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.
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