The Night Watch

The Night Watch 

And the day watch and passaging in general

16 FEB 2015

We just did our run from the Dry Tortugas to Isla Mujeres in 54 hours, which means that we took watches, 4 on 4 off. This is a typical cruising couple watch schedule so there’s no real news here, but the experience is amplified on long passages. A quick overnight you can tough it out with loose watch discipline, but on long passages sticking to the schedule is important. And so there were lots of night and day watches to stand.

Which means when you are On, the boat is yours, day or night. On watch, we are both dealing with active route navigation, sail handling, and monitoring for ships-in-our-path and weather issues. Everything but sail handling is hugely simplified with our electronics, such as radar, AIS, and the chart plotter, especially at night when visual conning is limited to spotting the lights of ships or beacons. On Cerca Trova, all operation functions are available at the nav station in our main cabin, so on this last passage (in a cold snap in February) we ran the boat from inside. As for sail handling, we tend to shorten sail and then let it ride on the night watch because you can’t see the sails well and sail work beyond trimming of sheets often requires both of us, ie you have to wake up the off-watch person. Monitoring for collision risk and progress along the planned route doesn’t take much time, so we try to fill in with other things.

On the night watch I like to fill time with communications work. Partly because shortwave radio works a lot better at night, partly because it makes me feel connected despite being on a small boat on a large, dark ocean, and partly because it keeps me from fretting about all those boat systems that are failing but I just haven’t found yet. So when you get emails from us at 3am it’s because that’s when I got the radio-email to connect. And contacting the radio officers on the big ships crossing our route ensures that they actually know you are there. Jennifer actually had one ship kindly change course in such a way that they had to later yield to another on-coming ship such that they lost noticeable progress.

And when you are Off, you had best get some sleep.

But Jennifer and I have each our own extra functions aboard that we need to address when on passage, above and beyond running the boat, and we generally try to take care of those functions on the off watch and when there are no other boat-demands when On. Jenn handles provisions, food in general, and long range planning. I handle boat systems and navigational planning. Food on passage is pivotally important because a) there’s no food out there that you didn’t bring with you and b) well fed people do a lot better under stress, and passaging is clearly stressful on many levels. And preparing food while under way is uniquely difficult, which requires planning ahead for minimal cooking. Boat systems on passage are also critical. By that I mean battery, fuel and fresh water status, engines, pumps, weather, navionics and communication gear. The thing about boat systems on passage is that something always goes wacky, so vigilance is required to catch/fix/adapt the out-of-whack gear before real problems develop.

I am not sure when we will do our next passaging. Passaging is a rare thing for many cruisers because it’s generally difficult sailing due to the uncertainty of weather and routing barriers like the Gulf Stream or prevailing winds. If those barriers weren’t there then people would be going all over, all the time. “Gee Honey, let’s sail down to Columbia and check out Cartagena”, not.

But when we do, we will back on the night watches.

Such sweet sorrows

Simply put, we are pursuing a nomadic life. Which comes with great adventure and romance, and some real trepidation. And many partings.
 
After several months of refitting work on Cerca Trova, we are rapidly coming up on launching ourselves from Fort Myers for possibly two years of cruising. During the refitting we have toured Europe, spent significant time with friends and family, lived on the dock and gotten to know Fort Myers as a second home. There are also all those things we haven’t gotten to do here, and now may not ever get to. Add to that many new friends who live here and have shared their lives with us. We are going to sever ourselves from all of that and head for remote parts of the western Caribbean. Are we nuts?

No, the excitement and exploration call to us. So does the warm weather. But it means parting from the people important to us and from all the resources first-worlders take for granted as if they were air: unlimited supplies of water, electricity, fuel, internet, garbage services, sewers. Think of going “off the grid” as living as if you were in a power-failure status all the time and you will get some idea.
 
But now we are done. Just a few last partings, a very few last goodies to take along, and we are away. It feels like standing at the top of a five-month ski jump.
 

Geronimo!

Which way to turn

We are back on Cerca Trova after a long summer of travel and land-based adventures.  We are working hard to get her ready for a serious cruise of perhaps a year or more, which means replacing all those systems that have aged to where they are no longer trustworthy out of range of easy help.  That would be our main battery bank (which was essentially shot last year when we set out for our first cruise), our standing rigging at its design-life end (if it fails, we lose our rig), major engine overhauls, replacing leaking hatches (boating rule #1 is to keep the water out and the people in), and of course an overhaul of the boat’s bottom paint, props, rudders, etc (bottom paint available in the US nowadays barely lasts 18 months before it fails to prevent a personal coral reef from starting up and making a ‘hula-skirt’ that seriously drags down boat speed and therefore our ability to get to places and away from weather).  And a mind-boggling array of small tasks like mounting the EPIRB (look it up) for ready access if disaster strikes, reworking our “garage” to allow for quick access to tools and parts, cleaning up our main salon headliner that had been stained and uncleanable when she was launched, failing bug screens that we can no longer patch, resuscitating the SSB so we can communicate by text-mail and get all-vital weather data anywhere in the world, get the watermaker leaks fixed, tune the dinghy so it will idle well, and on and on and on.  The whole list is about 5 pages single-spaced of repairs, upgrades, spares, and provisioning.  We haven’t even started on the provisioning because we haven’t decided where we are going to go.

And go we must.  Men and ships rot in port, and our port, the Fort Myers Boat Club, has been sold to a powerboat broker company.  We can see the writing on the wall being left by the fancy sales guys inspecting the docks; and we are getting antsy.   So where do we go?

Last year in the Bahamas it was cold (really) and the incessant cold fronts with their fierce northwest winds in an archipelago with almost no west-protected anchorages made for less than relaxed cruising.   And it was crowded, with 320 boats in Georgetown harbor for the peak of the season, crowds that made it chancy to find room in the popular spots.  They are crowded because they are easy to get to, beautiful and have a base of marine support services.  We loved them and we will go back. But for now,……

We would like to go somewhere else.  Which means to get more remote, take on a lot more adventure and so also push the thin line between adventure and adversity.  If it was easy and safe, then everyone else would be there already.

Cerca Trova was built for it.   There are Mantas all over the world and they get there on their own bottoms.   It’s really about us: are we ready? Can we deal with the physical punishment of heavy weather, standing off unmarked reef entrances until after sunrise, finding engine parts in foreign languages, fixing it ourselves because the locals don’t have experience or parts for our gear, finding our way through the uncharted shifting sands of foreign immigration rituals? We think we can figure it out, and have the cruising community for assistance if needed. Just the way sailing and sailors work.

We are nearly done with refitting.  We are taking a Holiday break, then back for the final push to provision.  And then we will indeed have to make the choice.  Off the dock and off the fence.

Where my string be

We learned many things over our winter in the Bahamas.  We saw sights, we talked with people, ran aground (!) a few times.   Perhaps the most rewarding though was learning about the Bahamians.  Yes, there are Bahamians.  Its a sovereign nation of 400,000 people, smaller than Austin, and 350,000 live in Nassau.  Which means when you aren't in Nassau you are in with them.  They are a people with their own unique history and culture that arose from origins of slavery and life-on-the-sea in an archipelago of hundreds of islands.  They see the Loyalists of the American Revolution as the good-guys because the Loyalists brought so much economic prosperity to these astringent islands.  They talk a lot about Positive.  There is an active church every half mile along the road.  They live for the moment and for the future of their children.  It's a culture they struggle to hang on to in the face of the hurricane of self-indulgent materialism exported by the 'States.  Many go to the 'States to study and work.  But they always find their way home.

  

                        

On Stocking Island we had a chance to hear a local historian and botanist talk about his country.  He talked about plants and their medicinal purposes. He talked about where he had lived and why he was now back home on Stocking Island.  He said it was "where his string be."

Wow!  What did that mean?  We had to ask.  He said your "string" is your umbilical cord and it's buried in the garden of the house you are born in.  And when Bahamians are done wandering and living abroad, they always head back to where their string be.

Where be your string?  As Americans, we don't have much sense of home, the world is our oyster, well not really.  We are out in the world right now, touring through Europe, avoiding the worst of the South Florida summer heat.  We are visiting our European friends and our ex-pat friends too.  It's pretty clear that ex-pats do make their homes here although there is always this sense of looking over your shoulder back to the US.  And the over-arching question is "where will we settle when we get back?"  Without a sense of "where my string be" it's pretty hard to know where to go back to.

Cruisers seem to be the same or worse.  Most of us do not intend to spend the rest of our lives living aboard nor abroad.  At any gathering of cruisers there is this undercurrent of wondering where we will each go next and where we will go back to when done wandering.  The Bahamians wander their archipelago and the world but they each know where their string be.

And the sea grants to each man new hope

    And the sea will grant each man new hope,
    as sleep brings dreams of home.

This poetic quote was attributed to Columbus in The Hunt for Red October (but was actually created for the film see www.quoteinvestigator.com ). Regardless of where it came from, it's incredibly evocative of the mind-set of those of us who go forth upon the sea.  One has to wonder if the screenwriter who penned it was a sailor. 

We have learned a lot in our last year, went through some rough times, but the hope that is always on the horizon still calls us back to sea.  And now back home from our travels, yes, we did dream of home while away.  Ironically, it's not very nice here right now.  It's pushing 90 oF here in south Florida in June, not especially high on the scale but it is a special kind of heat that only Florida can produce.  And I have lived in a lot of hot places, like south Texas and Arizona.  Air conditioning is running 24/7.  How could we ever have considered A/C non-essential?  All those accumulated exterior boat repairs are a special treat.  And a big high-pressure is sitting right on top of us so there is no breeze, ie nothing breaks the heat and it's not worth trying to go out sailing locally.  When I figure out how to photograph heat, I'll include it.  We are catching up on all those movies we missed.

It feels like we are killing time again until we can go back to sea.    

Between two worlds

We made it back to Fort Myers about 2/3 of the miles under engine, which is much better than sometimes, tied up to our strangely familiar dock, and, a week later, are still dealing with the culture shock. 

I think it was the Publix our first day back where we first noticed it.  Shelves, coolers, racks, stands, cases, piles, cartons of products.  The sheer number of choices was disorienting, and we found ourselves carefully considering each option one-by-one.  It would have taken hours to do a basic shopping trip.  Because in the Bahamas there is one choice, if you are lucky and the supply boat has recently come.  How do we Americans do this?  The sheer quantity of quality is astounding when put in perspective of the rest of the world.

But now we are on the road, going to the wedding of a friends' son, seeing our doctors, seeing our family.  Immersed in America at the ground level.  Hotels, brands, restaurants, brands, airports, brands, cars, brands, SUVs!, brands, people, people, people.  And more people.  It feels like we are adrift between two worlds: our new one of self-reliance, simple living, and the physical truth of the ocean, and our past one of 2010's America. 

Our response is not unique.  I recommend the blog of Kintala, especially Tim's entry on being far from their new home:
http://theretirementproject.blogspot.com/2014/05/far-from-home.html

..The Cruising community is not much like America. These are people with different motivations, different ideas of what it means to be responsible, with a close and personal relationship with the natural world. They are from Canada and Europe and are not nearly as impressed with Americans as Americans tend to be with themselves. Most know well their turn will come to need a little help, and so they offer the same with little hesitation. ..

We have two weeks of road trip ahead of us before we can go home...

On Our Last Leg

We made it Across. It was of course on a mis-forecast wind. Mr. Parker predicted 10-12 out of the SE which would have been ideal to go WSW on, but nooo, we got 3-5 kts dead behind us. So we motored. Of all our sea miles, we have done not much better than a third under sail, which cruisers all say is actually pretty typical. When you have to be somewhere, to make a current window, a daylight window, a weather window, sailing is just not reliable enough to plan around. When you are on a ten-day passage it kinda doesn't matter, you take what Nature throws at you and you speed up or slow down near the end to time your arrival. I am thinking that the real art of an experienced sailor is getting the sailing right.

What are these clouds telling you about imminent weather?

 

But we did make it Across. We came across the “COLREGS” line, the international maritime law boundary, just after eight in the morning at Turtle Reef Light. Then we worked our way down the Hawk Channel to anchor about 11am behind Rodriguez Key. They spell “Key” in the Bahamas as “Cay” but its pronounced the same way, BTW. As a treat we went for our first US happy hour in 5 months at a little place that was several miles by dinghy. Ha ha! Miles in the dinghy? No problem! Our experience is beginning to show.

From there we ran the next day 40 miles down to Boot Key Harbor. Another frustrating long day of motoring with light winds dead behind us. One small gift from providence was the utter lack of crab pot floats. The last time we were in the Hawk Channel, it was infested with floats, one every 50 ft in some patches.  The season is ending and the harvest has been poor (hmmm .. wonder what happens when you put out 800,000,000 traps each year?) so we didn't have to strain to spot the floats in the waves then dodge them by altering course every few minutes for fear of being entangled.   

We really like the mooring field at Boot Key in the city of Marathon, FL. It has everything a liveaboard cruiser could want. Chandleries, groceries, attractions like the wonderful Crane Point Preserve, all-round protection from the weather, and lots of other cruisers in a real community. We finally caught up with our friends the Hackneys and their 5 kids on their catamaran Take Two.  It was wonderful to see how their kids have grown up in the real world and we had a great time trading lessons and experiences even with their 3-year-old.  The cost of Boot Key is in having to pay for a mooring ball and put up with the soupy water of the basin.  Die-hards look askance at boat people who stay in Boot Key, tends to be liveaboards, not “real” salty cruisers, but it is a great place to hang and enjoy ourselves.

The harbor at Boot Key

 

The Family Hackney on Take Two

 

But everything comes to an end, in the end. We have to be in Houston for a wedding on 16 MAY and have air tickets on 15 MAY. We have a huge list of work to get done on the boat. So we can't hang here forever. We have been looking for the weather window now for a week and it will open on Monday. Our run is an overnight 20 hrs to Fort Myers by way of Cape Romano. We really enjoy overnights because it feels like real cruising. The prediciton is for 10-12 from the ESE (hmmmm.. where did we hear that before?) for TUE and TUE night all the way up the west coast of Florida. Ideal for running up because the land to the east keeps the sea state from getting nasty. So this morning at 09:45 we dropped the mooring lines to our ball and set off for Fort Myers... the last leg, for this year.

On our way out of Boot Key Harbor