A hard landing.
We left Mustique in bright sunshine and a light wind on our nose and in less than an hour we were driving into dense fog with heavy rain and winds and seas slamming into us. Peter was in meetings, so I took the decision to postpone the Tobago Cays and turn to Mahault Bay on the north coast of Canouan, the closest relatively protected bay I could see on the chart. We got well dug in right away, and when Peter checked the anchor the next morning it was completely buried – just like it was in Icaria, Greece, during a storm two years ago to the day. We stayed another day waiting out the wind and swell, then moved around the corner to Little Bay and found calmer waters, a pretty beach, and a nice little reef teeming with fish, including a large blue-green parrot fish.
The wind was finally low enough the next day to rig our third reef – an important new safety feature of our main sail, and we wanted to make sure we had it ready before we left for Bonaire. Getting up early also meant we got to Tobago Cays early and nabbed the closest mooring ball to the beach behind a small island we’d spotted on our last visit. (This photo is from the spring – we didn’t take any this time!)
Oh, how blue the water is in the Tobago Cays! With nothing but a white sandy bottom throughout, the blue of the sky is reflected in the water all around, and it’s the bright turquoise of the plastic “gems” sold in schlocky trading posts in the Southwest. We were immediately in the water watching turtles and avoiding the many dinghies and day boats zipping from island to island and reef to reef. It’s a beautiful and very, very popular place.
With little swell or waves it was a perfect place to start cooking for our passage to Bonaire. We hadn’t set a final date – still watching the weather – but we knew it needed to be within the coming week. Over the next couple of days, I stocked the freezer with lasagna and red chile chicken enchiladas, our usual comfort food for crossing meals, made bread and yogurt, and made sure we had lots of leftover red chile for eggs all week. We headed to Charlestown, Canouan to check out of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and anchored off the airport, which also housed the Immigration office. The rest of the day was spent laying out and rigging our new parasail, prepping the ditch bag, setting up jacklines, rechecking safety equipment and reviewing safety procedures. We wanted an early start the next morning.
CHRIST but passages are so fecking boring. I do prefer boring to eventful, since events on any crossing are never good, but I am quickly at the “poke my eyes out with a stick” stage on these things. The parasail was performing well, but there was a new, erm, shudder emanating from the starboard engine that intensified with higher rpms. So, nothing that created extra work, just extra worry. Between the worry about either being boarded by Venezuelan pirates (we were taking a very northern arc route to avoid being close to the Venezuelan coast) or bombed by our own military for being supposed drug smugglers, the last thing we needed was to worry about things like engines or sails. The days crawled by with relatively constant winds, and though we snuffed the parasail for a few small squalls along the way we were able to put it up again quickly. We were making decent time, and with another six hours to go, the shit hit the fan.
I feel sick just thinking about it. Around sunset the wind came up and got squirrely, so we started snuffing the parasail. Peter hauled on it and it came down ten feet or so. He hauled on it again, and nothing. All his weight on the snuffing line. Nothing. It was well and truly stuck, and the wind was increasing, the seas were coming up, and the sun was down. We knew our only option at that point was to partially drop the halyard and head closer to the wind so it would blow more toward the boat and not the sea and he could haul it in by hand. This was a nightmare scenario. We’d been flying this brand-new sail for only three days, and we were in high winds and heavy seas and couldn’t snuff it. It blew directly into the starboard side stay and immediately wrapped around its many small bolts and eyes and other hardware. I hopped down from the helm and started trying to disentangle the little cords holding the parasail’s “eyebrow” from the hardware and then realized several were tangled around my thumb. With that, the wind changed and the sail ripped off the stay, shredding as it went and taking the thumb of my glove with it.
Peter and I stared at each other in utter horror as the pieces of our sail flopped into the sea under the boat. Then I looked up and saw that the end of the halyard was snaking slowly across the coachroof, heading for the mast. If it went up and out the top of the mast, we would have to take the mast off to rerig it for any future foresail. I jumped up onto the coach roof and ran to the mast, leaping up to grab the end as it slithered up the mast. I got it and then landed with my ankle crunching underneath me as the boat rolled and my ankle rolled with it.
We spent the next two hours lying on the trampoline and hauling the shreds of our sail up out of the water. I then found a bench in the cockpit while Peter motored the rest of the way to Bonaire. We arrived about 1 am and then couldn’t find a place to anchor. After finally hooking we tried to sleep (I was still in the cockpit since I couldn’t walk any further) but woke again at 4:30 floating out to sea. We managed to anchor again but I was awakened by the marine police at 8 am with the news that there is NO anchoring in Bonaire, we needed to move to a mooring ball immediately, and we would be fined for our infraction.
We should have done our homework – we were definitely in the wrong on anchoring. Reviewing what we’d read about Bonaire on noforeignland we could see that the ban on anchoring was implied, but there was no explicit statement about it. We won’t make that mistake again. In the end we weren’t fined at all – the marine police had said the committee determined the fines on a case by case basis, so I have to believe she was both a hard ass and sympathetic to our plight.
So. A destroyed sail, and used only three days. Devasting. And I couldn’t put an ounce of weight on my ankle, which had ballooned up and throbbed badly. I couldn’t walk, bike, couldn’t even leave the boat. We didn’t have crutches on the boat, so I was confined to the cockpit until we did. I hopped to the sugarscoop with the deck shower when I needed to pee. It was hell.
Peter managed immigration and brought crutches and gelato. A few days later I was able to drop carefully into the dinghy (getting out was less elegant) and go to the hospital for xrays, which confirmed that while not broken, it was a level 3 sprain, implying a torn ligament, and it would be months before I’d be healed. In the end it was weeks, not months, but the trauma of the event lives on. I started making plans to go back to Denver. I was done.
It helped that eventually I was able to get in the water, and being weightless was a joy. It also gave me a chance to see the fabled underwater world Bonaire is known for – right off the boat we saw more diverse fish life than we’d ever seen. Huge angel fish and butterfly fish, squadrons of little squids, parrot fish so big their tails looked like yellow and orange stained glass panes. Several different varieties of tangs, stonefish with evil looking mouths, tarpon hanging out under a nearby boat, huge filefish with their blue irridescent dots, octopus hiding in the shelves of the reef next to the seawall, little wrasses in bright yellow and pink, and countless other beauties. It was like swimming in an aquarium and it became the highlight of my days.
There was a very good reason not to leave right away too, and that was the arrival of Quinn and Troy, who had been planning on being with us here for over a year, and it was their first visit to the boat. We decided to rent a truck for the first couple of days they were here so we could tour the island – another good reason not to leave right away.
We drove around the island the day the kids arrived later in the afternoon, went to the flamingo sanctuary in the national park in the north, then had lunch in a little place that served up very bony iguana soup and a thick goat stew for Peter. (I stuck with pumpkin pancakes and a salad.)
We visited the botanic gardens – a thickly overgrown private garden with esoteric collections on display throughout. We picked up Quinn and Troy later in the afternoon and headed back to the boat for a leisurely swim.
We started the next day with a trip to the Bonaire dog rescue, and narrowly avoided acquiring a boat puppy.
After lunch in town we drove out to the Donkey Rescue. It’s a huge place with acres and acres of land for the ~700 healthy adult donkeys, plus a smaller “senior meadow” and nursery for the rest. We bought a bale of hay at the visitors’ center, threw it in the back of the truck and drove out to make friends.
After a spectacular snorkel and dinner out, I packed to leave the next morning.
And after I left, this happened! Troy had been planning it for months, and while no one was surprised, everyone is thrilled. They are the perfect match.
In the meantime, Laura laid out the welcome mat for me in Denver, and I gratefully settled in to my huge bed in the guestroom and being spoiled by my sister.
Up Next: Holidays in Denver – and Peter’s perilous journey