung and varied community of cruisers manages to make contact one way or another.

Now if we could just get this radio working!