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!

   Behind us is a replica of the Mayflower.  Shame about the white van.

And here is the lobster - very good indeed

It's  been a wonderful birthday - masses of friends took the trouble to email or skype or phone or text, Charlotte arranged a party, and two even baked cakes - Fiona sent me a photo of hers, I am so sad that it's the wrong side of a broadband connection.

Thank you for sharing it with me, and making it special.

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." 

More Gustatory Delights

Tuesday 6th July 2010, day 627, 11,408 miles. 41° 11’.44 N, 071° 34’.79 W, Block Island, Rhode Island

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.

A Maryland Crab Feast

Friday 11th June, 2010, day 602, 11,028 miles. 38° 47’.20N, 076° 13’.06W, St Michael’s, Maryland

“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.

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.

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.

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.