CruiseNews #18
Date:  December 16, 1999
Port of Call:  Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands
Subject:  Passage to the BVI

 
Sailing out Town Cut
After two weeks in Bermuda, having fixed everything we reasonably could, we took advantage of a favorable weather forecast and raised anchor at noon on Wednesday, December 8th.  We sailed out St. George's Harbour, through Town Cut, and out to the sea buoy.  The wind was light, but at least it was from the right direction.  We raised the spinnaker, and promptly tore it on some sharp piece of rigging aloft.  We pulled the spinnaker down, patched it, and sent it back aloft, catching the wind and pulling us southward.

The wind slowly built that afternoon, and we exchanged the spinnaker for our two working jibs, the staysail and yankee.  By 0300 on Thursday it was blowing 20 knots, and we put the first reef in the mainsail.  The wind continued steady through Thursday, and Sovereign's log ticked off the miles:  130 on the first day, 145 the next.

Unfortunately, my stomach wasn't nearly as steady as the wind and I had a nasty bout of seasickness on the second night out.  In order to avoid talking about seasickness, as if saying its name would conjure it up, Cathy and I have taken to using a sort of verbal shorthand.  All we have to say is the onomatopoetic word "gaack", and we know exactly what the other is feeling.  In our experience with coastal cruising, we had found that we generally didn't feel very well the first two days, but by the third day things were usually looking up.  (Of course, in coastal passagemaking, by the third day we were usually at our destination, too!)  Belatedly, Cathy tried applying a Scopolomine patch behind my ear.  Within an hour the patch had vanished, so she applied another.  That one also vanished, as did a third.  We still don't know what happened to them.  We didn't even find them when cleaning up the boat after the passage.  But I decided to "tough it out" in hopes of becoming accustomed to the motion.  I never did, and felt "gaack" the whole passage.

On Thursday morning, I noticed that one of the yankee sheets had chafed almost completely through, and we went up on the foredeck to replace it.  Our new roller furling has been wonderful for furling and unfurling sails easily from the cockpit, but this job required actually lowering the sail--a much more difficult task because once lowered, the sail is not attached anywhere as it is with hanked-on sails.  We lowered the sail, wrestling and trying to pin it to the foredeck as the bow pitched uncontrollably, drenching us constantly with huge green walls of water.  Raising the sail after replacing the sheet was no easier, because one person has to hold the head of the sail into the slot in the roller furling, while the other frees the fouled halyard and raises it, all while holding on for dear life.  It took us an hour to do this simple task.  Our foredeck work was not done once we had completed that job, as we noticed that the roller furling line on the staysail had jumped off the drum and wrapped around the stay.  Another hour in splashing, heaving conditions and we straightened that mess out.  We came back to the cockpit and collapsed, too exhausted to move.

That afternoon, we heard a crash after a particularly large wave, and looked up to see that the mainsail had gybed and ripped apart the bale that held the mainsheet to the boom.  The sail was pushing against the rigging, with no way to pull it back in.  I quickly jury-rigged a repair using a line in place of the ½ inch stainless steel rod that had broken, knowing it wouldn't last long.  The next day, in somewhat calmer conditions, I replaced the lines with another bale that was not being used.

By Saturday morning, the wind had dropped to less than five knots, and we started motoring.  Fortunately, the good progress we made in the first few days meant that, if necessary, we had enough fuel to motor the rest of the passage.  Motoring in calm seas was comparatively uneventful.  We spent the day reading (and trying not to be gaack) and the night watching a fantastic show of shooting stars (and trying not to be gaack).  On Sunday morning we were visited by a pod of dolphins who swam at our bow for a few minutes, and then, seeming to lose interest in us, veered sharply off to our port side.  We continued to log good daily runs-140 miles at Saturday noon and 147 miles at Sunday noon.  Then, shortly after 0500 in my watch on Monday morning, the electronic autopilot gave up and refused to steer.  We had had this problem before in 1993, and knowing it could not be fixed offshore, we hoped for enough wind so that we could switch to our windvane self-steering device.  Fortunately the wind built, and within four hours we were under sail, now being steered by the windvane.

Monday noon's log showed another 149 miles toward our destination, now only 152 miles away.  We desperately wanted to make it to our destination before dark on the following day, so we kept all sail on, even through the building wind, and in one hour that evening we logged 7.3 miles-not bad for a boat with less than 29 feet of waterline length!

On early Tuesday morning it appeared we had a mutiny on our hands:  the windvane had apparently been conspiring with the autopilot, and decided it didn't want to steer the boat either.  One of the control lines on the windvane had chafed through overnight.  Fortunately, this problem was easily repairable, and with a close eye on the vane, we continued on.

 
Landfall at Jost Van Dyke, a smudge to the left of the shrouds
By daylight, the peaks of the Virgin Islands were visible dead ahead, some 40 miles away.  Even though I knew how far away they were, I was still compelled to stand in the cockpit and stare at them for all of the next six hours, as if they might disappear if I wasn't looking.  By 1500 (3:00 PM) we were anchored in Great Harbor, Jost Van Dyke, British Virgin Islands, having logged 872 miles in six days and three hours.

This passage, and the one before it to Bermuda, have taught us a lot about our boat and ourselves.  We know that we are capable of handling difficult conditions and emergency repairs at sea in a manner that should allow us to make any passage we choose.  But we also learned that the feeling of "gaack" is always present, no matter how acclimated we are to the sea conditions, and that seven days of gaack is really no fun.  We are still trying to decide whether the rewards at the end of a long passage are worth the hard work, loss of sleep, and general malaise we experience in getting there.  We'll let you know what we decide.

Smooth sailing,

Jim and Cathy