... when Buoy meets Gull ...
Monday, 20 September 2010
Monday, 13 September 2010
Things we like about America
Sunday 12th September, 2010. 12,127 miles, day 694. 38° 57’.33 N, 75° 09’.91W. The Delaware River.
All good things have to come to an end, and we are now motoring up the grey and formless Delaware River, in a grey and form-shrouding mizzle. If it wasn’t for the occasional moored tanker looming out of the gloom, it would be hard to believe that we were moving. Hats and socks and neck-scarves have been dug out, smelling fustily of bilges, from the deep lockers they were stored in after our Biscay crossing. Autumn is on our heels.
We are on our way to the Chesapeake, to lay Tomia up and do some weeks of hard work on her, before heading back to England in early October. In addition to manual labour, I shall be working hard on Chatty Parrot, our new networking site for yachties and travellers. It is coming along well, after a change of designer, and the first couple of beta testers are giving very useful feedback.
Meanwhile, while I try to get our experiences into some sort of coherent form for retrospective blogs, here are some of the things we like about America.
Americans themselves take pride of place. Welcoming, engaged, interesting, intelligent, outgoing, easy and open: we have met some truly gorgeous people. They have overwhelmed us with their hospitality and kindness, and given us many happy memories. We have spent golden days with new BFFs, fallen instantly in love over a dinner table with friends of friends, or cousins or second cousins twice removed of friends, been embraced into warm family households, been cared for by complete strangers. Sailing and the Corinthian Yacht Club have provided us with a new group of like-minded people, whose generosity has made us feel at ease wherever we went. Even in Manhattan, strangers are polite and helpful.
Next is the papers. Even leaving aside the wonderful New Yorker, which belongs in a category of its own. Anybody who thinks British newspapers set the standard that the rest of the world yearns to emulate should have a look at the New York Times or the Washington Post; compare them to the British broadsheets, and hang their head. These two papers, along with many others with a more regional focus are what English papers used to be: quite simply, densely packed with objective, fact based reporting. The international news fronts up the paper, and takes up nearly half of it. The Op-ed (comment) pages cover different points of view and let them slug it out. The paper doesn’t give a damn about the private lives of slebs or sportsmen. The front page has a photograph that illustrates the news, not the opening of a new film. Just good plain informative journalism, which seeks to inform and stimulate, not to entertain.
That said, even the New York Times has a good line in bloopers. I posted the one about yachting a few weeks ago; here is one from last Sunday’s coverage of the US Tennis Open, where a young player, Beatrice Capra “attended a financial-planning session organised by the WTA” and learnt about “the financial volubility of life on the spotlight’s periphery”. Well, they always say that money talks …
Members of the MCC and those who have their own personal cricket clubs should look away now: baseball is rather a good game. It’s pacy, plenty happens, there is all the catching and getting out and general drama you could want, and it’s all over within a couple of hours. The basic rules are simple and easy to learn, but there are enough complexities to keep a teenage boy in statistics for several summers. The wonderful Arthur and Patty took us to the Yankee Stadium, to see the game played at its highest level, a great treat.
Then we got to meet two real, professional baseball players, Brett and Londell, staying for the summer with in Pete and Cheryl’s family, while they go through the rigours of their first years in the farm team system, playing for the Connecticut Tigers. They were delightful, and we went to watch them play three times. Knowing people on the team, and desperately wanting them to have a good match, gives a whole extra level of interest. A good game is interesting, but when Londell slides triumphantly onto the base a few milliseconds ahead of the fielder, or Brett makes a hit that runs two other team members in, it is thrilling.
We’ve finally cracked American food in all its delicious and varied guises – you aren’t supposed to eat it all. Now we know that restaurants will happily split a dish between two people, and expect, even in the high-end places, to provide a plastic box for the half you couldn’t eat, our clothes have stopped shrinking. The sweet and juicy Maine lobsters and the Maryland crabs have been the highlights – oh yes, and the corn on the cob. My father grew this in our walled kitchen garden, and I never thought that anything could equal the memory of those fresh sweet cobs. The season is coming to an end, and each time we have more corn, we know it may be the last time this year; having been exposed to perfection, the merely good won’t do for us any more.
And one more small good thing about life in America : they give you programmes for free in the theatre. How civilised. Oh, yes, I also should confess to a shameless attraction to Mountain Dew and Cream Soda. And Anthony has a thing for saltines and Triskets.
Now, to balance things off, here are a couple of things we aren’t in tune with yet: the first one being feet.
Americans use their feet for all sorts of things, just like Europeans: American feet are recipients of nail polish and pedicures, wearers of shoes from sneakers to sandals, lovers of massages; they can be jogged on, or hiked on in the wilderness, or used to power bicycles – but not, apparently, used for walking. At least, not in the sense of everyday transportation from A to B. If you want to get around, you take a car. If you don’t have a car, you hire a cab. If you are poor – or a yachty – and you are in an unusually public-spirited town, there might be a bus. If you want to walk – “Walk? On your feet?!” is the normal response. In Newport, we asked a bright girl in the Historic Society’s museum about how to get to one of their houses. “Oh, you can’t walk there!” she said, in tones that made us think the route led through a combination of a ghetto and a nuclear waste dump, “it’s over a mile!”
To take to your feet to go more than a few hundred yards is to lay yourself open to charges of eccentricity, and to seriously increase your chances of ending up as road-kill.
The problem is that grocery stores (supermarkets) and hardware stores, and chandlers, and just about anything other than tourist shops selling T shirts, salt-water taffy and decorative glass-ware, are in malls, and malls are not in towns. Moreover, malls are normally set along the edges of busy roads. The walk to the mall itself isn’t a problem, a mile or so there, and what seems like three miles back with a rucksack laden with a week’s worth of milk and potatoes – it’s the last few yards that normally cause the difficulty. In the land of the ten lane highway and the 5 acre house-building plot, room has rarely been found for a sidewalk (pavement) on more than one side of the road, and there is definitely no space among the two thousand car parking lot for an underpass, a bridges, or even an island in the middle of the road. A pedestrian is a small and insignificant dot, waiting for a gap in the onrushing traffic, taking their life in their hands for a dash across the road. I suppose designers of shopping malls just can’t envisage that somebody who doesn’t have a car could possibly have enough money to buy things.
The other thing we don’t quite get is air-conditioning. Not the concept, just the level. Our first visit to New York in July coincided with a heat wave. Temperatures up in the 90s, humidity the same. We wandered the streets in a damp fuggy daze, carting the tourist paraphernalia of guide books, subway map, camera, water bottles – and my thickest pashmina. Because when you come in to any building: restaurant, cinema, shop or museum, you are met by a blast of chilled air, initially as refreshing as a drink of spring water, but quickly feeling as if it is freezing the sweat on your skin into tiny droplets of ice. On our most recent visit to Manhattan, we made an unplanned trip to the theatre, and only had with us what we had needed for a day on the beach. We spent the second act huddled together, like the Babes in the Wood, under our brightly-coloured bathing towels.
It’s a wonder they don’t all get pneumonia.
All good things have to come to an end, and we are now motoring up the grey and formless Delaware River, in a grey and form-shrouding mizzle. If it wasn’t for the occasional moored tanker looming out of the gloom, it would be hard to believe that we were moving. Hats and socks and neck-scarves have been dug out, smelling fustily of bilges, from the deep lockers they were stored in after our Biscay crossing. Autumn is on our heels.
We are on our way to the Chesapeake, to lay Tomia up and do some weeks of hard work on her, before heading back to England in early October. In addition to manual labour, I shall be working hard on Chatty Parrot, our new networking site for yachties and travellers. It is coming along well, after a change of designer, and the first couple of beta testers are giving very useful feedback.
Meanwhile, while I try to get our experiences into some sort of coherent form for retrospective blogs, here are some of the things we like about America.
Americans themselves take pride of place. Welcoming, engaged, interesting, intelligent, outgoing, easy and open: we have met some truly gorgeous people. They have overwhelmed us with their hospitality and kindness, and given us many happy memories. We have spent golden days with new BFFs, fallen instantly in love over a dinner table with friends of friends, or cousins or second cousins twice removed of friends, been embraced into warm family households, been cared for by complete strangers. Sailing and the Corinthian Yacht Club have provided us with a new group of like-minded people, whose generosity has made us feel at ease wherever we went. Even in Manhattan, strangers are polite and helpful.
Next is the papers. Even leaving aside the wonderful New Yorker, which belongs in a category of its own. Anybody who thinks British newspapers set the standard that the rest of the world yearns to emulate should have a look at the New York Times or the Washington Post; compare them to the British broadsheets, and hang their head. These two papers, along with many others with a more regional focus are what English papers used to be: quite simply, densely packed with objective, fact based reporting. The international news fronts up the paper, and takes up nearly half of it. The Op-ed (comment) pages cover different points of view and let them slug it out. The paper doesn’t give a damn about the private lives of slebs or sportsmen. The front page has a photograph that illustrates the news, not the opening of a new film. Just good plain informative journalism, which seeks to inform and stimulate, not to entertain.
That said, even the New York Times has a good line in bloopers. I posted the one about yachting a few weeks ago; here is one from last Sunday’s coverage of the US Tennis Open, where a young player, Beatrice Capra “attended a financial-planning session organised by the WTA” and learnt about “the financial volubility of life on the spotlight’s periphery”. Well, they always say that money talks …
Members of the MCC and those who have their own personal cricket clubs should look away now: baseball is rather a good game. It’s pacy, plenty happens, there is all the catching and getting out and general drama you could want, and it’s all over within a couple of hours. The basic rules are simple and easy to learn, but there are enough complexities to keep a teenage boy in statistics for several summers. The wonderful Arthur and Patty took us to the Yankee Stadium, to see the game played at its highest level, a great treat.
Then we got to meet two real, professional baseball players, Brett and Londell, staying for the summer with in Pete and Cheryl’s family, while they go through the rigours of their first years in the farm team system, playing for the Connecticut Tigers. They were delightful, and we went to watch them play three times. Knowing people on the team, and desperately wanting them to have a good match, gives a whole extra level of interest. A good game is interesting, but when Londell slides triumphantly onto the base a few milliseconds ahead of the fielder, or Brett makes a hit that runs two other team members in, it is thrilling.
We’ve finally cracked American food in all its delicious and varied guises – you aren’t supposed to eat it all. Now we know that restaurants will happily split a dish between two people, and expect, even in the high-end places, to provide a plastic box for the half you couldn’t eat, our clothes have stopped shrinking. The sweet and juicy Maine lobsters and the Maryland crabs have been the highlights – oh yes, and the corn on the cob. My father grew this in our walled kitchen garden, and I never thought that anything could equal the memory of those fresh sweet cobs. The season is coming to an end, and each time we have more corn, we know it may be the last time this year; having been exposed to perfection, the merely good won’t do for us any more.
And one more small good thing about life in America : they give you programmes for free in the theatre. How civilised. Oh, yes, I also should confess to a shameless attraction to Mountain Dew and Cream Soda. And Anthony has a thing for saltines and Triskets.
Now, to balance things off, here are a couple of things we aren’t in tune with yet: the first one being feet.
Americans use their feet for all sorts of things, just like Europeans: American feet are recipients of nail polish and pedicures, wearers of shoes from sneakers to sandals, lovers of massages; they can be jogged on, or hiked on in the wilderness, or used to power bicycles – but not, apparently, used for walking. At least, not in the sense of everyday transportation from A to B. If you want to get around, you take a car. If you don’t have a car, you hire a cab. If you are poor – or a yachty – and you are in an unusually public-spirited town, there might be a bus. If you want to walk – “Walk? On your feet?!” is the normal response. In Newport, we asked a bright girl in the Historic Society’s museum about how to get to one of their houses. “Oh, you can’t walk there!” she said, in tones that made us think the route led through a combination of a ghetto and a nuclear waste dump, “it’s over a mile!”
To take to your feet to go more than a few hundred yards is to lay yourself open to charges of eccentricity, and to seriously increase your chances of ending up as road-kill.
The problem is that grocery stores (supermarkets) and hardware stores, and chandlers, and just about anything other than tourist shops selling T shirts, salt-water taffy and decorative glass-ware, are in malls, and malls are not in towns. Moreover, malls are normally set along the edges of busy roads. The walk to the mall itself isn’t a problem, a mile or so there, and what seems like three miles back with a rucksack laden with a week’s worth of milk and potatoes – it’s the last few yards that normally cause the difficulty. In the land of the ten lane highway and the 5 acre house-building plot, room has rarely been found for a sidewalk (pavement) on more than one side of the road, and there is definitely no space among the two thousand car parking lot for an underpass, a bridges, or even an island in the middle of the road. A pedestrian is a small and insignificant dot, waiting for a gap in the onrushing traffic, taking their life in their hands for a dash across the road. I suppose designers of shopping malls just can’t envisage that somebody who doesn’t have a car could possibly have enough money to buy things.
The other thing we don’t quite get is air-conditioning. Not the concept, just the level. Our first visit to New York in July coincided with a heat wave. Temperatures up in the 90s, humidity the same. We wandered the streets in a damp fuggy daze, carting the tourist paraphernalia of guide books, subway map, camera, water bottles – and my thickest pashmina. Because when you come in to any building: restaurant, cinema, shop or museum, you are met by a blast of chilled air, initially as refreshing as a drink of spring water, but quickly feeling as if it is freezing the sweat on your skin into tiny droplets of ice. On our most recent visit to Manhattan, we made an unplanned trip to the theatre, and only had with us what we had needed for a day on the beach. We spent the second act huddled together, like the Babes in the Wood, under our brightly-coloured bathing towels.
It’s a wonder they don’t all get pneumonia.
Friday, 3 September 2010
Hurricane Watch
Friday 3rd September 2010, day 686, 12,013 miles. 40° 57’.37N 073° 05’.20W. Port Jefferson, Long Island, NY
We’ve learnt a lot about hurricanes in the past week, as Earl has tracked relentlessly up the coast towards us.
Firstly, how very good the weather forecasters have got. On the US’s excellent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ hurricanes’ lives are tracked and predicted, from the incipient tropical wave forming vaguely off the west coast of Africa, somewhere near the Cape Verdes, to the tropical storm as the wave turns into a depression, forms, solidifies and starts to spin, to the forecast track of the final hurricane.
The second thing is how much time we have to prepare. Earl has been around for over a week, forecast to turn into a hurricane back last Wednesday, when it was still out in the Atlantic, several hundred miles east of the Caribbean islands. The forecasters produce a “cone”, showing not only the likely track, but the widening area of places where the hurricane could reasonably go, updated several times a day. Since last Saturday, when its path seemed likely to cross ours, we have been monitoring it daily, and getting advice from all our local friends about the best place to be if it did coincide with us.
Then there’s the combination of geography and meteorology which means that the eastern seaboard of the US tends to suffer less from a hurricane going by than the South. Hurricanes are an extreme form of a standard depression, with the wind blowing anti-clockwise around the centre. The winds blow around the centre at the same speed, wherever they are on its surface, but the hurricane itself is also moving, affecting the actual wind speeds generated. Earl is moving north east at the rate of about 20 miles an hour. In its north-western quadrant the wind is blowing from the north east (it goes anti-clockwise about the centre, remember), so the hurricane’s own velocity reduces the effective wind by 20 mph. In the south-eastern quadrant, on the other hand, the wind is blowing to the north east, increasing the effective wind.
Earl’s own wind right now is about 70 mph, giving a wind of 90 mph on the south east of its passage, but a more manageable 50 on its west. Hurricanes normally pass along the east coast, a bit offshore, so, here, the coast gets the lesser wind.
And in practice, for us? We spent the last few days with friends on the eastern end of Long Island. Wonderful people, happy and funny and easy and a pleasure to spend time with. We varnished our floorboards on their deck (they are yachties too, so quite understand), swam in their bay, drove round the ultra-exclusive resort of East Hampton marvelling at the size of the gated estates, laughed a lot, and fretted about Earl in between times. Brenda lent me the use of her bath, and I spent a blissful hour up to my neck in bubbles, reading Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.
The predictions as of yesterday morning were for Earl to graze the tip of Long Island, so regretfully we sailed away, to the western end of Long Island Sound, where the forecast today is for nothing more than 15 -20 knots of wind. The people we are worried about are our friends, who will get worse weather than us.
And that’s the final thing we’ve learnt about hurricanes. It’s much better to be on a boat, mobile, than not to have the ability to move your home out of the way.
We’ve learnt a lot about hurricanes in the past week, as Earl has tracked relentlessly up the coast towards us.
Firstly, how very good the weather forecasters have got. On the US’s excellent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ hurricanes’ lives are tracked and predicted, from the incipient tropical wave forming vaguely off the west coast of Africa, somewhere near the Cape Verdes, to the tropical storm as the wave turns into a depression, forms, solidifies and starts to spin, to the forecast track of the final hurricane.
The second thing is how much time we have to prepare. Earl has been around for over a week, forecast to turn into a hurricane back last Wednesday, when it was still out in the Atlantic, several hundred miles east of the Caribbean islands. The forecasters produce a “cone”, showing not only the likely track, but the widening area of places where the hurricane could reasonably go, updated several times a day. Since last Saturday, when its path seemed likely to cross ours, we have been monitoring it daily, and getting advice from all our local friends about the best place to be if it did coincide with us.
Then there’s the combination of geography and meteorology which means that the eastern seaboard of the US tends to suffer less from a hurricane going by than the South. Hurricanes are an extreme form of a standard depression, with the wind blowing anti-clockwise around the centre. The winds blow around the centre at the same speed, wherever they are on its surface, but the hurricane itself is also moving, affecting the actual wind speeds generated. Earl is moving north east at the rate of about 20 miles an hour. In its north-western quadrant the wind is blowing from the north east (it goes anti-clockwise about the centre, remember), so the hurricane’s own velocity reduces the effective wind by 20 mph. In the south-eastern quadrant, on the other hand, the wind is blowing to the north east, increasing the effective wind.
Earl’s own wind right now is about 70 mph, giving a wind of 90 mph on the south east of its passage, but a more manageable 50 on its west. Hurricanes normally pass along the east coast, a bit offshore, so, here, the coast gets the lesser wind.
And in practice, for us? We spent the last few days with friends on the eastern end of Long Island. Wonderful people, happy and funny and easy and a pleasure to spend time with. We varnished our floorboards on their deck (they are yachties too, so quite understand), swam in their bay, drove round the ultra-exclusive resort of East Hampton marvelling at the size of the gated estates, laughed a lot, and fretted about Earl in between times. Brenda lent me the use of her bath, and I spent a blissful hour up to my neck in bubbles, reading Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.
The predictions as of yesterday morning were for Earl to graze the tip of Long Island, so regretfully we sailed away, to the western end of Long Island Sound, where the forecast today is for nothing more than 15 -20 knots of wind. The people we are worried about are our friends, who will get worse weather than us.
And that’s the final thing we’ve learnt about hurricanes. It’s much better to be on a boat, mobile, than not to have the ability to move your home out of the way.
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
En route for New York
We are in Newport right now, but as the blog has got so behind, here is a diary extract from June
Thursday 24th June 2010, day 615, 11,286 miles, 39° 16’.96 N, 74° 17’.86 W. Off Atlantic City, New Jersey.
“Tah tah dahdadahda, tah tah dahdadahda … Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today …”
“Prepare the ship for sea”, and once again we are off, this time leaving behind Annapolis with the usual blend of excitement at the next destination, pleasure in the new friends we’ve spent time with, and sorrow to be leaving yet another place where we could happily have spent months.
The route this time takes us up the Chesapeake Bay, and this is where we learn that the English are quite wrong when they say with a defiant pride “We don’t have a climate, we have weather.” The English have a very variable climate. The Americans have Weather. We ran into a particularly nasty patch halfway up Chesapeake Bay. Our friends Don and MaryKay had warned us “If you see a jelly roll (Swiss roll) in the sky, reef down and get yourself to shelter.” Believe me, next time we see any sort of cake up there, we will be motoring hard for the nearest harbour, rather than reefing a bit, and carrying on, staring up at the dark charcoal swirl forming fifteen miles down the bay with slightly academic interest.
The roll grew and massed, blacker and rounder, following us up the bay. Lightning started to crackle, thunder rumbling ominously, first in the distance, then growing closer and closer to the lightning flashes: “one thousand, two thou – whew, that was close!” The storm was chasing us right up the bay, like being followed by a giant bear, growling and spitting and making wild slashes with his claws.
The VHF crackled with a message from the Coast Guard: “Severe weather warning. A severe front with associated thunder, lightning and hail storms is due to pass up the Chesapeake Bay, north of Annapolis, in the next hour. All vessels in the upper Chesapeake Bay should make for shelter immediately.” We were stuck; the shelter of Baltimore was behind us, the other side of the ever-increasing storm cloud, the Bay was still 6 miles wide, but shallow banks on either side kept us from the shelter of the trees. Shelter of the trees? Aren’t you supposed to avoid trees in lightning? Yes, if you’re a person, and much closer to the ground than the trees; no, if you’re a yacht with a 58 foot metal mast that is the only thing above wave height in many square miles of open water.
We did the only thing possible, which was to disconnect the electrics, putting all the small stuff in the oven (apparently because it swings on rubber gimbals, it provides a degree of insulation), and carry on, willing the storm to slow or deviate to one side or the other. Finally a small wooded island appeared off to port, and we picked our way over unmarked shoals to a spot as close as we dared to its shores. The storm raged away, lightning exploding behind the clouds in yellow and grey sunbursts, sometimes swinging towards us, sometimes backing away. It would have been a wonderful show if we’d been watching from behind windows in some cosy little house. Finally it grumbled away, leaving us with increased respect for American weather.
The journey through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, shrouded with early morning mist, and down Delaware Bay was tame by contrast, and here we are, twenty four hours later, sailing past the unlovely shore of Atlantic City, at the 3am change in watches.
The moon is shining, our destination is less than a day away, and we are dancing together in the cockpit to Anthony’s Frank Sinatra impression “… I’m gonna be a part of it, New York, New York …” Can’t wait.
Thursday 24th June 2010, day 615, 11,286 miles, 39° 16’.96 N, 74° 17’.86 W. Off Atlantic City, New Jersey.
“Tah tah dahdadahda, tah tah dahdadahda … Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today …”
“Prepare the ship for sea”, and once again we are off, this time leaving behind Annapolis with the usual blend of excitement at the next destination, pleasure in the new friends we’ve spent time with, and sorrow to be leaving yet another place where we could happily have spent months.
The route this time takes us up the Chesapeake Bay, and this is where we learn that the English are quite wrong when they say with a defiant pride “We don’t have a climate, we have weather.” The English have a very variable climate. The Americans have Weather. We ran into a particularly nasty patch halfway up Chesapeake Bay. Our friends Don and MaryKay had warned us “If you see a jelly roll (Swiss roll) in the sky, reef down and get yourself to shelter.” Believe me, next time we see any sort of cake up there, we will be motoring hard for the nearest harbour, rather than reefing a bit, and carrying on, staring up at the dark charcoal swirl forming fifteen miles down the bay with slightly academic interest.
The roll grew and massed, blacker and rounder, following us up the bay. Lightning started to crackle, thunder rumbling ominously, first in the distance, then growing closer and closer to the lightning flashes: “one thousand, two thou – whew, that was close!” The storm was chasing us right up the bay, like being followed by a giant bear, growling and spitting and making wild slashes with his claws.
The VHF crackled with a message from the Coast Guard: “Severe weather warning. A severe front with associated thunder, lightning and hail storms is due to pass up the Chesapeake Bay, north of Annapolis, in the next hour. All vessels in the upper Chesapeake Bay should make for shelter immediately.” We were stuck; the shelter of Baltimore was behind us, the other side of the ever-increasing storm cloud, the Bay was still 6 miles wide, but shallow banks on either side kept us from the shelter of the trees. Shelter of the trees? Aren’t you supposed to avoid trees in lightning? Yes, if you’re a person, and much closer to the ground than the trees; no, if you’re a yacht with a 58 foot metal mast that is the only thing above wave height in many square miles of open water.
We did the only thing possible, which was to disconnect the electrics, putting all the small stuff in the oven (apparently because it swings on rubber gimbals, it provides a degree of insulation), and carry on, willing the storm to slow or deviate to one side or the other. Finally a small wooded island appeared off to port, and we picked our way over unmarked shoals to a spot as close as we dared to its shores. The storm raged away, lightning exploding behind the clouds in yellow and grey sunbursts, sometimes swinging towards us, sometimes backing away. It would have been a wonderful show if we’d been watching from behind windows in some cosy little house. Finally it grumbled away, leaving us with increased respect for American weather.
The journey through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, shrouded with early morning mist, and down Delaware Bay was tame by contrast, and here we are, twenty four hours later, sailing past the unlovely shore of Atlantic City, at the 3am change in watches.
The moon is shining, our destination is less than a day away, and we are dancing together in the cockpit to Anthony’s Frank Sinatra impression “… I’m gonna be a part of it, New York, New York …” Can’t wait.
Thursday, 19 August 2010
The second guest blog
The voyage of Tomia from Boston to Boothbay (without the Captain!)
After an invitation to join Tomia we packed our shorts and flew into Boston only to see Celia briefly at Logan International airport on her way back to the UK for a week. For the first time for 2 years without the boss onboard, Tomia set sail north and really did behave very well and we soon realised that the 1st mate was quite competent and all would be well.
There is a lovely harbour at Marblehead where there are more moorings than cars on the M25 and If there is no mooring there are some lobster pots. But we had our contacts and on arrival the club launch met Tomia and guided us to our evening stop. Ashore we met Arthur who was to be the 4th member of the crew for the week and dinner with the Burns family overlooking the harbour at The Landing was a great treat, Patty and their daughters, Genevieve and Elizabeth’s company made for a real fun evening with Shepheards pie made with lamb, now there is a surprise! However, it was by now 2am (next day) UK time for us having left home the previous 6am.
A still night and soon after a mornings guided tour of this exquisite New England village and sailing centre, lunch at the yacht club, Tomia was rearing to move onto Gloucester Harbour where it rained.
A still night before we entered Annisquam river (where Tomia very carefully negotiated under a bridge with 6 inches clearance –(it may have been 6 feet but who knows) Emerging after an hour, despite Arthurs real expectation that we would be hard aground by now, into Ipswich Bay which was shrouded in a classic Maine fog. As we sailed away from the coast the fog cleared, sailing close to whales (that is the large sea going type rather than the west coast of Great Britain – a long debate on board about the size ranging from 12 feet to 60!) was an experience and we were now off to Kittery for a rendezvous with John & Els, a charming couple who not only invited us all to dinner but had purchased some bread and milk for us to take onboard. All these contacts along the coast, lots of eating out and with his constant craving for biscuits, why is Anthony not overweight you might ask?
A still night and we were off towards Biddeford Pool, And Arthur still had not introduced us to his rum punches - yet. Ashore we surveyed the real estate and purchased our first lobster tails for the evening’s aperitif, Arthur also secreted a bottle of Moet from the local store. It was the only bottle.
A still night and then we were off again, life was getting into a routine, Arthur and Suzanne were chief ‘Pot Watchers’, this may not seem too onerous but when you hear that Maine harvests some 75.6 million pounds (circa 34 thousand tonnes) of lobster annually there are a heck of a lot of pots out there, miles out to sea, in the approaches to harbours, in the anchorages, everywhere like little bobbing fishing floats always exactly in your path. Luckily by now we were proficient pot watchers and Tomia glided into Boothbay Harbour having averaged 6 knots today with gusts of force 7, but only after we took the ghoster down Celia.
A still night. Now why do I keep referring to these, well because most unusually at anchor the nights have been so quiet and peaceful, not a lap to be heard, no halyards tapping, no wind and absolute calm. Suzanne who is not the most enthusiastic sailor thought it is always like this and for our stay it was, every night. As we were at our destination (boothbayharbour.com) it was time for more lobster and a bit of whale watching the next day before Arthur finally delved into a well stocked alcohol cabinet and proceeded to mix the rum punches..… supper, oh, did we eat as well!
The coast line varies and is wonderfully dramatic, you need to be very aware, these rocks are unforgiving. Anthony and Tomia steered us through some interesting waters, under bridges, past many lighthouses and around the islands with confidence. Tomia is just the ticket, most comfortable as R&S were afforded the luxury of the captain’s cabin. Arthur was up front with his own escape hatch for midnight deck walkabouts and Ant seemed very happy in the forward side bunks, at least he seemed to sleep well. We all enjoyed every minute with just one sadness that Celia was not with us. But we so enjoyed Arthurs company and feel we now have new friends across the pond, like minded and great company. Apart from the Gloucester shower a fine breeze and sunshine accompanied us every day with Anthony so welcoming we could all see the pleasure and excitement which has been had on this journey beginning on the Deben in July 2008 and finishing when, well who knows, don’t think quite yet somehow.
Thank you for allowing us all to share a short section of your adventure and bon voyage.
Richard, Suzanne, hairdryer – Tomia team members and we have the t shirts to prove it.
p.s. Hilton Hotel, Boston eat your heart out, give us Tomia any day and much quieter.
After an invitation to join Tomia we packed our shorts and flew into Boston only to see Celia briefly at Logan International airport on her way back to the UK for a week. For the first time for 2 years without the boss onboard, Tomia set sail north and really did behave very well and we soon realised that the 1st mate was quite competent and all would be well.
There is a lovely harbour at Marblehead where there are more moorings than cars on the M25 and If there is no mooring there are some lobster pots. But we had our contacts and on arrival the club launch met Tomia and guided us to our evening stop. Ashore we met Arthur who was to be the 4th member of the crew for the week and dinner with the Burns family overlooking the harbour at The Landing was a great treat, Patty and their daughters, Genevieve and Elizabeth’s company made for a real fun evening with Shepheards pie made with lamb, now there is a surprise! However, it was by now 2am (next day) UK time for us having left home the previous 6am.
A still night and soon after a mornings guided tour of this exquisite New England village and sailing centre, lunch at the yacht club, Tomia was rearing to move onto Gloucester Harbour where it rained.
A still night before we entered Annisquam river (where Tomia very carefully negotiated under a bridge with 6 inches clearance –(it may have been 6 feet but who knows) Emerging after an hour, despite Arthurs real expectation that we would be hard aground by now, into Ipswich Bay which was shrouded in a classic Maine fog. As we sailed away from the coast the fog cleared, sailing close to whales (that is the large sea going type rather than the west coast of Great Britain – a long debate on board about the size ranging from 12 feet to 60!) was an experience and we were now off to Kittery for a rendezvous with John & Els, a charming couple who not only invited us all to dinner but had purchased some bread and milk for us to take onboard. All these contacts along the coast, lots of eating out and with his constant craving for biscuits, why is Anthony not overweight you might ask?
A still night and we were off towards Biddeford Pool, And Arthur still had not introduced us to his rum punches - yet. Ashore we surveyed the real estate and purchased our first lobster tails for the evening’s aperitif, Arthur also secreted a bottle of Moet from the local store. It was the only bottle.
A still night and then we were off again, life was getting into a routine, Arthur and Suzanne were chief ‘Pot Watchers’, this may not seem too onerous but when you hear that Maine harvests some 75.6 million pounds (circa 34 thousand tonnes) of lobster annually there are a heck of a lot of pots out there, miles out to sea, in the approaches to harbours, in the anchorages, everywhere like little bobbing fishing floats always exactly in your path. Luckily by now we were proficient pot watchers and Tomia glided into Boothbay Harbour having averaged 6 knots today with gusts of force 7, but only after we took the ghoster down Celia.
A still night. Now why do I keep referring to these, well because most unusually at anchor the nights have been so quiet and peaceful, not a lap to be heard, no halyards tapping, no wind and absolute calm. Suzanne who is not the most enthusiastic sailor thought it is always like this and for our stay it was, every night. As we were at our destination (boothbayharbour.com) it was time for more lobster and a bit of whale watching the next day before Arthur finally delved into a well stocked alcohol cabinet and proceeded to mix the rum punches..… supper, oh, did we eat as well!
The coast line varies and is wonderfully dramatic, you need to be very aware, these rocks are unforgiving. Anthony and Tomia steered us through some interesting waters, under bridges, past many lighthouses and around the islands with confidence. Tomia is just the ticket, most comfortable as R&S were afforded the luxury of the captain’s cabin. Arthur was up front with his own escape hatch for midnight deck walkabouts and Ant seemed very happy in the forward side bunks, at least he seemed to sleep well. We all enjoyed every minute with just one sadness that Celia was not with us. But we so enjoyed Arthurs company and feel we now have new friends across the pond, like minded and great company. Apart from the Gloucester shower a fine breeze and sunshine accompanied us every day with Anthony so welcoming we could all see the pleasure and excitement which has been had on this journey beginning on the Deben in July 2008 and finishing when, well who knows, don’t think quite yet somehow.
Thank you for allowing us all to share a short section of your adventure and bon voyage.
Richard, Suzanne, hairdryer – Tomia team members and we have the t shirts to prove it.
p.s. Hilton Hotel, Boston eat your heart out, give us Tomia any day and much quieter.
Sunday, 15 August 2010
July - Boston to Boothbay
"Where have you been?" asks a friend. “There has been nothing on the blog for ages." Sorry about that, we've been rather hectic ... I went back to England to celebrate my stepmother's 80th birthday, and take my father on a trip to old friends and old haunts, and Anthony sailed on without me, in the company of his brother, Richard and wife Suzanne, and a new friend, Arthur. Arthur is "sort of family" - the sort of loose connection (his grandfather is the uncle of Anthony's daughter's husband's father) that means, when we were put in touch with each other in New York, we could both have said “thank you that was lovely” and gone our separate ways, or, as has turned out, been delighted to spend plenty of time together having fun.
Arthur and Richard / Suzanne have both written guest blogs about their time on Tomia – here is Arthur’s.
After following the adventures of Tomia for the past 2 years and living vicariously many of the great accounts of cruising in the Caribbean I finally had my chance to sail on her. Sadly, Celia could not make a planned cruise from Boston up to Boothbay Harbor, but Anthony’s brother Richard and his wife Suzanne seized the opportunity and flew over from England to join. And I was invited as well, having met Anthony and Celia a few weeks prior when they anchored at the 79th street Boat Basin in the Hudson River off Manhattan and Patty (my wife) and I shared a few NYC land-based adventures together, including an evening game at Yankee Stadium (Yankees lost).
And now I am just back from 5 days living with 3 virtual strangers in a 43 foot space. So what was it like?
Great time. Anthony, the Captain was amazing. In constant motion, moving effortlessly and unobtrusively (always barefoot) like a cat, gracefully and sure footed across the decks (even in 25 knot winds with boat heeling)--hoisting and trimming sails, furling and unfurling the head sails, setting lines (including some fishing lines), rigging and trimming a cruising chute while manipulating a heavy “spinnaker” pole , moving up and down the companionway unobtrusively to manage navigation, replace filters, replenish water supplies from the excellent Tomia watermaker and even prepare coffees for the crew. Just a normal day in the office I suppose, for someone living on board for two years. And he willingly and patiently shared his extensive knowledge of the sea, sailing and all mechanical aspects of his home, a well equipped 43 foot sailboat that felt more like 50 feet for some reason- maybe a result of the feeling of security from the center cockpit design, as well as the vessel weight and obvious stability.
The watermaker was the best bit of kit on board. An advanced filtration system allows you to draw in seawater (except in really funky harbors) and converts to fresh drinking water. At first I held onto my Poland Springs stash but after a couple of days could not resist the luxury of drinking fresh water right from the tap on board- in the heads or in the galley. Ok it’s not Evian but a fantastic convenience for cruising. As is the wind generator which can be flipped over into the water when there is no wind and magically (to me) function as a propeller, generating power underway as it turns with the rush of water.
Richard was a solid number 1 mate for his brother and a great guy as well. Also a highly experienced sailor, he and Anthony owned a 32 foot sailboat together prior to Tomia and speak the same language. Half the time I needed a translation. But it was engaging and I kept learning, as knowledge was imparted generously and patiently. Especially the anchoring. As a weekend sailor for too many years I still always opt for a mooring. Given a choice Anthony anchors. This makes perfect sense as they are free of charge and he and Richard have the skill levels to size up an unfamiliar harbor quickly and set an anchor relatively effortlessly. No sea dramas for this pair. The anchor has an all chain rode and a meter to keep track of the amount of scope let out. Very secure and convenient - no fear of dragging loose during the night!
Suzanne is also a very competent sailor with deceptively “keen” perceptions …for someone living in NYC for 40 years it came as I surprise that I (and my habits) were apparently not invisible to others. Then again it was only a 43 foot space……but who is complaining? Not I. Suzanne and Richard (and Anthony) were all easy going, great fun and we had lots of laughs and mini adventures as you might expect from a 5 day July cruise off the New England coast, from navigating through an unexpected fog off the coast of northern Mass to a more structured whale and dolphin watching tour off Boothbay Harbor (the watch boat did circles to allow the large schools of dolphins to swim, jump and surf the wake!) to the usual fresh lobster fests and even an impromptu dinner at Kittery harbor with friends of a friend of Anthony’s.
But it is the experience of cruising that I am left with ...essentially living out of doors 16 hours a day, sleeping under the stars albeit through the lens of an open hatch cover above, and slowing down as the official Tomia crew T-shirt advises, "sail fast and live slow". The exhilaration of moving along on a magic carpet over the sea, under the vast blue sky … it takes a few days to let go of habits- addictions,—the NY Times and constant background music … mainly in the head but also on the radio, on CDs, an iPod ..after a while all the noise melts away and one experiences the music and food for the soul—the harmony and routines established in living in close quarters with people of good will and equally committed to maintaining harmony by sublimating their own needs and neurosis to as minimal a level as possible … the feeling of perfect harmony when the mind finally stops rushing around for stimulus and the oft-talked about feeling of oneness with nature and the elements slowly and subtly but unmistakably sets in … the open sky, the perfect air temperature and gentle breezes, the rush of water along the hull and the vast blue ocean all around cast their spell … deep quiet … one tends to see oneself and one’s habits in a mirror as the calm and peace move in … thanks to Anthony and Celia for making this possible.
Arthur and Richard / Suzanne have both written guest blogs about their time on Tomia – here is Arthur’s.
After following the adventures of Tomia for the past 2 years and living vicariously many of the great accounts of cruising in the Caribbean I finally had my chance to sail on her. Sadly, Celia could not make a planned cruise from Boston up to Boothbay Harbor, but Anthony’s brother Richard and his wife Suzanne seized the opportunity and flew over from England to join. And I was invited as well, having met Anthony and Celia a few weeks prior when they anchored at the 79th street Boat Basin in the Hudson River off Manhattan and Patty (my wife) and I shared a few NYC land-based adventures together, including an evening game at Yankee Stadium (Yankees lost).
And now I am just back from 5 days living with 3 virtual strangers in a 43 foot space. So what was it like?
Great time. Anthony, the Captain was amazing. In constant motion, moving effortlessly and unobtrusively (always barefoot) like a cat, gracefully and sure footed across the decks (even in 25 knot winds with boat heeling)--hoisting and trimming sails, furling and unfurling the head sails, setting lines (including some fishing lines), rigging and trimming a cruising chute while manipulating a heavy “spinnaker” pole , moving up and down the companionway unobtrusively to manage navigation, replace filters, replenish water supplies from the excellent Tomia watermaker and even prepare coffees for the crew. Just a normal day in the office I suppose, for someone living on board for two years. And he willingly and patiently shared his extensive knowledge of the sea, sailing and all mechanical aspects of his home, a well equipped 43 foot sailboat that felt more like 50 feet for some reason- maybe a result of the feeling of security from the center cockpit design, as well as the vessel weight and obvious stability.
The watermaker was the best bit of kit on board. An advanced filtration system allows you to draw in seawater (except in really funky harbors) and converts to fresh drinking water. At first I held onto my Poland Springs stash but after a couple of days could not resist the luxury of drinking fresh water right from the tap on board- in the heads or in the galley. Ok it’s not Evian but a fantastic convenience for cruising. As is the wind generator which can be flipped over into the water when there is no wind and magically (to me) function as a propeller, generating power underway as it turns with the rush of water.
Richard was a solid number 1 mate for his brother and a great guy as well. Also a highly experienced sailor, he and Anthony owned a 32 foot sailboat together prior to Tomia and speak the same language. Half the time I needed a translation. But it was engaging and I kept learning, as knowledge was imparted generously and patiently. Especially the anchoring. As a weekend sailor for too many years I still always opt for a mooring. Given a choice Anthony anchors. This makes perfect sense as they are free of charge and he and Richard have the skill levels to size up an unfamiliar harbor quickly and set an anchor relatively effortlessly. No sea dramas for this pair. The anchor has an all chain rode and a meter to keep track of the amount of scope let out. Very secure and convenient - no fear of dragging loose during the night!
Suzanne is also a very competent sailor with deceptively “keen” perceptions …for someone living in NYC for 40 years it came as I surprise that I (and my habits) were apparently not invisible to others. Then again it was only a 43 foot space……but who is complaining? Not I. Suzanne and Richard (and Anthony) were all easy going, great fun and we had lots of laughs and mini adventures as you might expect from a 5 day July cruise off the New England coast, from navigating through an unexpected fog off the coast of northern Mass to a more structured whale and dolphin watching tour off Boothbay Harbor (the watch boat did circles to allow the large schools of dolphins to swim, jump and surf the wake!) to the usual fresh lobster fests and even an impromptu dinner at Kittery harbor with friends of a friend of Anthony’s.
But it is the experience of cruising that I am left with ...essentially living out of doors 16 hours a day, sleeping under the stars albeit through the lens of an open hatch cover above, and slowing down as the official Tomia crew T-shirt advises, "sail fast and live slow". The exhilaration of moving along on a magic carpet over the sea, under the vast blue sky … it takes a few days to let go of habits- addictions,—the NY Times and constant background music … mainly in the head but also on the radio, on CDs, an iPod ..after a while all the noise melts away and one experiences the music and food for the soul—the harmony and routines established in living in close quarters with people of good will and equally committed to maintaining harmony by sublimating their own needs and neurosis to as minimal a level as possible … the feeling of perfect harmony when the mind finally stops rushing around for stimulus and the oft-talked about feeling of oneness with nature and the elements slowly and subtly but unmistakably sets in … the open sky, the perfect air temperature and gentle breezes, the rush of water along the hull and the vast blue ocean all around cast their spell … deep quiet … one tends to see oneself and one’s habits in a mirror as the calm and peace move in … thanks to Anthony and Celia for making this possible.
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Happy Birthday to me
What could be better? I have a gorgeous man to cook me breakfast, and some beautiful sparkly presents. My dear friend Harriet gave me a magnifying glass to help my aging eyes, but we will skip past that. Who could want more? We are in a beautiful place, the sun is shining, and the sand dunes beckon. the only thing missing is you. Have a lovely day, everybody.
Swimming is good for you when the water is only 60 degrees!
Thank you for sharing it with me, and making it special.
Saturday, 17 July 2010
From the New York Times
I can't resist this from the normally ever-so-reliable New York Times of 30th June:
"Correction
An article on June 18 about programs to teach families to sail misidentified the function of steel railings on a boat. They are intended to protect passengers from falling overboard, not to keep the boat from tipping over."
"Correction
An article on June 18 about programs to teach families to sail misidentified the function of steel railings on a boat. They are intended to protect passengers from falling overboard, not to keep the boat from tipping over."
Thursday, 8 July 2010
More Gustatory Delights
And now – the Block Island Sinker. A doughnut like no other. Hand-made, served too hot to touch, dusted with cinnamon and sugar, wonton-crisp on the outside, the inside a hot, soft, butterfly-light miracle. It lasts a grand total of 15 seconds from pan to gullet, leaving embarrassingly ecstatic exclamations floating down the street, and a blissful, stunned sense of satisfaction as the final crumbs of sugar are licked from fingers. It’s like the best, most eagerly awaited doughnut you ever remember from your childhood, brought back to life even better than memory suggested.
Two minutes later, you realise how it got its name, as the lump of oily dough thuds to the bottom of your stomach like a runaway lift, and settles in for a couple of hours. Never again, you swear. And a few hours later, back from a bicycle ride … well, some of us just have to check to see that they are as good in the afternoon as they were in the morning. But this time, washed down with peanut butter chocolate chip ice cream. Will our clothes ever fit again?
The other foodie pleasure from Block Island you have to work for – fresh clams. We dug for them with new friends Dick and Carol, combing through the black sand for ones large enough to fail to pass through the gauge, and so end up in our bucket. Shops on the island sell all sorts of refined rakes to pull the shellfish out with minimal effort, but the best method is the straight-forward, bent-backed fingernail-filling scrabble, in a few inches of warm(ish) water in the Great Salt Pond.
Yesterday evening, we steamed them quickly in white wine, tomato salsa, garlic and spiced sausage, and ate them in the cockpit; fat and sweet and tender, mopping up the juice with home made tomato focaccia.
Sunday, 20 June 2010
A Maryland Crab Feast
“How about crabs for supper?” asked our friends Don and Mary Kay. Well, that sounds nice, we thought, imagining neatly dressed crabs lying open on their backs, with perhaps a little salad and mayonnaise tidily arranged beside them, and a slice of two of brown bread and butter, all set off with a lemon quarter, and of course a knife and fork.
Not a bit of it. Maryland Blue Crabs are a wonderfully full-on physical, down-to-earth experience, a finger-licking, chops-smearing, tooth-picking feast for taste and touch and smell. If you crossed all-in wrestling with fine dining, this is what you might get.
The scene is set with a bundle of newspapers brought in from the garage and spread over the kitchen table, onto which is emptied a vast brown paper bag full of crabs, steamed and dusted with Old Bay seasoning, and set off with an array of implements: mallets, screw-drivers and pliers.
A platter of just-picked Maryland maize, so young and fresh that it still has a sweet green flavour to it, to set off the crabs, a quick lesson for the newbies in the tactics of successful dismemberment (in short, “get stuck in, and don’t forget the claws”), and off we go. Ooh, those crabs are good. Salty and fresh and spicy with the seasoning (which doubles as snuff if you sniff it), quite delicious, and all the better for the slightly ruminative atmosphere that develops as we all chase the last sweet fibres of flavour down into the claws and crevices. You can’t have a serious discussion picking crabs, with half your attention focussed on choosing the next spot to attack, and wondering whether you’ve picked that one dry and should move on the next, or is there just a little sweet something lurking in that joint. So we chat in a relaxed way, and eye the growing pile of shells to make sure we haven’t eaten more than our fair share, and lick our fingers, and decide we could just squeeze in one more … and chat again, and realise that essence of crab has found its way slowly up our fingers and around our mouths until we are one cat’s-dream flavoured mess. What a great way to spend an evening.
Thank you, Don and Mary Kay for all your kindness and hospitality, but thank you most of all for introducing us to Maryland Crabs.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Backwards to Bonaire
Monday 22nd March 2010, day 521, 8,840 miles. 12° 09’.58 N, 068° 16’.98 W. Kralendijk, Bonaire
Backtracking to before we went to Cuba, we had a lovely three weeks in Bonaire, which sort of got forgotten in the horrors of the Windward Passage.
Bonaire is one of three little Dutch rocks off the coast of Venezuela, the other two being Curaçao and Aruba. It is a barren place, useful back in the days of the slave trade only for salt – one of the most economically satisfying manufactures: you create it from salt water, sell it to people, who eat it, and then excrete it into the rivers which replenish the sea – and there you are, your raw materials are furnished right back to you for free by your customers. Neat.
Salt water is once again how Bonaire makes its money, but now from the fantastic, fish-filled reefs that surround it and attract tens of thousands of divers. We’d learnt to dive in St Eustatius (Statia) and plunged right in, having endless wonderful dives, and starting to identify some of the hundreds of fish. The wonderful thing about the diving in Bonaire is that the whole island is just the tip of a steeply shelving coral reef, so from anywhere on the coast you wade into the water, swim out a hundred yards, and there you are in 60 feet of water, looking down on a brightly coloured, infinitely varied world. Tomia found herself turned into a dive boat and took us off to reefs up and down the coast, from where we launched ourselves down the bathing ladder in full dive regalia and went off to explore the endless beauties under the sea.
I’m not sure that it’s possible for non-divers – as we were a few months ago – to understand the hypnotic magic of breathing underwater, in the fishes’ own environment. It’s partly the weightlessness and freedom, partly the concentration, partly the constant procession of variety and beauty, partly it just simply being a whole new, undreamt of world, hidden from surface-dwellers by the interaction of light and water.
The fish are endlessly fascinating and varied, with each dive showing us new creatures. We love the gorgeous little trunkfish, with little yellow fluttery fins, large luxuriantly fringed eyes and pale pink pouty lips, who will swim straight up to you to ask in a friendly way if you are new here. Unlike the purpled, "nesting" sergeant majors, who make it quite clear (to a creature hundreds of times their size) that this is their patch, and you will find nothing here to interest you if you're wise. And the herds of parrot fish, turquoise with pink and yellow stripes, grazing on the coral in the shallows, making a noise like - someone chewing coral.
http://www.breathebonaire.com is an underwater camera giving a little glimpse of the sub-aqua life.
We started accidentally dropping things overboard – but, in contrast to the normal cussed run of things, in a place where we had ample means of retrieving them. “You’d better go and get a tank” from Anthony was code for “Oh damn, I’ve dropped a screwdiver”. However, although we could get things back from the deeps, a drill-bit down the shower drain continues to elude us. Like the Bellman, we seek it with tweezers, we seek it with care, we hunt it with blue tack and string, we charm it with magnets, with chopsticks and skewers, with just about every darn’ thing. But to no avail. Only on boats.
Our time in Bonaire was enlivened by the visit of Anthony’s son Chris, and Anna, who were the perfect guests. With them, we rented a jeep one day and drove round the northern end of the island, a nature reserve stocked with cacti and scrub, and climbed the highest point, in the baking heat, finding their first hummingbird in an acacia tree, and then down to a tiny cool, fresh, shaded pond in the middle of all that sucked-dryness, smelling of green, visited by every bird and iguana around.
Another day we drove out to a mangrove swamp and took a tour in kayaks, swimming through a narrow muddy channel in company with a vast porcupine fish. We drove round the east and south coasts, with the waves pounding in, and back up to the sheltered west coast, with the modern salt pans looking like giant icerinks, sparkling purplish in the sun.
There were a lovely bunch of yachties there, all the boats strung out in one neat line down the shore just above the start of the reef. Several of the women were keen readers, so one night six of us gathered for a “one off book club” and sat in a bar pulling together our all-time favourites – and we barely strayed off topic all night, while our other halves discussed holding tanks and sikaflex in comfort on Willow. They managed to get the dancing girls out of the way just before we came back.
Sad to leave, as always; we have met so many wonderful people on this trip, and pulling up the anchor and waving goodbye not knowing when we shall meet again always brings a lump to the throat.
Backtracking to before we went to Cuba, we had a lovely three weeks in Bonaire, which sort of got forgotten in the horrors of the Windward Passage.
Bonaire is one of three little Dutch rocks off the coast of Venezuela, the other two being Curaçao and Aruba. It is a barren place, useful back in the days of the slave trade only for salt – one of the most economically satisfying manufactures: you create it from salt water, sell it to people, who eat it, and then excrete it into the rivers which replenish the sea – and there you are, your raw materials are furnished right back to you for free by your customers. Neat.
Salt water is once again how Bonaire makes its money, but now from the fantastic, fish-filled reefs that surround it and attract tens of thousands of divers. We’d learnt to dive in St Eustatius (Statia) and plunged right in, having endless wonderful dives, and starting to identify some of the hundreds of fish. The wonderful thing about the diving in Bonaire is that the whole island is just the tip of a steeply shelving coral reef, so from anywhere on the coast you wade into the water, swim out a hundred yards, and there you are in 60 feet of water, looking down on a brightly coloured, infinitely varied world. Tomia found herself turned into a dive boat and took us off to reefs up and down the coast, from where we launched ourselves down the bathing ladder in full dive regalia and went off to explore the endless beauties under the sea.
I’m not sure that it’s possible for non-divers – as we were a few months ago – to understand the hypnotic magic of breathing underwater, in the fishes’ own environment. It’s partly the weightlessness and freedom, partly the concentration, partly the constant procession of variety and beauty, partly it just simply being a whole new, undreamt of world, hidden from surface-dwellers by the interaction of light and water.
The fish are endlessly fascinating and varied, with each dive showing us new creatures. We love the gorgeous little trunkfish, with little yellow fluttery fins, large luxuriantly fringed eyes and pale pink pouty lips, who will swim straight up to you to ask in a friendly way if you are new here. Unlike the purpled, "nesting" sergeant majors, who make it quite clear (to a creature hundreds of times their size) that this is their patch, and you will find nothing here to interest you if you're wise. And the herds of parrot fish, turquoise with pink and yellow stripes, grazing on the coral in the shallows, making a noise like - someone chewing coral.
http://www.breathebonaire.com is an underwater camera giving a little glimpse of the sub-aqua life.
We started accidentally dropping things overboard – but, in contrast to the normal cussed run of things, in a place where we had ample means of retrieving them. “You’d better go and get a tank” from Anthony was code for “Oh damn, I’ve dropped a screwdiver”. However, although we could get things back from the deeps, a drill-bit down the shower drain continues to elude us. Like the Bellman, we seek it with tweezers, we seek it with care, we hunt it with blue tack and string, we charm it with magnets, with chopsticks and skewers, with just about every darn’ thing. But to no avail. Only on boats.
Our time in Bonaire was enlivened by the visit of Anthony’s son Chris, and Anna, who were the perfect guests. With them, we rented a jeep one day and drove round the northern end of the island, a nature reserve stocked with cacti and scrub, and climbed the highest point, in the baking heat, finding their first hummingbird in an acacia tree, and then down to a tiny cool, fresh, shaded pond in the middle of all that sucked-dryness, smelling of green, visited by every bird and iguana around.
Another day we drove out to a mangrove swamp and took a tour in kayaks, swimming through a narrow muddy channel in company with a vast porcupine fish. We drove round the east and south coasts, with the waves pounding in, and back up to the sheltered west coast, with the modern salt pans looking like giant icerinks, sparkling purplish in the sun.
There were a lovely bunch of yachties there, all the boats strung out in one neat line down the shore just above the start of the reef. Several of the women were keen readers, so one night six of us gathered for a “one off book club” and sat in a bar pulling together our all-time favourites – and we barely strayed off topic all night, while our other halves discussed holding tanks and sikaflex in comfort on Willow. They managed to get the dancing girls out of the way just before we came back.
Sad to leave, as always; we have met so many wonderful people on this trip, and pulling up the anchor and waving goodbye not knowing when we shall meet again always brings a lump to the throat.
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Is Deltaville the nicest town ever?
Monday, 7th June, day 598, 10.904 miles. 37° 47’.62 N, 076° 19’.56 W. Deltaville, Virginia
Is Deltaville the nicest town ever? It takes small-town friendliness to new levels. Hurd’s hardware store (motto “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it” – well, that would be true if we weren’t finicky boaters wanting everything in marine-grade stainless steel) boasts the tireless Roy, who not only searched through all his shelves for something approximating to our needs, but took us out back to his workshop where he had a collection of cast-off bits “bound to come in useful someday” from where he dug out 75¢ worth of thing-a-ma-bob which will do the job perfectly. The library was selling off its unwanted books; the most friendly librarian ever took time off from her lunch-time muffin to help me sort through the dusty shelves of American History to find the two most appropriate volumes. And to cap it all, we were lucky enough to meet the cheerful and generous Hop Murfee (and later the gentle Genia), who not only gave a lift to two strangers trekking off to the supermarket for provisions, but waited for us while we whizzed round, and then drove us two miles back to the boat. But, wait for this, Hop isn’t a vicar or a teacher or someone from whom you might expect spontaneous kindness – he’s a realtor (estate agent). A town where the estate agents are selflessly helpful to complete strangers – that’s somewhere special.
Is Deltaville the nicest town ever? It takes small-town friendliness to new levels. Hurd’s hardware store (motto “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it” – well, that would be true if we weren’t finicky boaters wanting everything in marine-grade stainless steel) boasts the tireless Roy, who not only searched through all his shelves for something approximating to our needs, but took us out back to his workshop where he had a collection of cast-off bits “bound to come in useful someday” from where he dug out 75¢ worth of thing-a-ma-bob which will do the job perfectly. The library was selling off its unwanted books; the most friendly librarian ever took time off from her lunch-time muffin to help me sort through the dusty shelves of American History to find the two most appropriate volumes. And to cap it all, we were lucky enough to meet the cheerful and generous Hop Murfee (and later the gentle Genia), who not only gave a lift to two strangers trekking off to the supermarket for provisions, but waited for us while we whizzed round, and then drove us two miles back to the boat. But, wait for this, Hop isn’t a vicar or a teacher or someone from whom you might expect spontaneous kindness – he’s a realtor (estate agent). A town where the estate agents are selflessly helpful to complete strangers – that’s somewhere special.
Thursday, 27 May 2010
Passage from Bonaire to Cuba - a diary
Thursday 1st April Set off for Cuba from Bonaire.
Our course is set straight for Cuba’s eastern tip, with a detour to get around the south-western peninsula of Haiti. 316° True. Eight hundred-odd nautical miles – or a thousand land miles - of sea lie ahead.
For the next six days, we just have each other and the fridge for our mutual entertainment. As a special bonus, there is also the “Multi Purpose Mosquito Bat”, a battery-powered Chinese-made toy from Bonaire. With it, we purge the boat of the no-see-ums we picked up there too. There is a most satisfying crackle each time one gets swatted. If you can arrange the cull over a white cloth, a tally of small black cinders builds up. Revenge for a month of itching!
The sea out in the ocean is a deep, translucent blue, transparent and saturated with colour at the same time. Sunlight sparkles down into the utterly clear depths. By tea time, there are 8,000 feet of water underneath us, filled with – who knows what. The eye is drawn down and down, all sense of perspective lost: that band of light could be six inches from the surface or sixty feet.
Little waves strike each other every now and then to produce a bigger wave uplifted like a Mohican haircut.
Lunch tomato and boat-grown beansprout salad with boat-grown basil. Tangerines. Supper Seafood risotto, tangerines.
Two hour watches during the day, three hours at night. Long enough to get a bit of proper sleep, but the person on watch doesn’t get exhausted.
Fri 2nd Spanish, diary, sew up Bonaire courtesy flag and mosquito nets. Starting to wonder if all our lovely Bonaire provisioning will be impounded by Cuban customs, as suggested by (some of) what we have read. Should we eat it all now – no, can’t get through 2lbs of cheese!
Lunch pea and lettuce salad, toast and paté, grapefruit. Supper curried mince with aubergine.
The seas get up and come forward in the night, and we get several damp slaps, one of which comes right in through the small forward port of our cabin. Curtains and my sewing bag are soaked. The kicker goes bang, in the middle of the night, while A is on watch – the rivets have come out of the mast. We have a wet and stressful hour while A lashes it on again, I am trying to keep the boat head to wind. We are ok, but trying not to put too much pressure on it, keeping the sail partially furled. Gusts up to 30 kts. Should we make for the Dominican Republic instead (500 miles away)?
Half moon, waning.
Sat 3rd A rather groggy day, we both nap several times. Abandon day watches, sleep as we need. I am reading Waterlog – a very refreshing antidote to all this salt water!. Seas calm and the swell moves slowly aft. During the day we see several ships on the radar, but none by eye, and start to realise how convoys could cross the Atlantic in WWII. There is so much empty sea out there. At night, the wind falls irritatingly low, and we wallow. Both still quite tired.
Lunch – bacon and pine nut salad, supper reheated risotto.
Change watches to be three hours starting from end of hand-over so the one off watch gets a proper sleep. It means we start and end the watches at odd times – but does that matter out here?
Sun 4th Easter Sunday. In the morning, the wind gets up, at our back, so we boom out the yankee and off we go. I sent my older nephew, Ralf, a copy of Treasure Island for his birthday, and am now trying to compose a cross-word for him based on some of the key words. A good deal more difficult than just an ordinary one – finally give in, and realise I will have to allow non-themed words if it’s going to be more than disjointed entries in a sea of black. Pouring rain, which washes off all the dust from Bonaire – everything had become rust coloured. The mosquito nets had been doubling as veils for the whole boat.
See a ship! A cruise ship - ? heading south from Florida.
1600 there is a very rhythmic thump like the bass of a sound system. Dum dum dum chicka dum dum dum. Sounds like it’s coming from land – but there is none. Could it be a submarine?
Waves now from astern, and quite large – six to ten feet – each one rising up behind Tomia and threatening to break over the stern, and then bubbling and hissing as she lifts her bottom elegantly, and they just slide under. Her key competence: floating. World class at that.
Moonlight is replaced by early morning cloudy sunlight, but the monochrome silver colour scheme stays the same.
Now we are sailing between Haiti and Jamaica, just 11 miles off Haiti at night – nothing to be seen. Not a light from a city, no neon glow from roads. None of the orange loom of settlement. Just totally dark. The only sign of life is the smell of wood smoke wafting off the shore. The most melancholy smell. I can feel the darkness reaching out for us – sitting in the cockpit thinking of loved ones to keep the cold fingers of despair at bay. And when we get further on towards the south coast of Cuba, the only sign of life for a long time will be the glare from Guantánamo.
Lunch bacon salad wraps. Supper canned frankfurters disguised with canned tomatoes and plenty of garlic, onions and tamarind sauce. Who needs radar when they can smell us coming?
Monday 5th A bad 24 hours. We turn north around the SW corner of Haiti and run smack into the Windward Passage. Wind and current bang on the nose, thump thump thump. The chain plates start leaking over the bunks again, and a lot of water is coming in – concerned about the electrical junction box which is underneath. Stuff a towel in, and arrange the awning to give as much protection as possible. The mattresses are sodden, thank heavens, they have probably soaked up most of the salt water. Salt water in the spinnaker, in a box of frusli bars, in our wheeled trolley for shopping. Disentangle it all, and move to the forepeak to stop it from getting wetter Looking forward to being in Cuba and rinsing the whole lot out with gallons of lovely fresh water and putting it all in the sun to dry. Nothing to do but carry on. Spanish irregular verbs to the rescue.
Finish Waterlog with regret and move on to A. S. Byatt’s Matisse Stories, alternating with chunks of Penguin Latin American History.
The watermaker also decides to call it a day – only doing one “thump” instead of two. Probably another O ring gone. Plenty of water in the tanks, good thing we always keep them topped up. Made bread. A cleaned the outboard. Neither very hungry, there really hasn’t been a lot to do since we left, and we nibble our way through the night watches.
Lunch bread and cheese, supper the last of the good Bonaire currant buns, with cold sausages.
Tue 6th Got round Punta Maisi, and life became a lot easier. A pleasant if slightly rolly day’s sail downwind. We start off by staying outside the 12 mile limit, then are forced in by shipping lanes and the Bahamas bank – and nobody shows any interest in us at all. Had expected coastguards bristling with sub-machine guns. Suspect, though, they know where we are.
The water system is not right – it has been playing up for some months now. The first symptom was that it would have little pressure burps when the taps were off. A found and tweaked the switch that regulates the pressure in the accumulator tank, and that cured it for a while. Then it started up again, accompanied by the pump cycling rapidly on and off while a tap was open. Tweaking the pressure switch stopped the burping, but not the cycling. We have been living with this now for some time, and no idea what the problem is, except that it is getting worse, so I decided to have a look at Nigel Calder – what a genius he is! Turns out that accumulator tanks can get “waterlogged” – the air that provides the pressure gradually gets replaced by water. The solution, quite simply is to pump it up with a bicycle pump. Who knew?
Shipping all of a sudden, tracking it on radar.
Good to be able to look out around the side of the spray-hood without getting a bucketful of water in the face.
Lovely healthy masses of coleslaw for lunch with extra raisins and almonds.
Wed 7th Preparing for landfall in Cuba. The unknown. Throw basil plant overboard in case it would be impounded, having stripped all leaves and put them to steep in olive oil. Turn in towards the bay: “Yacht approaching the coast. Identify yourself, and proceed to Bahia de Vita.” Run aground in the entrance channel. Anchor at last. Isn’t it nice when it stops. Bird song.
Our course is set straight for Cuba’s eastern tip, with a detour to get around the south-western peninsula of Haiti. 316° True. Eight hundred-odd nautical miles – or a thousand land miles - of sea lie ahead.
For the next six days, we just have each other and the fridge for our mutual entertainment. As a special bonus, there is also the “Multi Purpose Mosquito Bat”, a battery-powered Chinese-made toy from Bonaire. With it, we purge the boat of the no-see-ums we picked up there too. There is a most satisfying crackle each time one gets swatted. If you can arrange the cull over a white cloth, a tally of small black cinders builds up. Revenge for a month of itching!
The sea out in the ocean is a deep, translucent blue, transparent and saturated with colour at the same time. Sunlight sparkles down into the utterly clear depths. By tea time, there are 8,000 feet of water underneath us, filled with – who knows what. The eye is drawn down and down, all sense of perspective lost: that band of light could be six inches from the surface or sixty feet.
Little waves strike each other every now and then to produce a bigger wave uplifted like a Mohican haircut.
Lunch tomato and boat-grown beansprout salad with boat-grown basil. Tangerines. Supper Seafood risotto, tangerines.
Two hour watches during the day, three hours at night. Long enough to get a bit of proper sleep, but the person on watch doesn’t get exhausted.
Fri 2nd Spanish, diary, sew up Bonaire courtesy flag and mosquito nets. Starting to wonder if all our lovely Bonaire provisioning will be impounded by Cuban customs, as suggested by (some of) what we have read. Should we eat it all now – no, can’t get through 2lbs of cheese!
Lunch pea and lettuce salad, toast and paté, grapefruit. Supper curried mince with aubergine.
The seas get up and come forward in the night, and we get several damp slaps, one of which comes right in through the small forward port of our cabin. Curtains and my sewing bag are soaked. The kicker goes bang, in the middle of the night, while A is on watch – the rivets have come out of the mast. We have a wet and stressful hour while A lashes it on again, I am trying to keep the boat head to wind. We are ok, but trying not to put too much pressure on it, keeping the sail partially furled. Gusts up to 30 kts. Should we make for the Dominican Republic instead (500 miles away)?
Half moon, waning.
Sat 3rd A rather groggy day, we both nap several times. Abandon day watches, sleep as we need. I am reading Waterlog – a very refreshing antidote to all this salt water!. Seas calm and the swell moves slowly aft. During the day we see several ships on the radar, but none by eye, and start to realise how convoys could cross the Atlantic in WWII. There is so much empty sea out there. At night, the wind falls irritatingly low, and we wallow. Both still quite tired.
Lunch – bacon and pine nut salad, supper reheated risotto.
Change watches to be three hours starting from end of hand-over so the one off watch gets a proper sleep. It means we start and end the watches at odd times – but does that matter out here?
Sun 4th Easter Sunday. In the morning, the wind gets up, at our back, so we boom out the yankee and off we go. I sent my older nephew, Ralf, a copy of Treasure Island for his birthday, and am now trying to compose a cross-word for him based on some of the key words. A good deal more difficult than just an ordinary one – finally give in, and realise I will have to allow non-themed words if it’s going to be more than disjointed entries in a sea of black. Pouring rain, which washes off all the dust from Bonaire – everything had become rust coloured. The mosquito nets had been doubling as veils for the whole boat.
See a ship! A cruise ship - ? heading south from Florida.
1600 there is a very rhythmic thump like the bass of a sound system. Dum dum dum chicka dum dum dum. Sounds like it’s coming from land – but there is none. Could it be a submarine?
Waves now from astern, and quite large – six to ten feet – each one rising up behind Tomia and threatening to break over the stern, and then bubbling and hissing as she lifts her bottom elegantly, and they just slide under. Her key competence: floating. World class at that.
Moonlight is replaced by early morning cloudy sunlight, but the monochrome silver colour scheme stays the same.
Now we are sailing between Haiti and Jamaica, just 11 miles off Haiti at night – nothing to be seen. Not a light from a city, no neon glow from roads. None of the orange loom of settlement. Just totally dark. The only sign of life is the smell of wood smoke wafting off the shore. The most melancholy smell. I can feel the darkness reaching out for us – sitting in the cockpit thinking of loved ones to keep the cold fingers of despair at bay. And when we get further on towards the south coast of Cuba, the only sign of life for a long time will be the glare from Guantánamo.
Lunch bacon salad wraps. Supper canned frankfurters disguised with canned tomatoes and plenty of garlic, onions and tamarind sauce. Who needs radar when they can smell us coming?
Monday 5th A bad 24 hours. We turn north around the SW corner of Haiti and run smack into the Windward Passage. Wind and current bang on the nose, thump thump thump. The chain plates start leaking over the bunks again, and a lot of water is coming in – concerned about the electrical junction box which is underneath. Stuff a towel in, and arrange the awning to give as much protection as possible. The mattresses are sodden, thank heavens, they have probably soaked up most of the salt water. Salt water in the spinnaker, in a box of frusli bars, in our wheeled trolley for shopping. Disentangle it all, and move to the forepeak to stop it from getting wetter Looking forward to being in Cuba and rinsing the whole lot out with gallons of lovely fresh water and putting it all in the sun to dry. Nothing to do but carry on. Spanish irregular verbs to the rescue.
Finish Waterlog with regret and move on to A. S. Byatt’s Matisse Stories, alternating with chunks of Penguin Latin American History.
The watermaker also decides to call it a day – only doing one “thump” instead of two. Probably another O ring gone. Plenty of water in the tanks, good thing we always keep them topped up. Made bread. A cleaned the outboard. Neither very hungry, there really hasn’t been a lot to do since we left, and we nibble our way through the night watches.
Lunch bread and cheese, supper the last of the good Bonaire currant buns, with cold sausages.
Tue 6th Got round Punta Maisi, and life became a lot easier. A pleasant if slightly rolly day’s sail downwind. We start off by staying outside the 12 mile limit, then are forced in by shipping lanes and the Bahamas bank – and nobody shows any interest in us at all. Had expected coastguards bristling with sub-machine guns. Suspect, though, they know where we are.
The water system is not right – it has been playing up for some months now. The first symptom was that it would have little pressure burps when the taps were off. A found and tweaked the switch that regulates the pressure in the accumulator tank, and that cured it for a while. Then it started up again, accompanied by the pump cycling rapidly on and off while a tap was open. Tweaking the pressure switch stopped the burping, but not the cycling. We have been living with this now for some time, and no idea what the problem is, except that it is getting worse, so I decided to have a look at Nigel Calder – what a genius he is! Turns out that accumulator tanks can get “waterlogged” – the air that provides the pressure gradually gets replaced by water. The solution, quite simply is to pump it up with a bicycle pump. Who knew?
Shipping all of a sudden, tracking it on radar.
Good to be able to look out around the side of the spray-hood without getting a bucketful of water in the face.
Lovely healthy masses of coleslaw for lunch with extra raisins and almonds.
Wed 7th Preparing for landfall in Cuba. The unknown. Throw basil plant overboard in case it would be impounded, having stripped all leaves and put them to steep in olive oil. Turn in towards the bay: “Yacht approaching the coast. Identify yourself, and proceed to Bahia de Vita.” Run aground in the entrance channel. Anchor at last. Isn’t it nice when it stops. Bird song.
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Cuba - part one
Friday 16th April 2010, day 546, 9,648 miles. 21° 04’.28 N, 075° 57’.28 W, Bahia de Vita, Cuba.
Here are some words that won’t appear in any writing about Cuba: shiny, new, crisp; freedom, debate, efficiency; luxury, choice, plenty. And some others that won’t appear either: celebrity, tawdry, yob; drunken, surly, aggressive; ill-fed, unhealthy, obese.
The second-hand bookstalls in the Plaza de Armas in Habana Vieja sell a mixture of 1950s issues of Life magazine, coffee table books of photos of crumbling colonial buildings, and writings about Revolution, here and elsewhere. We bought three books, all written just before or just after the Revolution; the thoughts of Fidel and of Che. They inspire and depress at the same time: the bright hopes, the desperate desire to root out poverty and injustice, and the fervent belief that men can be motivated by an appeal to the best in their nature rather than by offering them material goods, all read more than 50 years later amid a failing infrastructure, agriculture which has gone back to ploughing with oxen, and little old ladies begging in the squares for soap.
In many ways it is a gravity-defying miracle that Cuba continues on its Revolutionary way, 20 years after the fall of communism in the East removed the props to its economy. One has to wonder for how much longer it can stagger on, until the very last tractor falls apart for lack of spares. When Castro took over, his immediate priority was to give land to the peasants, and make sure everybody had a house and access to the basics of life. His writings at the time display a visionary belief that giving peasants the right to farm their own land and removing them from a condition of semi-slavery, would so motivate them that, together with management by a wise and benevolent government, Cuba could become wealthy and self-sustaining by focusing on agriculture alone.
It hasn’t worked, or perhaps it’s fairer to say it’s worked in parts.
If you’re comparing the outcome of economic models, I would have to say that the average Cuban we met seemed happier and healthier than many of the miserably dough-faced and pudgy representatives of capitalism we met mooching off cruise ships up and down the Caribbean. Everybody we talked to was friendly, generous and open, ready to share whatever they had with complete strangers. The passegiata (or whatever the Spanish for it is) goes on in the evenings, and people sit around gossiping and flirting in the squares as dusk falls, having just as much fun as if they were in a chic bar wearing the latest fashions.
Which just goes to show that there’s more to live than possessions, because it is hard to imagine the level of material deprivation, the near-total absence of stuff, in Cuba unless you visit. A lot of basics are simply not available; while we were there, these included butter and potatoes – for breakfast we were given mayonnaise to spread on the bread, and for lunch and supper it was always rice and beans (or occasionally beans and rice). Things like razor blades and loo paper could only be found in hard currency shops, where they stood in proud, if well-spaced out displays, with other fancy goods like cooking oil or pasta. Simple things such as moisturiser or saucepans are luxuries for most people; at a roadside stall, the going rate for more bananas than we could eat in a week was half an (unused) bar of soap, a biro and an old pot of nail varnish.
We spent one night, not quite legally, in a private house, just west of Santiago, that was not part of the government’s licensed chain of B&Bs. Built of concrete slabs, it sported three rooms, with a tiny shower room and kitchen tacked on the back. The walls were painted a chipped and faded blue, the concrete floor a certain red, which emphasised the similarity, in both style and size, to a spacious two-car garage. The son of the house was turned out of his bedroom for us, so we were free to examine the one piece of furniture in the room, a short railing across one corner, and to count up the two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, four shirts and two jackets that constituted this teenager’s possessions. His six-year-old sister owned three coloured crayons, a pink plastic teacup and saucer, decorated with a large purple flower, and a shabby blonde partially-dressed doll, all stored on a shelf beneath a picture of Jesus and the Sacred Heart. But they were of course good company – perhaps better than some children we know, who have learnt to become grasping before they are eight. In the shower room, a bucket sat ready to be filled to flush the loo, and an empty shampoo bottle paraded on the single shelf, symbol of good times that had been, and a talisman that they might come again.
That’s the setting for people who earn the standard wage, of around 300 pesos a month, equivalent to £7. But not equivalent in purchasing power, when rent and electricity are minimal, education and health care are free, as are the weekly rations of rice, beans, bread and meat. Vegetables in the markets, where farmers are allowed to privately sell a portion of their crop, cost 5 pesos a kilo. Nobody starves in Cuba, nobody is homeless, but most people don’t have very much of anything.
Then there’s a parallel economy, one that runs on hard currency. Some Cubans get access to this via their jobs: a worker in an industry that has dealings with tourists might get an additional 10 Convertible Pesos (CUCs) a month, around £6, to buy themselves toiletries. But what keeps many families going, and gets DVD players and frilly china ornaments into the better-off houses, is remittances from family members who have escaped overseas.
Escaped? Yes, because this country is pure communist in its approach to personal freedom. Debate and discussion are not tolerated, let alone dissent. As an example, a person would drop their voice and check they were not being overheard before venturing the opinion that Raúl Castro is not as eloquent a speech-maker as his brother. No internet is allowed in private houses, and even those who work with computers have very limited access to the internet. The authorities aren’t particularly concerned about stopping visiting yachts smuggling goods into the country; what they worry about is that we might smuggle someone out. No Cuban apart from customs and immigration is allowed on a foreign boat – or probably a local one too – not even in broad daylight for a drink. Any GPS or radio that wasn’t wired into the boat had to be sealed up and accounted for on departure, in case it helped some Cuban make his way over the straits to Florida.
The other thing missing, in addition to butter and freedom, is advertising, at least in the way we recognise it. There is one brand, and only one brand in Cuba – the Revolution. Every community has its slogans painted in red on a blue background: “Hasta la Revolucion siempre”, “Unidad y Sacrificio”, “Remember the glorious martyrs of the revolution”, “Global Financial Crisis – the revolution lives” and, more ominously, “In a revolution there are no neutrals” or “Propaganda = Knowledge”.
These, with the constant pictures of the young, cinematically handsome, Chef, would be inspiring if it weren’t so patently obvious from everything around that the revolution, after fifty years of endeavour, has failed to give Cuba a functioning economy. Fidel’s words, from a book written in 1966, have an ironic and tragic ring to them: “In time it will become apparent that only those countries in which a revolution has taken place will be in a position to fulfil their international financial obligations.” A promise as illusory as the one he made at the same time to retire “at an early age.” (Though the subject of financial obligations isn’t one that any country can
afford to feel smug about at the minute.)
There is a terrible wistfulness about all these slogans now, reminiscent of Miss Faversham sitting in her wedding finery, feeding on the memory of youthful promise while real life decays around her.
This sense of the country being ready to crumble around its own ears makes it seem odd that the US maintains its embargo and antipathy towards Cuba. Certainly, they were made to look very silly in the Bay of Pigs, and certainly, Fidel has lost no opportunity of deriding “Yankee neo-colonial imperialism”. But it is hard to believe that the island poses any sort of threat now – or not to imagine that there are plenty of ways in which it could be a very much more dangerous neighbour if more effective operators took control.
Cuba has the feeling of being a failed harvest or two away from collapse. Everybody is housed, educated, and adequately (if monotonously) fed, but achieving that has exhausted the limits of the country’s capacity. It is criss-crossed with overgrown railway lines which used to carry what used to be a surplus of sugar-cane. Now they import sugar. Horse drawn carts have replaced buses in the country areas, oxen have replaced tractors. Fields are lying fallow. The roads are crumbling, the buildings are crumbling, the electricity network, the distribution network, are crumbling. People’s faith in the revolution is crumbling.
This is a country in serious need of support and friendship. And if they don’t get that from the US, they will get it from someone else, who the Americans will like even less than what they have right now. This period before the Castros die is perhaps the last chance to become Cuba’s new best friend, and to ease their transition to the new era that must follow, sooner or later. I don’t know who are the people who are jockeying for power when Fidel and then Raul dies, but for sure they will be sponsored by some heavyweight nasty countries, just dying to twist America’s tail. If the Americans don’t like having the Castros on their doorstep, they will like Chavez or Ahmedinajad there even less.
The biggest challenge for anybody trying to help Cuba is how to move it forward economically, without losing all the excellent things about its society: its cohesiveness; its freedom from putting a monetary value on every pleasure; the warmth and unquestioning generosity of the people.
The second instalment, rather less serious, is about our travels in Cuba.
Here are some words that won’t appear in any writing about Cuba: shiny, new, crisp; freedom, debate, efficiency; luxury, choice, plenty. And some others that won’t appear either: celebrity, tawdry, yob; drunken, surly, aggressive; ill-fed, unhealthy, obese.
The second-hand bookstalls in the Plaza de Armas in Habana Vieja sell a mixture of 1950s issues of Life magazine, coffee table books of photos of crumbling colonial buildings, and writings about Revolution, here and elsewhere. We bought three books, all written just before or just after the Revolution; the thoughts of Fidel and of Che. They inspire and depress at the same time: the bright hopes, the desperate desire to root out poverty and injustice, and the fervent belief that men can be motivated by an appeal to the best in their nature rather than by offering them material goods, all read more than 50 years later amid a failing infrastructure, agriculture which has gone back to ploughing with oxen, and little old ladies begging in the squares for soap.
In many ways it is a gravity-defying miracle that Cuba continues on its Revolutionary way, 20 years after the fall of communism in the East removed the props to its economy. One has to wonder for how much longer it can stagger on, until the very last tractor falls apart for lack of spares. When Castro took over, his immediate priority was to give land to the peasants, and make sure everybody had a house and access to the basics of life. His writings at the time display a visionary belief that giving peasants the right to farm their own land and removing them from a condition of semi-slavery, would so motivate them that, together with management by a wise and benevolent government, Cuba could become wealthy and self-sustaining by focusing on agriculture alone.
It hasn’t worked, or perhaps it’s fairer to say it’s worked in parts.
If you’re comparing the outcome of economic models, I would have to say that the average Cuban we met seemed happier and healthier than many of the miserably dough-faced and pudgy representatives of capitalism we met mooching off cruise ships up and down the Caribbean. Everybody we talked to was friendly, generous and open, ready to share whatever they had with complete strangers. The passegiata (or whatever the Spanish for it is) goes on in the evenings, and people sit around gossiping and flirting in the squares as dusk falls, having just as much fun as if they were in a chic bar wearing the latest fashions.
Which just goes to show that there’s more to live than possessions, because it is hard to imagine the level of material deprivation, the near-total absence of stuff, in Cuba unless you visit. A lot of basics are simply not available; while we were there, these included butter and potatoes – for breakfast we were given mayonnaise to spread on the bread, and for lunch and supper it was always rice and beans (or occasionally beans and rice). Things like razor blades and loo paper could only be found in hard currency shops, where they stood in proud, if well-spaced out displays, with other fancy goods like cooking oil or pasta. Simple things such as moisturiser or saucepans are luxuries for most people; at a roadside stall, the going rate for more bananas than we could eat in a week was half an (unused) bar of soap, a biro and an old pot of nail varnish.
We spent one night, not quite legally, in a private house, just west of Santiago, that was not part of the government’s licensed chain of B&Bs. Built of concrete slabs, it sported three rooms, with a tiny shower room and kitchen tacked on the back. The walls were painted a chipped and faded blue, the concrete floor a certain red, which emphasised the similarity, in both style and size, to a spacious two-car garage. The son of the house was turned out of his bedroom for us, so we were free to examine the one piece of furniture in the room, a short railing across one corner, and to count up the two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, four shirts and two jackets that constituted this teenager’s possessions. His six-year-old sister owned three coloured crayons, a pink plastic teacup and saucer, decorated with a large purple flower, and a shabby blonde partially-dressed doll, all stored on a shelf beneath a picture of Jesus and the Sacred Heart. But they were of course good company – perhaps better than some children we know, who have learnt to become grasping before they are eight. In the shower room, a bucket sat ready to be filled to flush the loo, and an empty shampoo bottle paraded on the single shelf, symbol of good times that had been, and a talisman that they might come again.
That’s the setting for people who earn the standard wage, of around 300 pesos a month, equivalent to £7. But not equivalent in purchasing power, when rent and electricity are minimal, education and health care are free, as are the weekly rations of rice, beans, bread and meat. Vegetables in the markets, where farmers are allowed to privately sell a portion of their crop, cost 5 pesos a kilo. Nobody starves in Cuba, nobody is homeless, but most people don’t have very much of anything.
Then there’s a parallel economy, one that runs on hard currency. Some Cubans get access to this via their jobs: a worker in an industry that has dealings with tourists might get an additional 10 Convertible Pesos (CUCs) a month, around £6, to buy themselves toiletries. But what keeps many families going, and gets DVD players and frilly china ornaments into the better-off houses, is remittances from family members who have escaped overseas.
Escaped? Yes, because this country is pure communist in its approach to personal freedom. Debate and discussion are not tolerated, let alone dissent. As an example, a person would drop their voice and check they were not being overheard before venturing the opinion that Raúl Castro is not as eloquent a speech-maker as his brother. No internet is allowed in private houses, and even those who work with computers have very limited access to the internet. The authorities aren’t particularly concerned about stopping visiting yachts smuggling goods into the country; what they worry about is that we might smuggle someone out. No Cuban apart from customs and immigration is allowed on a foreign boat – or probably a local one too – not even in broad daylight for a drink. Any GPS or radio that wasn’t wired into the boat had to be sealed up and accounted for on departure, in case it helped some Cuban make his way over the straits to Florida.
The other thing missing, in addition to butter and freedom, is advertising, at least in the way we recognise it. There is one brand, and only one brand in Cuba – the Revolution. Every community has its slogans painted in red on a blue background: “Hasta la Revolucion siempre”, “Unidad y Sacrificio”, “Remember the glorious martyrs of the revolution”, “Global Financial Crisis – the revolution lives” and, more ominously, “In a revolution there are no neutrals” or “Propaganda = Knowledge”.
These, with the constant pictures of the young, cinematically handsome, Chef, would be inspiring if it weren’t so patently obvious from everything around that the revolution, after fifty years of endeavour, has failed to give Cuba a functioning economy. Fidel’s words, from a book written in 1966, have an ironic and tragic ring to them: “In time it will become apparent that only those countries in which a revolution has taken place will be in a position to fulfil their international financial obligations.” A promise as illusory as the one he made at the same time to retire “at an early age.” (Though the subject of financial obligations isn’t one that any country can
afford to feel smug about at the minute.)
There is a terrible wistfulness about all these slogans now, reminiscent of Miss Faversham sitting in her wedding finery, feeding on the memory of youthful promise while real life decays around her.
This sense of the country being ready to crumble around its own ears makes it seem odd that the US maintains its embargo and antipathy towards Cuba. Certainly, they were made to look very silly in the Bay of Pigs, and certainly, Fidel has lost no opportunity of deriding “Yankee neo-colonial imperialism”. But it is hard to believe that the island poses any sort of threat now – or not to imagine that there are plenty of ways in which it could be a very much more dangerous neighbour if more effective operators took control.
Cuba has the feeling of being a failed harvest or two away from collapse. Everybody is housed, educated, and adequately (if monotonously) fed, but achieving that has exhausted the limits of the country’s capacity. It is criss-crossed with overgrown railway lines which used to carry what used to be a surplus of sugar-cane. Now they import sugar. Horse drawn carts have replaced buses in the country areas, oxen have replaced tractors. Fields are lying fallow. The roads are crumbling, the buildings are crumbling, the electricity network, the distribution network, are crumbling. People’s faith in the revolution is crumbling.
This is a country in serious need of support and friendship. And if they don’t get that from the US, they will get it from someone else, who the Americans will like even less than what they have right now. This period before the Castros die is perhaps the last chance to become Cuba’s new best friend, and to ease their transition to the new era that must follow, sooner or later. I don’t know who are the people who are jockeying for power when Fidel and then Raul dies, but for sure they will be sponsored by some heavyweight nasty countries, just dying to twist America’s tail. If the Americans don’t like having the Castros on their doorstep, they will like Chavez or Ahmedinajad there even less.
The biggest challenge for anybody trying to help Cuba is how to move it forward economically, without losing all the excellent things about its society: its cohesiveness; its freedom from putting a monetary value on every pleasure; the warmth and unquestioning generosity of the people.
The second instalment, rather less serious, is about our travels in Cuba.
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
The land of the brave ...
and the home of the fully stocked supermarket! Together with internet links, so we are happy. Currently in West Palm Beach, and off to Brunswick, Georgia, tomorrow. Lots of blog to post when we get ourselves sorted out.
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Still in Cuba
Loving Havana, but communications still difficult. Expect to be in Florida in 10 days or so, when we will be back in touch
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
We are in Cuba
A fascinating country, but internet access is not easy. So there probably won´t be any news for a couple of weeks, but we are fine.
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
Thoughts from the bilges
As we prepare Tomia for her passage to Cuba, Anthony shares the second part of his thoughts on keeping the ship running
Navigation, safety and creature comforts
The watermaker is wonderful. It draws in seawater and passes it at about 7bar (100psi) through membranes and will dump 90% back over the side and make 10% pure water at a rate of 30 litres an hour. Water is often difficult to obtain and sometimes quite expensive and in short supply so it is great to be independent. We cannot run the watermaker when in marinas or when there is a lot of sediment in the water which occurs in some of the more enclosed harbours. Our tanks take 550 litres and we estimate to use about 40 litres a day for showers, washing up, drinking etc. so it is not normally a problem. We therefore run it for between one and two hours a day usually when we are running the generator because it will use about 9 amps per hour. Maintenance is easy with a change of the intake filter about once a month. If left for any length of time (over a month) you have to ‘pickle’ it by putting some chemical through it to ensure no bacteria grow inside and then re commission when you return.
The ‘heads’ (loo compartments to some of you!) have probably been the most demanding to look after. We have two onboard one forward to port and one aft to starboard so which ever tack you are on when sailing there is always one with the inlet and outlet in the water! These are obviously in regular use and we have run through a lot of ‘O’ rings and seals. Over time you also get a build up of calcium in the hoses and we dose with vinegar to help alleviate this. In the forward heads we have a separate shower. All inlets and outlets that go through the boats hull have a bronze skinfitting and then before any hose is attached, a seacock, which is a special tap that can be turned off so that you can isolate the item that it is connected to, such as the heads, and work on them without flooding the boat.
We have a fairly standard pressurised water system with a hot water tank heated either by a heat exchange system from the main engine if it is running or by a 240 volt emersion heater from the generator. Water is piped to the basins and showers in both the heads and to the mixer tap in the galley. All outlets, showers, basins and sink have electric pumps and these have caused a few problems and instead of now having to repair them we have replacements which can be exchanged immediately and the defective pumps worked on when convenient.
We have a four burner gas cooker with oven and grill fitted in gimbals to make cooking in a seaway possible. Before we left we had all the flexible hoses replaced and a new regulator fitted which means we can use either Butane or Propane gas.
We have two fridges but generally only need to use one. It is a chest style which is not the most convenient but we have got used to it. It is run from a small compressor which is installed in a vented cupboard under the sink. The sink itself is a double unit with mixer tap, a hand fresh water pump in case the electrics give out and a salt water pump – yet to be used!
Some of the most important equipment on any cruising yacht is situated around the chart table. Luckily TOMIA was not overburdened with navigational equipment when we bought her so we were able to research and buy new what suited us. Wherever we go we make sure that we have paper charts and will always check these against the local pilot and the electronic charts. Modern electronic charts however are a very quick and easy way to navigate but with a lot of caution when approach reefs and rocky shores. Basically TOMIA appears as a small boat symbol on the chart using the satellite navigational system (GPS _ global positioning system). She will be in her exact position on the earth’s surface. The GPS picks up her track every few seconds and will move the symbol accordingly. The screen will display the boat’s speed through the water plus the speed over the ground, course over the ground, the direction to any waypoint we may have entered plus the distance and estimated time to reach that waypoint at the current speed. It will also show the wind speed and direction both true and apparent, and any other information that you wish to show such as depth. We also have an Autohelm which links into the system and when that is set you can ask the system to go directly to the waypoint and allow for any leeway, tide or current. And the boat will sail herself. When there are just two of you on board this is a really almost essential bit of kit. When either of us is off watch and asleep the other can keep up with the navigation, make a cup of coffee, adjust the sails while TOMIA is gaily sailing to her next destination and she always seems as keen as us to get there!
We have a radar system linked into the same screen so that we can pick up any ships within a 24 mile radius, a SeeMe antenna which detects a radar beam picking us up, enhances the signal and sends it back so that we appear as a slightly larger blob on their screen. We have both VHF (very high frequency) and SSB (Single side band) radios. The VHF can be used within a 25 mile radius of a harbour or another yacht although sometimes a hill in the way might affect that distance. The SSB is used for longer distances of up to 2500 miles but sometimes much further. A nice Sony music system so that we can listen to all our old records which Celia transferred onto a little memory stick measuring 2inches by half an inch. I am not sure I fully understand how a four foot stack of LP’s can be reduced to that but it all works and what is more it tells you what is playing on the small radio screen – amazing!
We have a Webasto diesel heating system which blows hot air via ducting into each cabin – unused.
TOMIA is cutter rigged which means two headsails both of which are on furlers. These are controlled from retrieving lines led back to the cockpit so that we can set them and then roll them up without having to go forward. The main is furled into the mast when not in use and again this is all controlled from the cockpit. We sail with Main and Yankee most of the time and staysail when the wind is on the beam. A Yankee is a very high cut small genoa which allows good vision forward. We have a large genoa which is kept hidden under our berth. Two downwind sails are a full spinnaker which we find we can fly easily in up to 15 knots of wind and is easy to control with a snuffer, a sock of light material approximately a foot in diameter which rucks up at the top when the sail is flying and which you pull down to collapse it We also have a cruising chute or asymmetric which we can fly as small spinnaker or with the tack attached at the stemhead. Again we had a snuffer made for this which makes it easy to control.
Over the cockpit we have a bimini, a cover which shades the seating area so that you are out of the sun – essential. It sits just underneath the boom so gives 6 foot 6 inch headroom and extends out to the sidedecks. There is a clear window in the top so that we can keep it up while sailing and still watch the sails. Over the main hatchway there is a close fitting spray hood so that when the waves wash over us when we are out in a blow we keep dry and even more importantly water does not go down below.
In addition to all the above there is a fair amount of safety equipment. We have an EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicator Radio Beacon). If we have serious trouble and TOMIA is in danger of sinking or has in fact sunk, we jump in the liferaft and the EPIRB will be either manually or automatically activated and send out a GPS signal which includes our unique identification number and within a couple of minutes rescue services will know that we have a problem and will have our position which is updated every few seconds so that if there are strong tides or wind making us drift from the original sinking position they can keep track of us – unused! Life jackets, dan buoy and liferaft all of which are self inflating, need to be serviced regularly. The liferafts next service is due in February 2011; I wonder where we will be to have that done!
Navigation, safety and creature comforts
The watermaker is wonderful. It draws in seawater and passes it at about 7bar (100psi) through membranes and will dump 90% back over the side and make 10% pure water at a rate of 30 litres an hour. Water is often difficult to obtain and sometimes quite expensive and in short supply so it is great to be independent. We cannot run the watermaker when in marinas or when there is a lot of sediment in the water which occurs in some of the more enclosed harbours. Our tanks take 550 litres and we estimate to use about 40 litres a day for showers, washing up, drinking etc. so it is not normally a problem. We therefore run it for between one and two hours a day usually when we are running the generator because it will use about 9 amps per hour. Maintenance is easy with a change of the intake filter about once a month. If left for any length of time (over a month) you have to ‘pickle’ it by putting some chemical through it to ensure no bacteria grow inside and then re commission when you return.
The ‘heads’ (loo compartments to some of you!) have probably been the most demanding to look after. We have two onboard one forward to port and one aft to starboard so which ever tack you are on when sailing there is always one with the inlet and outlet in the water! These are obviously in regular use and we have run through a lot of ‘O’ rings and seals. Over time you also get a build up of calcium in the hoses and we dose with vinegar to help alleviate this. In the forward heads we have a separate shower. All inlets and outlets that go through the boats hull have a bronze skinfitting and then before any hose is attached, a seacock, which is a special tap that can be turned off so that you can isolate the item that it is connected to, such as the heads, and work on them without flooding the boat.
We have a fairly standard pressurised water system with a hot water tank heated either by a heat exchange system from the main engine if it is running or by a 240 volt emersion heater from the generator. Water is piped to the basins and showers in both the heads and to the mixer tap in the galley. All outlets, showers, basins and sink have electric pumps and these have caused a few problems and instead of now having to repair them we have replacements which can be exchanged immediately and the defective pumps worked on when convenient.
We have a four burner gas cooker with oven and grill fitted in gimbals to make cooking in a seaway possible. Before we left we had all the flexible hoses replaced and a new regulator fitted which means we can use either Butane or Propane gas.
We have two fridges but generally only need to use one. It is a chest style which is not the most convenient but we have got used to it. It is run from a small compressor which is installed in a vented cupboard under the sink. The sink itself is a double unit with mixer tap, a hand fresh water pump in case the electrics give out and a salt water pump – yet to be used!
Some of the most important equipment on any cruising yacht is situated around the chart table. Luckily TOMIA was not overburdened with navigational equipment when we bought her so we were able to research and buy new what suited us. Wherever we go we make sure that we have paper charts and will always check these against the local pilot and the electronic charts. Modern electronic charts however are a very quick and easy way to navigate but with a lot of caution when approach reefs and rocky shores. Basically TOMIA appears as a small boat symbol on the chart using the satellite navigational system (GPS _ global positioning system). She will be in her exact position on the earth’s surface. The GPS picks up her track every few seconds and will move the symbol accordingly. The screen will display the boat’s speed through the water plus the speed over the ground, course over the ground, the direction to any waypoint we may have entered plus the distance and estimated time to reach that waypoint at the current speed. It will also show the wind speed and direction both true and apparent, and any other information that you wish to show such as depth. We also have an Autohelm which links into the system and when that is set you can ask the system to go directly to the waypoint and allow for any leeway, tide or current. And the boat will sail herself. When there are just two of you on board this is a really almost essential bit of kit. When either of us is off watch and asleep the other can keep up with the navigation, make a cup of coffee, adjust the sails while TOMIA is gaily sailing to her next destination and she always seems as keen as us to get there!
We have a radar system linked into the same screen so that we can pick up any ships within a 24 mile radius, a SeeMe antenna which detects a radar beam picking us up, enhances the signal and sends it back so that we appear as a slightly larger blob on their screen. We have both VHF (very high frequency) and SSB (Single side band) radios. The VHF can be used within a 25 mile radius of a harbour or another yacht although sometimes a hill in the way might affect that distance. The SSB is used for longer distances of up to 2500 miles but sometimes much further. A nice Sony music system so that we can listen to all our old records which Celia transferred onto a little memory stick measuring 2inches by half an inch. I am not sure I fully understand how a four foot stack of LP’s can be reduced to that but it all works and what is more it tells you what is playing on the small radio screen – amazing!
We have a Webasto diesel heating system which blows hot air via ducting into each cabin – unused.
TOMIA is cutter rigged which means two headsails both of which are on furlers. These are controlled from retrieving lines led back to the cockpit so that we can set them and then roll them up without having to go forward. The main is furled into the mast when not in use and again this is all controlled from the cockpit. We sail with Main and Yankee most of the time and staysail when the wind is on the beam. A Yankee is a very high cut small genoa which allows good vision forward. We have a large genoa which is kept hidden under our berth. Two downwind sails are a full spinnaker which we find we can fly easily in up to 15 knots of wind and is easy to control with a snuffer, a sock of light material approximately a foot in diameter which rucks up at the top when the sail is flying and which you pull down to collapse it We also have a cruising chute or asymmetric which we can fly as small spinnaker or with the tack attached at the stemhead. Again we had a snuffer made for this which makes it easy to control.
Over the cockpit we have a bimini, a cover which shades the seating area so that you are out of the sun – essential. It sits just underneath the boom so gives 6 foot 6 inch headroom and extends out to the sidedecks. There is a clear window in the top so that we can keep it up while sailing and still watch the sails. Over the main hatchway there is a close fitting spray hood so that when the waves wash over us when we are out in a blow we keep dry and even more importantly water does not go down below.
In addition to all the above there is a fair amount of safety equipment. We have an EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicator Radio Beacon). If we have serious trouble and TOMIA is in danger of sinking or has in fact sunk, we jump in the liferaft and the EPIRB will be either manually or automatically activated and send out a GPS signal which includes our unique identification number and within a couple of minutes rescue services will know that we have a problem and will have our position which is updated every few seconds so that if there are strong tides or wind making us drift from the original sinking position they can keep track of us – unused! Life jackets, dan buoy and liferaft all of which are self inflating, need to be serviced regularly. The liferafts next service is due in February 2011; I wonder where we will be to have that done!
Thursday, 25 March 2010
More Friends
Friday 26th February 2010. 8,331 miles, day 497. Carlisle Bay, Barbados. 13 deg 05'.35 N, 059deg 36'.68 W
Friday 5th March 2010. 8,475 miles, day 504. Prickly Bay, Grenada. 11 deg 59'.96 N, 061deg 45'.68 W
Do you remember those wonderful friends of ours, who took an apartment in Barbados last year, to give us a surprise Christmas lunch after our Atlantic trip? They have come back to the island, so it was our turn to sneak up on them. This meant a bit of a detour off our route from Dominica to Bonaire – but what’s 500 miles between friends?
(This, by the way, is the reason the blog has been so out of date, we were trying to cover our tracks.)
We waited for a weather window before leaving Dominica, and were rewarded with a good sail for the last 24 hours, with the wind giving us a close reach all the way to the island. The current was against us, but that just seems to be a fact of life around here. Surely it’s not possible that our log is over-reading? Just as we left Dominica we came across a small pod of dolphins grazing in the shallows; one left his colleagues to join us for a way, apparently because we could give him a better back scratch than they could. (Sorry, can't get the video to load.)
We managed to explore Barbados a little more than on our previous visit, getting away from the mega-rich developments on the coast into the beautiful central hills, covered with rolling sugar cane, and with spectacular views down to the surrounding ocean. Over towards the east of the island is St Nicholas Abbey, not, in fact, a religious establishment, but a marvellously well-kept Jacobean house, in the centre of its sugar cane estate. The house, which dates back to 1658, was bought a few years ago by a Barbadian architect, and the restoration of the gardens and the distillery is clearly a labour of love, overseen by two fine Moluccan Cockatoos, Lance and Baby.
We travelled up there by bus, a rather more organised and calm experience than the rambunctious free-lance minibuses of the other islands, noticing on the way that all the little bus shelters have girls’ names. Why girls only, we wondered, and who chooses them? The bus shelters are tidy and uniform little structures, painted white, picked out with the blue and gold of the Bajan flag.
Tomia anchored again in the beautiful clear waters of Carlisle Bay – not that we had any choice, as the only other place where yachts are permitted is the berth-holder only marina at Port St Charles. The whole of Barbados is a bit like this: stunningly beautiful, but largely exclusive. The surf crashing onto the beach gave us our usual wetting as we tried to come ashore to drink at one of the beach bars – at least we have learnt from our previous visit, and the mobile phone is securely in its waterproof pouch.
And then, after only five days, it’s off again, a further 130 miles to Grenada, a convenient stop off on our way to Bonaire, where Anthony’s son will meet us. To our delight, several friends from our previous visit are there, and we make the most of our time in a sociable way, as well, of course, as stopping off at the local chandlery to cosset Tomia a bit – no chance of her taking a back seat for long. The main expense this time is charts for the east coast of the US; after Bonaire we will be on our way north, leaving the Caribbean sunshine. While life will become easier there in many ways, and we shall be overwhelmed with culture and history, we shall leave a part of ourselves behind here with much regret.
Friday 5th March 2010. 8,475 miles, day 504. Prickly Bay, Grenada. 11 deg 59'.96 N, 061deg 45'.68 W
Do you remember those wonderful friends of ours, who took an apartment in Barbados last year, to give us a surprise Christmas lunch after our Atlantic trip? They have come back to the island, so it was our turn to sneak up on them. This meant a bit of a detour off our route from Dominica to Bonaire – but what’s 500 miles between friends?
(This, by the way, is the reason the blog has been so out of date, we were trying to cover our tracks.)
We travelled up there by bus, a rather more organised and calm experience than the rambunctious free-lance minibuses of the other islands, noticing on the way that all the little bus shelters have girls’ names. Why girls only, we wondered, and who chooses them? The bus shelters are tidy and uniform little structures, painted white, picked out with the blue and gold of the Bajan flag.
And then, after only five days, it’s off again, a further 130 miles to Grenada, a convenient stop off on our way to Bonaire, where Anthony’s son will meet us. To our delight, several friends from our previous visit are there, and we make the most of our time in a sociable way, as well, of course, as stopping off at the local chandlery to cosset Tomia a bit – no chance of her taking a back seat for long. The main expense this time is charts for the east coast of the US; after Bonaire we will be on our way north, leaving the Caribbean sunshine. While life will become easier there in many ways, and we shall be overwhelmed with culture and history, we shall leave a part of ourselves behind here with much regret.
Monday, 15 March 2010
Meeting friends
Friday 5th February 2010, day 476, 7,910 miles. 18° 01’.97 N, 063° 05’.11 W Simpson’s Baai, St Maarten.
Monday 15th February, 2010, day 486, 8,124 miles. 15° 17’.19 N, 061° 22’.65 W. Roseau, Dominica.
Meeting friends.
We leave Saba with all the usual regrets, but we have to go to St Maarten, for our other habitual occupation – spending money on Tomia. St Maarten as an island has little to recommend it (well, apart from the usual white sandy beaches, constant perfect weather, blue sea) but it is a centre for yachts, and a good place to kit Tomia out with the various parts and charts she needs.
It is hard to believe the island is under 30 miles from tiny, remote little Saba – as we approach we see hotel tower blocks lining the coast, the peace is shattered by jumbos taking off every half hour or so, there are jet skis, speed boats, themed bars, traffic jams and duty-free shopping malls. Just our sort of place.
A week whizzes by deciding how to spend money, organising people to spend the money, and getting the money spent. A big plus is the presence of a couple of boats with friends on, and several more with new friends – St Maarten is the yachting equivalent of the Hotel Georges V in Paris – sooner or later everybody you know ends up there. We have met some really great people on this trip – you don’t hear much about them because I don’t like posting stuff about other people on the web – but it is such a joy to come into a harbour and find them there.
St Maarten is also a mecca for many of these vast motor yachts. The one thing that strikes me when I look at them all parked up next to each other is that, to want – and to be able – to own several million pounds-worth of gleaming fibreglass, you probably have to be a pretty competitive, coming second is for losers sort of person; someone who thinks that their character is determined by their possessions, and the one who dies with the biggest toys wins. But when you fly down to join your yacht, glowing with the admiration of your family, and bitter envy of your friends, what do you find? Something even bigger and swankier and more gold plated parked next door. Why keep them all together, when everybody bar one is guaranteed to have their nose put out of joint?
We had a couple of trips across the virtual border to St Martin, the French half of the island, to stock up on wine, saucisson and smelly cheeses, and then set off for our next appointment in Dominica, 195miles to the south..
Two lovely sets of people awaited us there – one some Americans who are running a small charity to help schools on one or two of the poorest islands. They work really hard, putting up bookshelves, painting classrooms, giving guidance and support to teachers, as well as channelling thousands of donated books to places where they are needed. They are also excellent company, so it is just splendid to sail into a bay and find them there.
The other people we met came all the way from Waldringfield, travelling in the civilised surroundings of a cruise ship. What glamour and luxury! We are duly impressed, but sorry that their intention to smuggle us aboard for a bath doesn’t come off. How nice to catch up with all the really important gossip about our friends at home – and get an update on The Archers from another aficionado.
Carnival is in full swing – it is Shrove Tuesday, and everybody is saying farewell to the pleasures of the flesh with gusto. We watch the glittering costumes going by, and the floats with troupes of dancers behind, and later in the evening take to the streets ourselves to have our ear drums blasted, and our feet exhausted as we follow our chosen mobile sound system. It is such a good-natured crowd; everybody intent on having a good time, with no aggression or obvious drunkenness. [Though some of us, says Anthony pointedly, dance with an exuberance that is inexcusable if not alcohol fuelled.]
Our time in Roseau is enlivened by one of the boat boys and guides, Pancho, the Rum Tum Tugger of Rastas. He is on a one man mission to make the world a less boring and predictable place, with a cheerfully irreverent attitude to time, plans, speed limits (not that that marks him out around here) and any minor laws that stop him having a good time. While guiding he is endlessly patient and good, light-hearted company, though a little vague on any but the most common birds, but his favourite occupation is chattering away with a can of our beer in his hand, telling stories and screaming with laughter at his punchlines, which normally find him being caught out in some misdemeanour. Not even writing off his car seems to dampen his exuberance – he is a one-off and we shall miss him.
Monday 15th February, 2010, day 486, 8,124 miles. 15° 17’.19 N, 061° 22’.65 W. Roseau, Dominica.
Meeting friends.
We leave Saba with all the usual regrets, but we have to go to St Maarten, for our other habitual occupation – spending money on Tomia. St Maarten as an island has little to recommend it (well, apart from the usual white sandy beaches, constant perfect weather, blue sea) but it is a centre for yachts, and a good place to kit Tomia out with the various parts and charts she needs.
It is hard to believe the island is under 30 miles from tiny, remote little Saba – as we approach we see hotel tower blocks lining the coast, the peace is shattered by jumbos taking off every half hour or so, there are jet skis, speed boats, themed bars, traffic jams and duty-free shopping malls. Just our sort of place.
A week whizzes by deciding how to spend money, organising people to spend the money, and getting the money spent. A big plus is the presence of a couple of boats with friends on, and several more with new friends – St Maarten is the yachting equivalent of the Hotel Georges V in Paris – sooner or later everybody you know ends up there. We have met some really great people on this trip – you don’t hear much about them because I don’t like posting stuff about other people on the web – but it is such a joy to come into a harbour and find them there.
St Maarten is also a mecca for many of these vast motor yachts. The one thing that strikes me when I look at them all parked up next to each other is that, to want – and to be able – to own several million pounds-worth of gleaming fibreglass, you probably have to be a pretty competitive, coming second is for losers sort of person; someone who thinks that their character is determined by their possessions, and the one who dies with the biggest toys wins. But when you fly down to join your yacht, glowing with the admiration of your family, and bitter envy of your friends, what do you find? Something even bigger and swankier and more gold plated parked next door. Why keep them all together, when everybody bar one is guaranteed to have their nose put out of joint?
We had a couple of trips across the virtual border to St Martin, the French half of the island, to stock up on wine, saucisson and smelly cheeses, and then set off for our next appointment in Dominica, 195miles to the south..
Two lovely sets of people awaited us there – one some Americans who are running a small charity to help schools on one or two of the poorest islands. They work really hard, putting up bookshelves, painting classrooms, giving guidance and support to teachers, as well as channelling thousands of donated books to places where they are needed. They are also excellent company, so it is just splendid to sail into a bay and find them there.
Thursday, 11 March 2010
Diving
Sunday 17th January 2010, day 457, 7,823 miles. 17° 14’.96 N, 062° 39’.50 W. White House Bay, St Kitts.
Thursday 21st January, day 461, 7,863 miles. 17° 28’.71 N, 062° 59’.32 W. Oranje Baai, Statia
Thursday 4th February, day 475, 7,910 miles. 17° 38’.29 N, 063° 15’.41 W. Ladder Bay, Saba.
Our sail across to St Kitts from Antigua took us past Montserrat in the morning light, in the middle of one of its periodic eruptions. A thick roiling of smoke and ash pours out of one of the vents as we pass, and becomes part of the miasma hanging at a few hundred feet downwind of the island. At the north of the island, what looks like a veil of rain is actually ash and dust falling down on the remaining inhabitants. It is only a couple of days since the tragic earthquake in Haiti, so the whole region is clearly having an geologically active time.
The ash shadow from Montserrat stretches for over 50 miles, giving us wonderful diffuse scarlet sunsets. When it’s not raining. Which it is in St Kitts. The rain comes slanting down from a slate grey sky. The green fields on the lower slopes of the central volcano are soaking up the rain. The wind has roused the sea into large relentless heaps. If we were in England, it would be a day for crumpets and log fires. We have our first attempt at putting out a kedge anchor to steady us against the ferocious rolling (in the pouring rain, with visibility fading in the quick tropical dusk) – well, it was certainly a learning experience, and we are still married, so it can’t have been that bad.
[Sailors can skip this next bit: What is a kedge anchor?
Normally, in non tidal waters, a yacht on a mooring or at anchor would “lie to the wind” – that is, lie with her bows pointing into the wind, falling back from the anchor or mooring, and swinging gently with any change in the wind direction. In calm water this is fine, but when a swell comes into the harbour, the boat can be affected by this more than the wind, which makes her very uncomfortable, as the swells catching her on the side make her roll heavily back and forth. The answer is to set a kedge anchor – a second anchor from the stern, which you use to pull the boat round so that she lies at right angles to the swell. The boat then “pitches” – rises up and down with the incoming waves – but this is much easier to live with than being rolled from side to side, like a jelly bean at a funfair, when you’re trying to sleep.]
We had meant to go to the races – a big St Kitts tradition, with everyone dressed up in their finest – but it was rained off, so we went down the coast to White House Bay, where the hills are covered in a heather-like scrub. With the lowering clouds and driving rain, it is like being in Scotland. Apart from the troop of monkeys scampering and screeching along the rocky beach. This whole southern end of the island has been sold off for development, so it won’t be so empty and barren and beautiful next time we come by.
From St Kitts, we drop down for a couple of days to its sister island, Nevis, the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers; and also the place where Nelson met and married his wife, Fanny. Snorkelling off one of the little reefs, there is a school of tens of thousands of six inch long silver fish. They move as one, like starlings massing for roost, but if you make a lunge for one, they split away from you into two separate groups, whisking away, reforming behind you. No way I could catch one, even armed with Barracuda-like teeth.
And then on to Statia (St Eustatius if you’re being formal), one of the five islands in the soon-to-be-disbanded Netherlands Antilles. Being part Dutch, it is quite different to the other French or English ancestry islands in the chain. The houses are mainly one storey, with lots of pretty white painted fretwork (known as gingerbread) some with those Dutch shutters painted to look like gathered curtains, some of the streets are paved with neat, regular bricks, the shops sell every colour of de Kuyper and Bols liqueurs, the fort is beautifully preserved, and the whole has an air of neatness and organisation. The vibrant, noisy, cheerful hurly-burly of the other islands is missing – not that Statians aren’t friendly, our arms get tired from waving to every passing car which greets us – just a bit more, well, planned.
Our main reason for being here is to do our PADI course, and become able to dive. The cost has put us off up till now, but Tomia hasn’t been too demanding for the past couple of months, and we feel it would be daft, having spent so long here, not to take the plunge (ouch).
Diving turns out to be utterly fabulous. The teaching is excellent, just calmly getting us to do all sorts of unnatural things so often that they become second nature, and when we first go down, after three days of studying theory, and an afternoon shivering in a swimming pool practising the basics, we are so absorbed in the fish and the coral that we quite forget we are under 30 feet of water.
Most of the fish we saw were those we had spied on from above, while snorkelling, but down in their world we can swim among them freely, apparently unnoticed. When we are on the surface, I suppose we look like predators, but down here we don’t match any known recognised danger, so they just ignore us. What a variety of fish there is: colours from silver to royal blue to scarlet and emerald green, every size from the minute ones that live in larger fishes mouths to big ugly groupers that lurk under rocks, every shape from spherical to flat to the two foot long, one inch wide needle fish.
There is a great calmness down on the seabed, even when the waves are pounding up at the top. The peace amongst all the piscine activity is what impressed me most strongly. A stingray dozed on the sandy bottom, and we could get right up close to him, and lie, nose to nose, watching him breathe in and out. Of course, we swam around, but I would be quite happy just sitting cross-legged on the bottom, letting it all flow around me.
Over the next days, we do five more dives, going down as deep as 100 feet; we dive around the wreck of a ship, with a giant barracuda lazily patrolling the interior; we see a spotted eagle ray, and learn how to breathe from each others’ tanks, and at the end of it all, are qualified to dive anywhere we want in the world.
On land, we meet Dutch friends of my sister’s, last seen at her wedding, who have retired out here, and explore a bit, climbing up and into the crater of The Quill, the dormant volcano, filled with a lush vegetation that has thrived on the volcanic soil including magestic Mahogany and Silk Cotton trees, and where we spot a Lesser Antillean Iguana (iguana delicatissima, which may explain why they are almost extinct) immobile on a moss covered rock. An ancient scaly head with heavy hooded eyes; stumpy legs on a boulder-shaped body, attached to a two foot tail, it is the nearest we will ever get to seeing a dinosaur.
We leave Statia with regret (as for every island) and go up to Saba, where the diving is also excellent. Saba is a tiny island, so small that it feels more like a pause in the ocean rather than a complete entity. It rises almost vertically from the sea bed, with the two little towns nestling, Shangri-La like, in valleys 500 feet up. Again, the Dutch influence produces an orderly, white-painted, fret-worked neatness – and great community spirit – the island is too small for buses, so every body hitch-hikes up the near-vertical hills.
We manage two dives on the lava fingers that flowed out to sea from the last eruption of the volcano. On our last dive, we meet two reef sharks, totally uninterested in us (we are too big to eat, too small to be a threat), hovering patiently while they wait for something toothsome to come just that bit too close.
That is all we have time for on Saba, with one visit to the interior – we are totally free, and have all the time in the world, to do whatever we want, but are due in Bonaire, down near the Venezuelan coast, in six weeks’ time, and have lots to do before we get there. What a rush it all is!
Thursday 21st January, day 461, 7,863 miles. 17° 28’.71 N, 062° 59’.32 W. Oranje Baai, Statia
Thursday 4th February, day 475, 7,910 miles. 17° 38’.29 N, 063° 15’.41 W. Ladder Bay, Saba.
The ash shadow from Montserrat stretches for over 50 miles, giving us wonderful diffuse scarlet sunsets. When it’s not raining. Which it is in St Kitts. The rain comes slanting down from a slate grey sky. The green fields on the lower slopes of the central volcano are soaking up the rain. The wind has roused the sea into large relentless heaps. If we were in England, it would be a day for crumpets and log fires. We have our first attempt at putting out a kedge anchor to steady us against the ferocious rolling (in the pouring rain, with visibility fading in the quick tropical dusk) – well, it was certainly a learning experience, and we are still married, so it can’t have been that bad.
[Sailors can skip this next bit: What is a kedge anchor?
Normally, in non tidal waters, a yacht on a mooring or at anchor would “lie to the wind” – that is, lie with her bows pointing into the wind, falling back from the anchor or mooring, and swinging gently with any change in the wind direction. In calm water this is fine, but when a swell comes into the harbour, the boat can be affected by this more than the wind, which makes her very uncomfortable, as the swells catching her on the side make her roll heavily back and forth. The answer is to set a kedge anchor – a second anchor from the stern, which you use to pull the boat round so that she lies at right angles to the swell. The boat then “pitches” – rises up and down with the incoming waves – but this is much easier to live with than being rolled from side to side, like a jelly bean at a funfair, when you’re trying to sleep.]
From St Kitts, we drop down for a couple of days to its sister island, Nevis, the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers; and also the place where Nelson met and married his wife, Fanny. Snorkelling off one of the little reefs, there is a school of tens of thousands of six inch long silver fish. They move as one, like starlings massing for roost, but if you make a lunge for one, they split away from you into two separate groups, whisking away, reforming behind you. No way I could catch one, even armed with Barracuda-like teeth.
And then on to Statia (St Eustatius if you’re being formal), one of the five islands in the soon-to-be-disbanded Netherlands Antilles. Being part Dutch, it is quite different to the other French or English ancestry islands in the chain. The houses are mainly one storey, with lots of pretty white painted fretwork (known as gingerbread) some with those Dutch shutters painted to look like gathered curtains, some of the streets are paved with neat, regular bricks, the shops sell every colour of de Kuyper and Bols liqueurs, the fort is beautifully preserved, and the whole has an air of neatness and organisation. The vibrant, noisy, cheerful hurly-burly of the other islands is missing – not that Statians aren’t friendly, our arms get tired from waving to every passing car which greets us – just a bit more, well, planned.
Our main reason for being here is to do our PADI course, and become able to dive. The cost has put us off up till now, but Tomia hasn’t been too demanding for the past couple of months, and we feel it would be daft, having spent so long here, not to take the plunge (ouch).
Diving turns out to be utterly fabulous. The teaching is excellent, just calmly getting us to do all sorts of unnatural things so often that they become second nature, and when we first go down, after three days of studying theory, and an afternoon shivering in a swimming pool practising the basics, we are so absorbed in the fish and the coral that we quite forget we are under 30 feet of water.
Most of the fish we saw were those we had spied on from above, while snorkelling, but down in their world we can swim among them freely, apparently unnoticed. When we are on the surface, I suppose we look like predators, but down here we don’t match any known recognised danger, so they just ignore us. What a variety of fish there is: colours from silver to royal blue to scarlet and emerald green, every size from the minute ones that live in larger fishes mouths to big ugly groupers that lurk under rocks, every shape from spherical to flat to the two foot long, one inch wide needle fish.
There is a great calmness down on the seabed, even when the waves are pounding up at the top. The peace amongst all the piscine activity is what impressed me most strongly. A stingray dozed on the sandy bottom, and we could get right up close to him, and lie, nose to nose, watching him breathe in and out. Of course, we swam around, but I would be quite happy just sitting cross-legged on the bottom, letting it all flow around me.
Over the next days, we do five more dives, going down as deep as 100 feet; we dive around the wreck of a ship, with a giant barracuda lazily patrolling the interior; we see a spotted eagle ray, and learn how to breathe from each others’ tanks, and at the end of it all, are qualified to dive anywhere we want in the world.
On land, we meet Dutch friends of my sister’s, last seen at her wedding, who have retired out here, and explore a bit, climbing up and into the crater of The Quill, the dormant volcano, filled with a lush vegetation that has thrived on the volcanic soil including magestic Mahogany and Silk Cotton trees, and where we spot a Lesser Antillean Iguana (iguana delicatissima, which may explain why they are almost extinct) immobile on a moss covered rock. An ancient scaly head with heavy hooded eyes; stumpy legs on a boulder-shaped body, attached to a two foot tail, it is the nearest we will ever get to seeing a dinosaur.
We leave Statia with regret (as for every island) and go up to Saba, where the diving is also excellent. Saba is a tiny island, so small that it feels more like a pause in the ocean rather than a complete entity. It rises almost vertically from the sea bed, with the two little towns nestling, Shangri-La like, in valleys 500 feet up. Again, the Dutch influence produces an orderly, white-painted, fret-worked neatness – and great community spirit – the island is too small for buses, so every body hitch-hikes up the near-vertical hills.
We manage two dives on the lava fingers that flowed out to sea from the last eruption of the volcano. On our last dive, we meet two reef sharks, totally uninterested in us (we are too big to eat, too small to be a threat), hovering patiently while they wait for something toothsome to come just that bit too close.
That is all we have time for on Saba, with one visit to the interior – we are totally free, and have all the time in the world, to do whatever we want, but are due in Bonaire, down near the Venezuelan coast, in six weeks’ time, and have lots to do before we get there. What a rush it all is!
Thursday, 4 March 2010
How the other 0.001% lives
Tuesday 12th January 2010, day 452, 7,772 miles. 17° 00’.85 N, 061° 46’.49 W. Falmouth Harbour, Antigua
Sailing is one of the few places where the lives of normal people come up against those of the hyper-rich. Falmouth Harbour in Antigua must have a higher average net worth than any other place on earth at this time of year, even allowing for us scruffy yachties lowering the tone. The squillionaires are always with us, of course, but I guess most of the time they swish past in dark-windowed four-wheel drives, and unless we have a job turning down their sheets or selling them derivatives, we and they pass in our different worlds.
In Antigua here they are, though, in their Gucci-loafered hordes. We counted 20 boats over 100 feet long at Christmas. Sleek super-fast racing machines; gentlemen’s motor yachts, all shining varnish and gleaming brass; J classes and their mother ships; vast motor boats with three decks, gyms, discos and a wood-panelled library. To think we used to find the little white Essex gin palaces on the River Deben pretentious.
We have seen yachts with sailing boats bigger than Tomia stored on one side of their aft deck – and a 40 foot motor launch on the other. As we putter into the dock, we gaze in amazement at the 3,000 cubic feet “garages” that open on hydraulic hinges at the side of the boats, with space for tenders and dinghies, jet skis, windsurfers, waterskis … one ship carries a perfect little 26 foot Herreshof as a toy for the guests.
A bit like computing the number of grains of sand in the universe, measuring the wealth of these yacht owners leaves our brains feeling soggy, and limp as a piece of over-stretched elastic. To put it in perspective, we count among our friends many who have dailies, quite a few with nannies or au pairs, a couple who get a cook to come for the summer holidays, and one or two with a live-in housekeeper, which seems to us the utterly giddy heights of luxury. These yachts have a permanent staff of anything from five to forty. For a boat that the owner may use for three or four weeks a year.
We were in DesHaies, Guadeloupe, the night after Lionel Richie had given a concert in front of several thousand people. A 150 foot boat was anchored there, and just before dusk its tender started ferrying people over to a bar on shore – “closed for a private party” we had read. After they had all been got ashore, and enough time had passed for champagne cocktails to be drunk, the crooner’s tones wafted out across the bay …just a little private concert for twenty or so of the owner’s closest friends. Cool or what?
But there’s one place where these pampered lives (jealous, moi? Not really, honest) and ours cross: the dock. No matter that, on board, they swan around in ankle-deep carpeting, with their personal masseur or tame ghazal singer constantly on hand. No matter that they can sit in a hot bath whenever they want (yes, I admit it, there the green-eyed monster has got me), or that the toughest decision they have to make is whether last season’s Chanel can be given just one more outing – they still have to get from the land to the boat. And (short of a helicopter, and actually only a tiny few of these ships have heli-pads, shame, huh?) we take a certain sneaking pleasure at the thought that every single gilded person at that private concert in DesHaies had to get to the yacht using the same crumbling, stinky fishermen’s dock as us; their Jimmy Choos got entangled in the same ropy pieces of fish-encrusted netting; they also had to take a gasp of fresh air to see them through the worst smell when their tender passes the fish gutting area.
Bet they don’t have as much fun as we do.
Sailing is one of the few places where the lives of normal people come up against those of the hyper-rich. Falmouth Harbour in Antigua must have a higher average net worth than any other place on earth at this time of year, even allowing for us scruffy yachties lowering the tone. The squillionaires are always with us, of course, but I guess most of the time they swish past in dark-windowed four-wheel drives, and unless we have a job turning down their sheets or selling them derivatives, we and they pass in our different worlds.
In Antigua here they are, though, in their Gucci-loafered hordes. We counted 20 boats over 100 feet long at Christmas. Sleek super-fast racing machines; gentlemen’s motor yachts, all shining varnish and gleaming brass; J classes and their mother ships; vast motor boats with three decks, gyms, discos and a wood-panelled library. To think we used to find the little white Essex gin palaces on the River Deben pretentious.
We have seen yachts with sailing boats bigger than Tomia stored on one side of their aft deck – and a 40 foot motor launch on the other. As we putter into the dock, we gaze in amazement at the 3,000 cubic feet “garages” that open on hydraulic hinges at the side of the boats, with space for tenders and dinghies, jet skis, windsurfers, waterskis … one ship carries a perfect little 26 foot Herreshof as a toy for the guests.
A bit like computing the number of grains of sand in the universe, measuring the wealth of these yacht owners leaves our brains feeling soggy, and limp as a piece of over-stretched elastic. To put it in perspective, we count among our friends many who have dailies, quite a few with nannies or au pairs, a couple who get a cook to come for the summer holidays, and one or two with a live-in housekeeper, which seems to us the utterly giddy heights of luxury. These yachts have a permanent staff of anything from five to forty. For a boat that the owner may use for three or four weeks a year.
We were in DesHaies, Guadeloupe, the night after Lionel Richie had given a concert in front of several thousand people. A 150 foot boat was anchored there, and just before dusk its tender started ferrying people over to a bar on shore – “closed for a private party” we had read. After they had all been got ashore, and enough time had passed for champagne cocktails to be drunk, the crooner’s tones wafted out across the bay …just a little private concert for twenty or so of the owner’s closest friends. Cool or what?
But there’s one place where these pampered lives (jealous, moi? Not really, honest) and ours cross: the dock. No matter that, on board, they swan around in ankle-deep carpeting, with their personal masseur or tame ghazal singer constantly on hand. No matter that they can sit in a hot bath whenever they want (yes, I admit it, there the green-eyed monster has got me), or that the toughest decision they have to make is whether last season’s Chanel can be given just one more outing – they still have to get from the land to the boat. And (short of a helicopter, and actually only a tiny few of these ships have heli-pads, shame, huh?) we take a certain sneaking pleasure at the thought that every single gilded person at that private concert in DesHaies had to get to the yacht using the same crumbling, stinky fishermen’s dock as us; their Jimmy Choos got entangled in the same ropy pieces of fish-encrusted netting; they also had to take a gasp of fresh air to see them through the worst smell when their tender passes the fish gutting area.
Bet they don’t have as much fun as we do.
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