A Sail of Two Idiots (15 page)
Read A Sail of Two Idiots Online
Authors: Renee Petrillo
They miss the shoals! Cue the triumphant music! The two waterlogged sailors jump up and down in sheer jubilation!
Well, we had missed the reef, but we skipped the jubilation part.
No really! Whose idea was this?!
Poor Shaka had been so scared that he pooped on our new carpet. He had never done that before, but I understood. I'm not sure we weren't close to soiling our own pants. He had also barfed all over the place. Michael and I must have been too terrified to get seasick.
Neither of us said a word as we motored back to Green Turtle. Neither of us let go of the wheel either. I wouldn't doubt we were in shock. I'm pretty sure we were
both thinking the same thing though. What the heck were we doing? Regarding The Whale. Regarding boating in general. We didn't belong out there.
It was a long, wet slog back, but boy were we glad to get anchored again. As soon as we guessed that the anchors were set (yes, guessedâwho knew? At this point we weren't sure we could do anything right), we started pumping water out of the boat. Even the dinghy, which was hanging above the stern on davits, was full of waterâthat's how high the towering waves were that had crashed over us.
LESSON 42: PULL THE PLUG
Out of your dinghy, that is, when you have it hoisted on its davits. Just don't forget to put the plug back in! We learned that the hard way (but just once!).
We continued to robotically hang stuff out to dry and pull out the bedding and the cushions. It wasn't long before all the nearby cruisers abandoned their ships like ants from an anthill, and we were surrounded by dinghies full of concerned sailors asking us what had happened.
We were still pretty pale and shaken up and didn't want to talk about it. Of course, Robbie also tootled over and said he was glad to see us. When we told him what happened, he said we were lucky we turned back. It would have only gotten worse.
As a matter of fact, someone on one of the lead boats had been yelling at us the whole time not to come out. We hadn't heard them. Turns out they had made it through before the tides switched, and with their deeper keels and larger engines were able to weather the waves better than we could have. Not that they would have done it again. By the time we went through the passage, no one should have attempted it. Uh, yeah, we figured that out.
Here are all those lessons I promised.
LESSON 43: GET A HEARING AID
We had only an interior VHF (mounted inside the sailboat) at that time, which is why we didn't hear the warning. We later installed a cockpit-mounted speaker so we could hear the interior-mounted VHF when we were on deck.
LESSON 44: GO WITH THE FLOW
When going through cuts or any other bottleneck, pay attention to the tides. Always go with the tides, not against them.
LESSON 45: USE PROTECTION
Most boaters who plan to travel offshore or anyplace away from sheltered areas install weather protection from the rain and waves in the form of plastic sheeting or curtains that attach to a dodger or bimini via Velcro, snaps, or zippers. We had adequate protection from the rain and waves coming over the bow (although we didn't have the plastic attached at this point), but we were unprotected on the sides and had been too cheap to remedy the problem. If we had to do it over again, we would have splurged on plastic side curtains that could be stowed when not in use. I highly recommend that you spend the money to have your boat outfitted with something you can either roll up or take off. Many monohulls already have this kind of shelter. I'm not sure why such a setup isn't standard on catamarans.
LESSON 46: SAFETY FIRST
It never occurred to us during that entire nightmare to put on our life jackets. Or pull out our ditch bag. We did have oneâwe deserve points for that! (A ditch bag contains lifesaving items you'd want should you need to ditch your boatâflares, water, water catcher, shade, suntan lotion, handheld GPS/VHF, granola bars, flashlight. You would throw your EPIRB in there too on the way off the boat.) It didn't occur to us to even consider getting on the VHF to put out a worried message, just in case. We never thought to clip in or harness ourselves to anything. We thought of nothing safety oriented. Had we done any of this, it would have put us more in control of a possible bad outcome.
You might be smugly asking yourself why these two idiots would even go out after seeing waves like that? Even
you
wouldn't have done that, right?
Maybe, but the waves didn't seem that high until they were literally upon us. Not every wave was a monster. The foaming whitecaps should have been our clue, but we were too inexperienced to know this.
The how-to books tell you to look for “elephants.” I didn't know what that meant, and after three years I still don't. The waves don't look anything like elephants. How about looking for rabid whales frothing at the mouth? Also, we had no idea what to expect. It was the ocean. It was not always going to be as calm as we had experienced during our crossing from the States. How bad did it have to be before people didn't go out there? Three other boats made it. Were we just wimps? We just didn't
know
! But we learned. And we learned fast.
Some of you might also be shaking your heads and saying “No way, JoseâI'm keeping my feet on solid ground, thank you very much.”
So let's get this out of the way first. It's trueâthe sea can be an unforgiving place. You must respect the ocean. This is real life, not a Wii simulation. Bad decisions
can have dire consequences. There. Now you know that. Here comes the pep talk part.
You can either cripple yourself with that knowledge or you can use it to empower yourself. Airline pilots do preflight checks before every flight. That improves their odds. Good sailors watch the weather, keep their boats maintained, and sail only in conditions that satisfy them. In this case, our inexperience was the number one factor in this unnecessary event.
Having kids is hard and scary, too, but you figure it out. A pro after your first one, you can practically snooze through your second one. Sailing gets easier over time too.
It's true that we were unsafe during that whole fiasco, but
most
situations are simply uncomfortable, not actually unsafe. There is a difference, and it's an important one if you really want to leave the dock. If you dream of boating but are letting feelings of powerlessness keep you from doing it, get over it! You'll be in more control of your boat than you will of that car you're so partial to; you know the statistics. And once you finish this book, you'll have learned how to implement that control and realize that even though you will make lots of mistakes, you will learn from all of them.
I promise you, if you implement LESSON 40, Don't be sheep, you will be in fine shape. Do what
you
feel is right and what makes
you
comfortable. Over time, you'll discover which sea heights and wind strengths you and your boat can tolerate. You'll visit islands that
you
feel okay going to, taking routes you plotted yourself. You may decide to go out only on sunny days (good luck with that). Being out of sight of terra firma might freak you out, so you may prefer to be close to land all the time. (That's called coastal cruising; many share this preference.) You might like the open seas with nothing but yourself, the birds, and the marine life. I am the latter. When I was far out to sea, I couldn't run into anything, which made me happy. Do what's right for
you,
assuming it's not stupid.
You will be smarter than we were.
Breaking Free!
Y
ay! You're still with us!
Because no one had given us our pep talk yet, Michael and I were still questioning ourselves. We could quit. We still had the house and a car, and both our employers would take us back. The idea of “abandoning ship” definitely held some appeal.
When word got out that we were doubting ourselves and using the “Q” word, the boaters around us rallied. They shared their horror stories (was that a good thing?) and told us that doubts plague everyone. Sure we had made a number of mistakes, but look at all we had learned. Why waste that newfound knowledge? Get back out there! Well,
okay
!
We'd get out there, but it sure wouldn't be through The Whale. It would be through Don't Rock Passage or we'd be permanent Green Turtle residents like Robbie and Jamie.
It would be another week before weather conditions would allow us to try again, the
other
way, but we needed the week to reconfigure our mainsail lines anyway (remember, we blew out the mainsheet block). We also needed time to work up our nerve.
The idea of tackling Don't Rock Passage became more palatable when a sailor on another 37-foot catamaran,
Mothra
, came into the anchorage. Brad had gone back and forth between these islands a bazillion times. He also had a depth sounder on
both
hulls, which would make going through the shallow Don't Rock Passage a little less risky.
If you get a catamaran, you can easily add a second depth sounder (most come with only one, which seems illogical).
We did our own weather check, plotted our new route on our chartplotter (conferring with Brad), and said good-bye to our friends.
Now
we were ready! Well, we were ready if Brad was ready because we were going to follow him.
The night before we left was the first dead calm in over two weeks. The water was so tranquil and clear and the moon so bright that we could see the harbor bottom 8 feet down at 10 p.m. and could easily see the huge red starfish moving along the anchorage floor. Wow!
All the boaties lowered their dinghies and went zinging about like bumper cars enjoying the freedom of a calm, moonlit night. It was liberating and a much better omen than the one we had prior to our last attempt. Ah, yes. That yin and yang thing. When it was bad, it could be pretty bad. But when it was good, it was awesome.
Early the following morning we headed out of Green Turtle harbor once again (no hangover this time. LESSON 39, Don't drink and drive). Conditions in both The Whale and Don't Rock Passage were like night and day. It was eerie. It also made us feel a little chagrined.
We enjoyed the rising sun, stuck close behind Brad (but not too close), kept our eyes on our own depth sounder (not solely relying on Brad's since we're not sheep), bit our nails a little, and within an hour found ourselves in deep water. Wahoo! The area that had kept us “trapped” up north was only a little over a mile long. Yeah, just like an hour of giving birth is
only
an hour long.
It felt good to be on the other side. We yanked up our sails (we had kept them down for visibility's sake) and had a fantastic hour-long 6-mile journey east to Great Guana Cay.
Lesson learned here?
LESSON 47: PATIENCE, PATIENCE, PATIENCE
Sure, I mentioned this in LESSON 5, but I can't say it enough. Lots of boats are called
Patience
. Get some, and wait for the right conditions!
Hallelujah! We were someplace newâGreat Guana Cay! If we could just get this anchor set. We dropped our anchor three times before Brad came over and helped us drag it a fourth time. He decided that our anchor wasn't heavy enough to hold our boat (see, it wasn't us!). We had a 37-pound CQR (and a 37-pound Fortress). Put a heavier anchor on the list! We managed to get dug in eventually.
LESSON 48: IT'S NOT HEAVY, IT'S YOUR ANCHOR
Get the heaviest anchor you can put on your windlass (the motorized device that pulls the anchor up so your crew doesn't have to) or hoist by hand. We later heard that the original owners of our boat, who sailed
Jacumba
for 18,000 miles starting in South Africa, had dragged a lot too. There are plenty of anchor choices, but based on a recommendation from Brad, and a great write-up in
Practical Sailor
, we ordered a 44-pound Bulwagga anchor, once we had the funds to do so. (The Fortressâa twin flukeâis light and compact but resets with the winds and currents and is very picky about sea bottom; the CQRâa plow type of anchorâworked in lots of seabed conditions but tended to drag in high winds; the Delta was a next-generation CQR; and the Bulwagga has three flukes, which seemed to work in most conditions.) We were happy with our choice, but if we had to do it again, we would have gone even heavier. Note: If you have a heavy anchor, you should have an electric windlass, your back (or your mate's) will thank you.
Great Guana Cay was beautiful and had lots of black-and-white-spotted manta rays in the harbor, some over 6 feet across and very graceful. Our depth sounder would go crazy as one passed underneath us. We'd run out to see what was going on, just in time to see a big black shadow exit from under our hull. Eerie.
After two days we were antsy to go somewhere else, just because we could. We didn't know how much time we'd be spending in the Abacos before the house finally sold, but we figured we'd be there long enough to sail back later. Many islands are within a few miles of one another, and we couldn't wait to sail to them all. That said, we would have been perfectly happy to follow Brad through the rest of the Bahamas.
Okay, so maybe that wouldn't be exactly adventurous (or been in
his
plans), so we sucked it up and plotted our journey to the next islandâMan-O-War Cay, 11 miles southeast and about two hours away. At least we didn't have to go through any more cuts (at least for a while). We were now in the relatively calm waters of the Sea of Abaco, so we didn't have to worry about cuts to the ocean until we wanted to head south eventually. We'd deal with that when we got there.
