While cruising, we (mainly Gwyn) keep experimenting with new recipes, mostly vegan, and a few have become our favorites. So we have added new blog pages (see on the header above) to provide easy access to an alphabetical sort of the various recipes to make them easy to find after the blog post containing the recipe ages. So you will start seeing recipe posts as we get around to writing them up. First ones will follow this post. Enjoy.
Hard on the Hard
We departed Virgin Gorda after the full moon and headed to Road Town for some shopping and then island hopping to Peter Island and Norman Island on our way to Soper’s Hole for the haulout.
As with most of this sailing life, challenges arising from constantly moving in a salt water environment are definitely the norm. So while attempting to leave Peter Island and head to Norman, our anchor windlass went on permanent strike. The good news, is that we had just retrieved 194 of the 200 feet of chain we had out when it died. That is good for two reasons: First, the anchor and two hundred feet of chain weigh in at close to 400 pounds and pulling that up with the manual feature of the windless would have been challenging. Second, the way the windless died was destruction of gears in the gearbox and the manual feature of the windless was inoperable. So we had to hand over hand the last 90 pounds – better than 400 pounds!! But now finding a replacement was proving difficult but our friend Anthony at BVI Yacht Charters helped us out locating some new parts. So we decided to install replacement parts during the haul out. We did stop at Norman Island but had to grab a mooring ball, having no anchor. But the view of Pelican Island and the Indians and the serenity of the bay was worth it.
We made it to Soper’s with a beautiful smooth sail and were hauled out on Friday with an acid wash scheduled for Saturday, paint and windlass fix on Sunday, and saildrive seals on Monday – 3 days and we’re back in the water, or so we thought. The removal of the old windlass was a simple matter of removing 4 nuts and sliding the gearbox and motor down off the shaft that turns the gypsy (the part that winds up and down the anchor and chain). Right? Sounded like a 5 minute job to me with another 15 minutes to put it back together and rewire. However, remember this is a BOAT so after quickly removing the 4 nuts, I discovered the gearbox and shaft remained as firmly entwined as a young couple discovering love. So I called in some professional assistance, expecting to be embarrassed as he would separate the parts in 2 minutes giving me a “what was the problem” look. Not so. It took almost three hours of continuous pounding and levering before the gearbox suddenly give up the ghost and split open releasing the shaft. Yay! Of course once again this is a BOAT, so the unexpected demise of the gearbox also released a pile of gear oil all over the chain and people in the vicinity. In the end, the expected 20 minute job took the better part of the day before all was apart, re-installed and cleaned up. But the new windlass is so quiet, I now can’t tell when G is dropping or retrieving the chain – but I am not complaining!
The paint job went swiftly but our mechanic for the sail drives showed up to check the boat and said he would be back later in the day. Remember we are on island time here so that means tomorrow or so. Chalk up another day on the hard – day 3 was done. Next day we got to enjoy another BOAT experience as the straightforward job of replacing the zincs and saildrive seals went very quickly until it was all apart (gears again – beginning to understand the old expression “being given the gears”). Lo and behold, the bearings in the gears of both drives were shot, partly due to age but accelerated a bit by the beautiful but very heavy bronze flexofold props I installed last year. Love those props because they fold nicely when under sail giving us a speed boost – but because they are on a BOAT, which is by definition the epitome of compromise, there was a small price to pay in accelerated bearing wear.
The good news of course is that we discovered this during routine maintenance rather than by finding water in our gearbox or worse (remember the windlass) in some remote location. The really bad news surfaced rather more slowly. This is an in stock local part, right? After all the BVI has many hundreds of boats with this drive. With assurances from everyone and a promise to have them the next morning, we found our departure delayed again as day 4 came to a close. Of course the next day came only to discover that the parts were not in the BVI, they were not even in St Thomas. Nope, sorry but they have to be fedexed from the US (ka-ching). But it will be overnight – so day 5 passed. Of course the Thursday came only to find out that the bearings “got stuck” in Puerto Rico, so didn’t show up. Sigh, day 6. They didn’t even show up on Friday, so now we had a weekend on the boat to add to our stay as days 7, 8 and 9 wandered by.
You must understand the “on the hard” environment we were in. For any non-sailors, picking a boat up out of the water and storing it on land is considered on the hard. If you live on a boat as we do, it feels very unnerving at first to be on the hard. Your body and being are used to the soothing constant motion on the boat so when that is suddenly gone, your brain tries to convince you that you are still moving which is very unnerving when you aren’t.
Where we like to be hauled in Soper’s Hole, the “hard” has been created by chiseling a roughly 100 foot level area out of very steeply rising terrain (as in very, fit mainly for goats). Having removed this material, a concrete retaining wall of some 40-50 feet high was built to keep the rest of the terrain from attempting to fill the ramp back in so nature could be happily back to normal. Of course on top of this wall sits a road, barely better than a jeep trail, with its own retaining wall so that people can access their homes cleverly hanging on in other nicely chiseled areas. So here we are, aft end of the boat against the wall on a concrete ramp, a beautiful bay in front of us with lots of ferry traffic. So what do you have? A perfect sound reflector! You can here every engine in the bay as if some heavy metal rock guitarist just cranked up his new amp! Ok, not quite the bad but walk 100 feet to the water and all is serene. Sit in the back of the boat and watch the goats impossibly walking down the steep hillside and you almost have a ferry concert. Of course the normally windy Soper’s Hole which keeps the area naturally air conditioned chose to be not windy during our extended stay thereby promoting a healthy mixture of perspiration with 3 billion mosquitos, dust from the road, and assorted other creepy crawly things that seemed to fall out of the sky. Not that we weren’t entertained!
Oh no, cruisers can always find the little nuggets in what we may have felt was intolerable in our previous lives. Charlie of course kept a watchful eye on the goats that managed to wander into the “hard” area. (click on the small image for a slide show and Esc to come back)
Goats above retaining wall 1 and below road retaining wall. They go anywhere/everywhere
Goats invading the ramp at Soper’s Hole
Charlie keeping an eye on the goats while on the hard
We temporarily adopted K’Mani whose Dad did a great job repairing gelcoat dings left over from the charter days (since we were stuck on the hard, this was great to get taken care of). K’Mani, at first scared to death of Charlie, ended up rubbing his tummy and finding much to do with Gwyn.
We also took him out in the dingy for a frolic at a beach where Charlie played with Zoe a few times.
Zoe and Charlie heading out to retrieve their toys at their favorite beach
Heading out to retrieve those toys
Zoe and Charlie heading back with their retrieved toys
What happens when the ball is thrown too far – the old man gets to retrieve it. There is no “too far” for Zoe – but Charlie has limits.
We wandered through town and found a rather ingenious chair made from two discarded pallets.
We took a hike to the south side of the island (about 10 min) where the pelicans were having a feeding frenzy.
Peter Island in background with Pelican starting a dive for a meal
Pelicans flying and diving/feasting on schools of fish
We were entertained by the magical transformation of our boat from blue to grey (barrier coat) to black (new bottom color), not to mention ecstatic when we finally got off the hard.
Blue Sky with last year’s paint
Blue Sky sporting her new barrier coat
Blue Sky with her new black bottom paint
Blue Sky on the beast about to head down the ramp to the water
Blue Sky heading for the water on the beast.
Sharp left turn and into the water she goes. Glad I’m not steering the beast with a 33,000 pound boat.
We headed immediately to Benure’s Bay on Norman where only two other boats shared the anchorage. Delightful to get into the water for a snorkel and swim. The next morning before leaving, the usual crowd of small fish were under the boat but with a rather large black shadow.
The usual crowd of little 5 inch fish – but that dark shape is new.
So I stuck my hand in the water with the camera for a better look. Oh, geez, its a barracuda! Note rudder in background for size reference.
Poor photo, picked the wrong hull window to shoot from. But that window over there is 22 inches so with a little measuring the barracuda comes in at 4.5 to 5 feet long.
Then it was off to Road Town for errands and food and a bash back to North Sound for Christmas Eve. We arrived too late and too tired to participate in the festivities but enjoyed all the lighted boats and the boat parade. Next morning we peaked out the back to see Santa relaxing after a hard night’s work.
A month in BVI
It’s hard to believe a month has passed since we arrived to the British Virgin Islands. Yesterday P went into Road Town to extend us for another 60 days. I doubt we’ll stay that long, but you never know. ‘The best laid plans …’ and all that.
So I’ve been procrastinating getting to this blogging. I’ve let a good deal of time pass since I last wrote, leaving me with a wealth of information to share with you. My goal is to not bore you to tears, but forgive me if I do.
Let me begin with all the Salty Dawg activities we’ve been enjoying. Many, many happy hours at many, many bars (Saba Rock, Bitter End Crawl Pub and Merimark Bars, CCYS-Esmeraldas, Fat Virgin, and Hog Heaven). Hog Heaven involved a good deal of coordination by Matt and Karen on Gypsy that involved a ferry ride and taxis up to the top of Virgin Gorda.
Judy from Rum Runner did the coordination for daily yoga classes at Biras Creek. She also did the organizing for the CCYS happy hours where we were treated to free appetizers on our first visit. We also celebrated our arrival with a dinner at the Bitter End with majority of the Dawgs that made the trip to BVI. Believe it or not, we also skipped a few events such as pizza night. We enjoyed all these events while on free moorings provided by the Bitter End Yacht Club. There are so many perks to being a part of this group not to mention the many friends we’ve made.
For thanksgiving we celebrated on the Wednesday (we were allowed to use the beach chairs and tables belonging to the bar as long as there was no cruise ship in port – which is why we celebrated a day early) with what turned out to be an excellent pot luck on the beach at Prickly Pear. We brought Charlie along to play with the other dogs, but he is a fussy one and only plays with Zoe. Dezi, Spinnacker and Nigel got the usual growls from him as he hid beneath my legs.
On US Thanksgiving day, we buddy boated across to Anegada with Jackie and Dan from Chill. We all went to Neptune’s Treasure for a dinner of Lobster and Swordfish. Of course we had some jungle juice which we enjoyed last time we were there. The following day we hauled our bikes ashore and cycled the island. Spent a few hours lolling around on Loblolly beach, which included some snorkeling and a workout to fight the current to get back to the beach. In total we figured we cycled about 24km (~15 miles).
We finally tried out the new gennaker on our way back to Virgin Gorda and it gave us a nice push in low winds. The parasailor would have been faster, but the gennaker is much easier to handle.
Let’s talk about yoga – Max our instructor was great. He seemed to instinctively know how much to challenge us. Some days we’d have only 5 or 6 participants, while other days we’d have 10 or 12. Most days I’d pick up someone. One day Irene from Destiny told me about the tuna they caught while on passage and asked if I’d eat tuna. I said yes, although I’m mainly vegan, I do give it up for fresh caught fish now and again. When dropping her off after yoga one morning she handed me a chunk of tuna from her freezer. Paul and I had a good few meals from it and it was delicious.
A few times we invited people aboard Blue Sky for sundowners. Chill had us over for a movie night (Despicable Me) and Dawn (Dutch and Elaine) invited us over to learn how to play ‘Oh Hell’ – a really fun card game which Jackie from Chill renamed ‘Oh Crap’.
Between all the fun we managed to clean up the boat, do laundry, provision, swim, paddleboard, kayak, groom Charlie and star gaze. We also took advantage of the free 2 hour water sport rental and tried out a Hobie Cat. Charlie donned his life vest for this and seemed to enjoy the ride as much as we did.
The time arrived to depart Virgin Gorda and head over to Road Town to pick up the boat paint and get ourselves over to Soper’s Hole in time for the latest Salty Dawg dinner event put on by Bamboushay Pottery and Lounge in Road Town. Here the Old Dogs of the BVI meet with the Salty Dawgs and we enjoyed a rare bit of entertainment by Foxy. If you’ve been to Jost Van Dyke island, Foxy has a famous tavern where he entertained his guests for years. He doesn’t entertain much any more so we felt truly privileged to have him entertain us after dinner. The deputy governor also stopped in to greet us on her way home from the office and of course we all received our coffee mugs provided by Bamboushay Pottery made especially for our group. There were many goodbyes as many of the Dawg’s plan to depart the BVI and head down island to various ports after this last event.
On Dec 12th we got Blue Sky hauled out at Soper’s Hole Yacht Services. She’s getting cleaned up and new boat paint. So we’ll be on the hard for a few days. While here we will also be getting our anchor windlass repaired (it broke while bringing up the chain in Little Harbour on Peter Island). Lucky for us Anthony of BVI Yacht Charters has spare parts for it and has offered to sell us some and provide us someone to help us do the repair.
So for the next few days we’ll be getting a little dustier than we like and walking Charlie a lot more. Meanwhile I’ve put up the solar Christmas lights to help us get into the spirit of the season.
1475 nautical miles
We are here in the BVI after our open ocean passage of 1475 nautical miles that departed from Hampton, VA on Nov 3. That makes a total of about 8800 nm we’ve done since we moved aboard in May of 2013. It’s hard to believe as it seems so incredible that we are actually doing this after dreaming about it for years. All of these miles were done with just the two of us. As we’ve mentioned before, we do 3 hour shifts and our bodies do magically adapt after about 24 hours, and they adapt right back when the opportunity for more sleep arrives.
This passage was much easier on all of us. We’ve learned to feed Charlie mainly rice for the first 24-48 hours and in any rough seas. He was not sea sick once this trip. When we left the Chesapeake Bay and entered the Northern Atlantic ocean we were greeted by dolphins swimming about. Too far off to get a picture, but I took it as a sign for a good trip; and a good trip it was. We had wind on days when it was not forecast, we managed to miss most of the storms at sea, and the only storms we hit met us with mostly rain and low winds. As we neared the islands we saw shooting stars on several of our night shifts. I counted 4 in one shift. There were no whales or dolphins on the remainder of our trip, but we did see the usual flying fish pretty much daily.
The only surprise was a little bird that hitched a ride for 10 minutes. At that point we were 400 miles from the nearest land so it was quite surprising.
On Fri. Nov. 14th we arrived at dawn into Sopers Hole in the west end of Tortola. As if to welcome us, about an hour after we arrived a torrential downpour appeared for about 10 minutes washing away the thick layer of salt that had caked onto the boat during the passage. That saved hours of washing the boat down. Thank you – and of course it was followed by a rainbow.
Once we got ourselves fed, we readied the dinghy to go and get everyone cleared in at customs. As usual, we had a bit of a battle with our electric dinghy motor and were late meeting the vet for Charlie’s clearance. Once that was done, Paul went to clear us and the boat in, but realized he left the boat paperwork on the boat. So we had to make another trip with out recalcitrant motor. ((P) Funny how the trip started and ended with fussy motors but the trip itself was great. In Hampton, we were in front of 4 other boats ready to leave. So of course the starboard engine refused to make a sound and we kept everyone trapped. After much diagnosing, a rap on the starter solenoid did the trick. Kind of like spurring the horse to get a move on.)
Charlie and I (G) sat in the dinghy waiting for Paul to get our passports stamped. Charlie gets a little excited and wanted to go ashore, and in his effort tried to jump from our dinghy to the one next to ours on the dock. He didn’t make it, instead he went for a swim. You can imagine those big black eyes looking at me for a rescue. So cute.
Once the clearance was done, we decided to keep our adrenaline up and head to the grocery store for a bit of fresh produce and then sail on over to the Bitter End at Virgin Gorda where majority of the Salty Dawg Rally participants sail directly to. When we arrived to the Bitter End a sea turtle swam right in front of us as we headed in. Another greeting – welcome back.
This morning we took Charlie for a romp on the beach with his ball. He loves to run full out after the ball. He immediately dropped the ball into the water after fetching it. This is his sign that he wants you to throw it into the water so he can swim for it. We spent a good long time playing with him. We’re now back at the boat ready to begin our day. We’ll empty the extra fuel we carried into the tanks and put away the jerry cans. We’ll also empty the extra water jugs into the water tanks. Everything will get tidied up. I’m most looking forward to putting away the feather duvet and our warm clothes and to pulling out our extra swim suits.
Salty Dawg Rally excitement
Here we are in Hampton at Blue Water Marina, participating in various events for the Salty Dawg Rally to the Caribbean. We’ve enjoyed many talks from the US Coast Guard including a live demonstration of a water rescue from a helicopter. Since P has been working like a fiend to get our new batteries up and running, I’ve been attending majority of the events. I learned about what to check on a regular basis on the boat for preventative maintenance, and really enjoyed the talk on the medical emergencies at sea which was led by rally participants. This is quite a change from last year when we missed all the pre-rally events due to our delayed arrival to Hampton.
It really is quite something all the work Bill & Linda Knowles have gone to in order to get people educated and ready to go. There is significant focus on communication and weather, and rightfully so. We all want to know how to let people on shore know that we are moving along our float plan and are safe out there. Chris Parker has been giving us daily Skype chats to help us determine our best departure time. At this point it looks like sometime on Monday, November 3rd we’ll throw off the dock lines. We’ve been testing our SSB radio and sending out our Spot tests and providing our last minute float plan to those who need to know.
Over the week we’ve also enjoyed happy hours with our fellow Dawgs most evenings. One evening we had painkillers, sponsored by sv RumRunner, a fellow cruiser. We also participated in the two dinner events and a night in a restaurant with fellow cruisers Pete & Irene from Destiny. On Halloween night, I enjoyed my first ever Dark & Stormy’s (Dark Rum and Gosslings Ginger Beer) which were served prior to dinner. After dinner we all pulled out our draw tickets and they proceeded to draw numbers for 31 fabulous prizes. I (G) won 4 gallons of Sea Hawk boat paint worth over $1000, and a Salty Dawg t-shirt. I knew it was worth buying those tickets, I just had a feeling. It was such a joy to also have someone at our table win a t-shirt and a $250 fishing rod and reel. What an amazing night of fun and laughter.
Today we are getting the last preparations done. I’ll be making a big batch of Ginger Snap Granola and some vegan cookies for the trip. Yesterday I prepared my 2 bean chili, a Curried Cauliflower dish and a double batch of rice. The left overs will get eaten over the start of the trip and Charlie will be fed rice only for his first 24 hours so he won’t get sea sick (he loves rice).
All in all, although you are never as ready as you want to be, we should be mostly ready by the end of the day. We wish our fellow cruisers ‘fair winds and following seas’ and a safe and trouble-free passage. God willing, we’ll post an arrival to the BVI update in about 10-12 days from departure.