Monthly Archives: April 2013

On Harbour Island when we stopped for lunch at Angela’s I was heartened to see that she had options for a vegetarian in this fish-intensive culture. I got an egg sandwich and an order of peas and rice. I’m a connoisseur of legumes so I was interested in seeing the Bahamian take on pigeon peas and oh, were they delicious! They were so good that when I couldn’t finish them I asked for a takeout container and carried the little doggie bag all the way back to the boat. I asked Angela what was in them and she said, “You can put whatever you want in them. Whatever your heart desires.” This is the same answer she gave when Jack asked how he should order his conch burger. I had to press her for more specific info but all I got was “onions, peppers, a little thyme.”

Back on Escape Velocity I set about trying to find an authentic recipe for Bahamian Peas and Rice. Sometimes the Internet is too much of a good thing. I found many recipes that claimed to be authentic only to be followed by 50 or so reader comments saying no, that’s nothing like it. I figured it’s one of those things that varies by region and tradition but I sure would like to get a basic rundown that I can start with. In the meantime I put the pigeon peas on to soak.

Monday morning Bandit came by to collect the mooring fee and I asked him about it. He gave me a strange look and breathed a heavy sigh to let me know I was overreaching a bit. Jack shot me a warning look. But then Bandit proceeded to give me chapter and verse on how to cook peas and rice, right down to how long to cook the tomato sauce before adding the rice. After he was done, I asked a few questions to clarify and he got that impatient look back and said, “It’s whatever you want. However you like it.”

Sounds just like Angela. Whatever our hearts desire. I can run with that.

I followed Bandit’s directions and our peas and rice turned out delicious. You can read the directions at my other blog, Monday Beans.

Bandit came by this morning to see if we were staying and I reported back to him our peas and rice success. I got a thumbs up.

While Jack spent a little more time displacing barnacles on the bottom I scanned the shoreline with the binoculars. I’d noticed some flotsam on the beach and was curious to see what was there.

We saw Bahamians secure their boats on the beach by dropping one anchor on the sand and one in the water marked by a float. This’ll keep the boat from floating away as the tide changes. We thought maybe we’d look for a float somewhere and — how about that? — there’s one stuck in a tree. When Jack dragged himself out of the water I announced that we were going ashore. He brightened until I told him we were got to the other shore, the one 100 feet from us.

We rowed over and made our way through the sucky sand and poked around for any usable objects. The float was perfect and we also found a few plastic crates that may come in handy, provided we can scrape off the marine growth.

The new float is already in service.

Our trip to Harbour Island gave us a little more of a flavor of the Bahamas. Of course how would we know? We’ve never been here before.

As soon as we got off the ferry we saw this Nissan Sentra; the very same thing we drove for years in Pittsburgh. We bought it from our friend Matt, passed it onto Drew and Ericka who passed it on to their friend’s daughter. As far as I know the thing may still be running. This one has the same faded red color as ours.

Without a map we just ambled around and enjoyed the beautiful day.

Golf carts are the most popular mode of transportation here. Unfortunately they’re not the quiet non-polluting electric versions but rather gas burning noisy things that make you think walking down the street that you’re in an episode of Toro! Toro! Toro!

It happened in slow motion. The harder I tried to ignore the guy the more I knew it was inevitable. Oh no, he just caught me with a surreptitious sideward glance and now I’m his “Brudda”. I’m not up on the latest soul handshakes so this is going to be awkward. The last time I had any confidence in a quality contemporary handshake had to have been about 1985.

My new “Brudda” is so drunk I really don’t think he knows he’s a white guy. Kinda loud, kinda brash, that’s when I notice he’s got a hole in the seat of his dry suit. I say,” Yo Brudda, I think something bit you on the butt.” Now he really thinks I’m his best friend. Saved by the ferry horn, we gotta go.

We shared the upper aft deck of the Bo Hengy II ferry with two women cruisers, one of whom has her 150-ton Masters License, a couple of Japanese tourists and an incredibly loud drunken extended family of at least a dozen or so souls and the largest cooler of beer I’ve ever seen.

Like just about everyone who has the responsibility of keeping their vessel floating free in this thin Bahamian water the four of us were studying the circuitous course out of the Spanish Wells Harbor that our Captain was taking, especially over the Devils Backbone. The loud drunken family…not so much. The Captain had us twisting and turning, sometimes right next to the beach barely a boat width off the sand.

We four decided that it was better left to local pilots. I couldn’t help but notice that the extended family had a pretty nonchalant attitude about piloting but great focus on the cooler.

Ah, Harbor Island. I guess you could say I’m a sucker for a quaint tourist trap. Lots of beach life, straw huts and woman cleaning the day’s catch and whacking conch.

Our friend Annmarie managed to get an email to us right before our phones went mute recommending Angela’s Starfish Takeout up on the ridge. After a few abortive attempts we finally got directions from someone who actually knew where the place was. Best fried conch burger I’ve ever had but I can’t say so much about their lumpy landscaping that would allow only two chair legs at a time to interact with the ground, which meant the thing would slowly start to lean in the sandy soil putting us in an Arte Johnson trajectory. (Ask your grandparents.)

Next we intrepid sailors took off for what we thought might be towards the beach. With a little help we made it but found it sadly lacking in ice cream vendors so we crossed the ridge back to town, eventually finding some at a pizza place.

I have to say that for some reason we never seem to have any of those maps, you know those cute little ones with the cartoon buildings that you see everyone else with…well, the people that seem to know where they’re going anyway. Spanish Wells is out of them and they don’t seem in a hurry to get any more. Harbor Island has tons but apparently you have to ask the right person for one.

On the way back to Spanish Wells we couldn’t help but notice that the drunken extended family was a bit more subdued but the cooler was a lot lighter. We were more determined to read the water like a true Bahamian. Even more inscrutable, the skipper had us dashing here and swerving there. The cruiser with the captain’s license said she was going up to talk to the ferry captain. Professional courtesy, I guess. When she returned we were entering the harbor and she told us that the ferry, which is quite modern, has four engines but they save hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel by only running three. In fact, they sold the propeller!

Welcome to the Bahamas.

At first blush this place feels like home, or at least there is something so familiar about the place that I was comfortable immediately. I lived in Charlotte Amalie, USVI, for a year and a half while working as a musician in the early 70s. It had the same quaint vibe juxtaposed with pretensions of a resort destination. St. Thomas had just gotten their first Orange Julius chain and many people were up in arms. The roads had that ad hoc, just winging it quality and a huge disparity in wealth that causes problems everywhere.

As Bob Marley said, “They belly full but we hungry!”

St. Thomas made it. I don’t think they want this place to change, ever. Race relations were strained everywhere in the 70s so finding trouble in St. Thomas really wasn’t surprising. I’m not sure what’s happening here in Spanish Wells but after a day or two you start to notice a lot of white faces and the black ones are mostly Haitian workers that leave every night for Eleuthera on the little local water taxi. It’s a dry Protestant town and I guess I just don’t like one- company towns.

We’re heading over to Harbor Island on the ferry tomorrow, weather permitting, to see something more like the Bahamas.

There has been a tension in the harbor due to the threat of multiple fifty knot squall lines ripping through the area, which is why we’re sitting here on a mooring. All day you could see crew come out to strip something off their boat or lash something down or add another line or chafe gear. It just kind of builds until you go out and do something, too. Escape Velocity is always tidy on deck. We don’t have jerry cans of fuel and water lashed to the side decks like most cruising boats do. We mostly have to sausage wrap the jib and double up our mooring lines and we’re ready for the storm.

We had two thunderstorms go through this harbor early today so inbetween we were able to scrub EVs decks and get a fresh water rinse. We are the only American boat and apparently all the Canadian, Kiwi, and Newfoundland boats around us don’t share our need for clean decks.

Life is good.

Arriving in the Bahamas was a giant leap forward for us. We actually didn’t intend to stop here but rather wanted to sail straight through to the Caribbean. When the wind didn’t cooperate we picked Spanish Wells as our stopping point because it positions us nicely for the long passage into the Atlantic and the mooring field looked to offer protection from the predicted squalls. We were underway for less than two days and went less than 200 miles but this is our first foreign port on Escape Velocity and cause for celebration. We also reached the 3000-mile mark; actually that happened in Fort Lauderdale but we weren’t much in the mood for celebration there.

We didn’t go ashore when we arrived but took the time to tidy up the boat and ourselves and opened a beautiful bottle of wine for the occasion. We also dug into our precious stash of homemade pesto from deep in the freezer. These two things, the pesto, made from basil we got from our beloved CSA farm, and the wine, given to us by our dear friends and frequent dining partners Jeff and Marylyn, were some of the few things we brought with us from our old life. It seemed fitting to enjoy them at this moment and reflect on how far we’ve come. One thing you can say about us, we may take a long time to reach escape velocity but we almost always get there eventually.

The next morning we were visited by Bandit who came to collect our mooring fee. He was very friendly as I grilled him about the town and what to see and do, but I was puzzled by something he said. He told us this place is different from the rest of the Bahamas and when I asked how so he said people here are hard-working; they know that if they want something they have to work for it. He was kind of vehement and I thought it was a curious way to characterize one’s hometown to a visitor.

You’ll probably notice I’m still in my pajamas. It was a slow start to the day. I spent the morning trying to catch up on the laundry and Jack did a little barnacle rearranging on the hull. Yep, shoulda done that before we left Fort Lauderdale but better late than never. We also stitched up the cockpit enclosure where the zipper was broken just in case the predicted storms materialized.

I know, I know. Not very neat and the thread doesn’t match. It’s temporary, and that is seriously strong thread we bought for our previous boat and I’m not going to waste it.

Eventually we got ourselves together and dinghied ashore. I was struck at once to see that most of the people of this island are white. With blue eyes. Named Pinder. I’m going to have to look that up.

Lake Sylvia had dark low scudding clouds and predictions for waterspouts and how to avoid them. As I came out on deck Easter morning, a large dead fish slowly floated by. Our friends on True Colors seemed to have a rollicking good time getting to Biscayne Bay in preparation for the jump over to the Bahamas. A half dozen wackos in inflatables serpentined through the anchorage with bunny ears on their heads. Our wind instrument decided to send erroneous information about wind speed down from the masthead. Oh…and the SSB crapped out.

Oh, the signs have been there for the past few days, but how can you interpret this tangled mess? Just as we began to settle down into the usual EV response to too much conflicting information, which is to make Dark and Stormies and try to relax, an old friend of Marce’s suggested that this evening was the time to jump. Did I mention that it was April Fools Day and dusk was about to settle over Lake Sylvia?

It must have been the fish.

I had already set up EV to weigh anchor so after taking on fuel we made the six PM 17th St Bridge opening and fought our way past the swirling mass of incoming water with a huge dredge right in the middle of the channel which kept me quite busy for a while. I finally was able to sit down and assess the situation, and before my eyes on the chart plotter screen were forty or more AIS targets, each one tagged with its name, description, course, speed, distance, nearest approach, and stuff I haven’t even discovered yet. It paid for itself last night as a behemoth cruise ship emerged from shore aimed right at us. It slowly changed course, because our information is being broadcast to them as well, and went by at a respectful distance. Whew! This is a busy patch of water. At one point we had six cruise ships vying for the same real estate as us. Good to know what they’re up to.

Traditional piloting would have you angling into a current to compensate for the push of said current, although you don’t want to test the gulfstream too much. It was a slow slog against the stream but we found EV going directly towards our southern aiming point, and because of the southern air flow the crossing was remarkably calm, for the Gulfstream. Izzy would have been terrified. Our speed was cut in half so we headed more North to allow the stream to lift and push us and the alternate plan was set in motion. The Berry Islands or maybe even Spanish Wells! Up and over into the deep water of Providence channel, it’s just that the weather would have to hold.

Weather…we’re still having a lot of trouble getting reliable weather information without our big SSB.

In the morning we were greeted with that wonderful electric steel blue Atlantic Ocean water, but little wind. Spanish Wells or bust. We shut down one engine and left the jib up for a little lift and steadying. The jib is working much better now with the reworked control lines and is our go-to sail when we don’t know if there is enough wind to keep the mainsail happy. We don’t know if there’s enough wind because our wind instrument has gone walk-about. To top it off there seems to be talk of extreme squall lines moving through the Bahamas by Friday or Saturday, we don’t know because our piece of crap radio has gone mute. But, enough about that.

By 2:30 pm Wednesday we hooked onto our first foreign mooring buoy as boat owners. Up went the yellow Q-flag. The Q stands for quarantine and a boat entering a country must fly it until they’ve been cleared for entry by customs, immigration, health and who knows what all else.

It took about 2 hours of dinghy searching of the narrow Spanish Wells Harbour front to find the yellow cement block customs house. $300 lighter, 7 long forms and of course we had to slip our mooring ball and motor over to the custom house because David wasn’t going for no damn dinghy ride. Practice make perfect. We’re getting pretty good at picking up a mooring ball. Now that we’re cleared in, up goes the Bahamian courtesy flag.

Tomorrow we go on one of our favorite things, a scouting sortie adventure of Spanish Wells, our first foreign port.

Just a reminder. Communications will be and are a major bug in the ointment, so while we continue to blog mostly daily, getting the the blog out will be spotty at best. Photos apparently are particularly troublesome and may be added later.

Fair winds and following seas,
Escapees

Providence Channel ocean blogging

Ever vigilant, Marce stands watch

End

We’ve ended up motoring with the jib up, which gave us a little lift for a while but eventually the wind came around to the east, the direction we’re headed, and dropped to insignificant. We don’t like burning this much fuel but we heard on the weather this morning that by Friday a line of serious squalls is headed our way and we’d like to be buttoned up and settled in somewhere safe well ahead of then. We still have a broken zipper on one panel of our cockpit enclosure that we should have had replaced in Fort Lauderdale. Looks like it’ll be a while until we’re in another place with canvas services so we plan to sew it shut in the meantime. The enclosure is old and crumbling in places but does an amazing job of protecting us in wind and rain.

This has been a quiet passage. We altered course very slightly just once when we saw that a freighter was going to pass within a mile of us. We probably didn’t have to, but better safe than sorry. Other than that, most of the ships we saw overnight were cruise ships heading to and from Nassau, south of us.

Our new AIS displays the ships around us on our chartplotter screen but there’s also an iPhone app that allows us to see a list of ships nearby from anywhere in the boat. On the list you can see CPA, closest point of approach, and TCPA, time of closest point of approach. In this photo you can see that none of the boats will be a threat to us. It’s very cool.

We were considering our options Monday morning when the VHF radio crackled to life.

“Escape Velocity. Escape Velocity. This is Ariel.”

Jack answered the call and it was a sailboat coming into Port Everglades from the ocean wanting to know if there was room to anchor in Lake Sylvia. It took us a minute to realize we had turned on all our instruments in preparation to leave and the AIS was broadcasting our name and position. I set the AIS to silent mode after that, meaning it receives data about other ships but doesn’t transmit ours, which we certainly don’t need to do when we’re sitting in the middle of a lake. We know from our limited experience that dozens of boats at the docks with AIS on just clutters up the screen. Nonetheless Jack was happy to reassure Ariel there was plenty of room for them in the Lake.

Since we couldn’t make up our minds about leaving we tore into the watermaker and changed the membrane. It was a fairly easy job made difficult only by having to work in tight places where each turn of the wrench skins your knuckles against the hull.

Once the new membrane was in we had to run the watermaker for an hour to purge the storage solution out of it, letting that water go into the bilge. Every once in a while we’d hear the bilge pump kick on, a foreign sound to us in Dry Boat World. (Oy, I hope I didn’t just jinx us.)

The day before, Easter morning, we were greeted not only by a cruisers version of an Easter parade but also by a dead fish floating past our stern. Sara on Tumbleweed blogged last year that you know it’s time to go when the dead pig floats by and we wonder if the fish isn’t some kind of Schulz addendum to the Tumbleweed Rule. Still, we ignored the sign and succumbed to the anchor glue that gets us everywhere we go.

As we were waiting for the purge cycle to finish we got the kick in the pants we needed from an old friend living in St. Thomas.

Today would have been a good day to get across the GS before the wind goes N of E but it is what it is. I would even leave before sunset if it was up to me but I know you guys probably don’t want to cross in the dark.

Wait, what?! We love night sailing! That’s all it took. We knew there wouldn’t be another window for crossing any time soon, so we buttoned up the watermaker and headed for the fuel dock to top up our tank and fill our backup diesel cans. We made the 6pm bridge opening and bucked a wacky current for a couple of hours to get to the gulfstream.

For those unfamiliar, the gulfstream is a strong warm current that flows from south Florida along the southeast coast, then angles across the Atlantic and is the reason England, for example, isn’t a frozen wasteland given its high latitude. In south Florida the gulfstream is only 7-10 miles offshore and can be 40 miles wide. It’s fast and depending on the weather conditions crossing it can vary from slightly bouncy to downright terrifying, like maybe stepping onto a moving roller coaster. Sailors give the stream a lot of respect, and newbies are understandably tentative. We crossed the stream only twice before, during the 2000 Bermuda Ocean Race from Annapolis, both going and coming back. Going I remember a 12-hour hurl fest that kept the rest of the crew hiding inside while I lay prone in the tiny cockpit with my head hanging so far over the side that the waves lapped at my hair, carrying away breakfast, lunch and dinner. My watchmate handed over a damp paper towel every time I came up for air.

Monday night the conditions were so perfect that we barely knew we’d entered the stream and experienced only the least little bit of rollicking without the raucous that can come with it. By morning we had passed Bimini and even though the wind left us we decided to continue on motorsailing for another day to get as far as we can before unfavorable weather moves in and the anchor glue gets us again.