May 13 through May 19, 2009 - 851 miles - St John

I don’t know where to begin sharing the story of our trip from Provo (Turks and Caicos) to St John, USVI. We traveled a total of 851 miles including tacks for the 550-mile journey. Most of the lost miles were at the beginning of the trip before we caught a reasonable ENE wind that took us to the SW for a solid three days. We almost made it all the way to the Virgin Islands without a final tack. The whole trip took 5-1/2 days, which is not bad at all.

We had very strong 25 to 30 mph winds to start with. I had reefed the main and it stayed that way for the first 2 days. I don’t tack as well when I’m reefed so this contributed to some excessive miles. We were tacking tight the entire way. This makes for a very grueling trip. The seas were pretty rough most of the time with 15 to 20 foot crests. The boat saw lots of drenchings and slamming over the seas. We both slept on deck and were in rain gear most all of the time.

The throttle linkage failed about 40 miles into the trip. So this left us with limited engine use. I did some basic checking to see if the problem was an easy fix and determined it wasn’t. At least not easy while under these kinds of sailing conditions. Fortunately, I was able to rev the rpm’s enough manually in the engine compartment for the alternator to kick in and keep the batteries up. On day 4-1/2, I decided to clamp the throttle with vise grips, at the engine, and run at 2000 rpm's the remainder of the trip. This helped us keep a tighter tack and an extra 10% on speed.

My new hand held VHF radio, which has been a godsend, failed on us. Our onboard VHF radio antenna broke and fell off a couple weeks ago. So we now have no communications.

I wish I could describe the physical dynamics of the boat motion. You are not only healing an average of 45 degrees at all times, you are also going up and down and side to side. There’s not always consistency as to which way you’re going to pitch. You never know when the rogue wave will strike the side or the unusually high crest or deep trough will send a wall of water over the bow.

I have to hand it to Colleen for managing to put meals together. Everything tastes good out there so it never mattered what it was. But it usually involved pots and pans and stove cooking. The stove is on a swivel so it always remains flat even when the boat is healed at 45 degrees. Which was the entire trip. The hard part is physically navigating yourself around the boat without losing your grip or slipping on the floor. You really can get seriously hurt. There’s so much opportunity for injury. Everything is a major effort. Just contemplating and working up the motivation to reach 5-feet across the boat for a water bottle is a major time consuming ordeal.

We had another rare circumstance where we crossed paths with a large vessel. This one really caught me off guard. It seems you can go for days without seeing land or vessels and then, low and behold, two come together, hundreds of miles off shore in the middle of nowhere. This situation was at about 11PM. The vessel was large and well lit, but I had dozed off. My watch alarm is set for 15-minute wakeup calls for this reason. The alarm went off and when I opened my eyes, there it was crossing our bow. Panic set in of course because at first, you don’t know whether it sees you or not, or which direction it is traveling. The moon had not appeared yet and our little green and red bow lights pale in comparison to the display on this thing. It took a good fifteen seconds, which seemed like an eternity, to confirm that we were out of danger.

This is what I surmised about the vessel incident. I did see a very distance glow directly off our bow in the horizon at my last visual scan. However, I saw the same glow about the same time the night before and it turned out to be the moonrise. So I discounted it, but I’m pretty sure I was wrong. The moon didn’t rise until sometime after our confrontation. Once we were all clear of this vessel, it took a direct course off of our stern. This tells me were actually on a parallel course with this boat in opposite directions. That means this boat had made an evasive maneuver to avoid a possible collision. It was perpendicular off the bow less than 100 yards when I first saw it. Then it turned back to the opposite parallel course. A large spot light kicked in on the deck of the vessel and shined our way as it went off in the distance. Had we had a working radio, I’m sure we would have heard some choice words. Which would have been very deserving. And that’s the understatement of the year.

We arrived in Caneel Bay off of St John around 3PM of May 18th. The engine would do us know good at this point since I had no control of the throttle. So we picked up a mooring ball under sail. I hadn’t done that before but I pretty much knew how. It took three tries but so what. I knew we could do it. It’s hard to fathom the dilemmas that could have evolved had we been in the Bahamas, or Turks and Caicos islands when this engine problem occurred. This is when I decided that this form of sailing is no longer an adventure. It’s just plain nuts. The Bahamas are simply unapproachable without an engine. Particular if you are unfamiliar with them as I am. It’s typical to have to motor several miles in 6 to 10 feet of water, only under high tide, through narrow reef cuts and channel markers. The approach routs aren’t there for sailboats that have to tack. So what do you do without and engine AND without a radio?? Beats the hell out of me. But I guarantee, I would have figured out something.

To sum up, I’m not doing this again. I’m not even to the stage where I can say, I’m glad I did it once for the experience. It will take some time to get to that point. This was a very hard trip. I felt really bad at times for even subjecting Colleen to this insanity. I can’t imagine what her blog will say about it? Right now, I’m just glad were home in the Virgin Islands.
My throttle cable turned out to be broken at the shifter lever end. I was able to pull the 18-feet of cable and jacket out, buy a new one off the shelf in a marine store, and install it the next day. We are back in business and now located in Red Hook, St Thomas. I’ve made a parts run to support several projects. We plan to go off to a quiet bay and get to work for a few days. I have a billion new topics to write about regarding work scopes we face. But those could get boring.