1980 (14) - Heading North

Night Sail.  Art Quilt by Jean Baardsen

To go to the beginning of this book, Tropic Moon: Memories, click HERE.

It was time to head north again.  I had been a little (??) apprehensive about the sail to Antigua, because it was going to take us two days and nights.  I'd never gotten fond of the long passages.  The trip was, if anything, anticlimactic.  We left Bequia May 6^th, at 8:00 a.m., and were anchored at Sandy Island, Antigua by 10:00 a.m. on May 8th, having covered 220 miles.  Our standard procedure was for Ed and I to alternate watches, two hours on and two hours off.  On a long sail, we made an entry in the log each time we came off watch, usually just noting the time and mileage, with an occasional comment.  The sum total of comments for our 50-hour trip to Antigua read as follows:

St. Lucia Channel

Abeam Pitons

Off St. Lucia

In the middle of nowhere (guess who wrote that one?)

Off Dominica

Becalmed

Ditto

Almost abeam Les Saintes

Abeam Guadeloupe

Passing Montserrat

Abeam Antigua 

The most interesting parts of the day on passage are dawn and dusk.  I got a little nervous as night closed in on us.  I found myself straining to continue to make out the horizon ahead, or the island to starboard, as all subsided into inky darkness.  I would take a deep breath, adjust my mind to the blindness, and tune in to watching for distant lights to indicate the possibility of approaching ships.  I felt I kept a more careful night watch than Ed.  They say that from the time you spot a ship on the horizon, till that ship reaches your boat, would be about fifteen minutes.  Not very long if you have to take evasive action.  My recurring childhood nightmare was of being in the water at night, with a large black hull bearing down on me.  I decided that if that were ever going to happen, it wasn’t going to be on my watch.  (Famous last words…)

Night Sail.  Detail.

The more perceptive readers among you, well aware that Ed could hardly walk, might wonder what the hell we were doing on a 50-hour sail, standing two-hour watches.  The simple fact was that Ed learned to sail laying down.  With a cushion propping up his head, Ed stretched out along one side of the cockpit, and handled the wheel with one hand.  Since he couldn't see the compass from that position, he followed John Masefield's advice and used "a star to steer her by."  Here’s the first stanza from "Sea Fever."  The poem didn't mean much to me when I was a landlubber, but it means quite a bit now.  

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking. 

Dawn breaking on that last day was especially sweet because we had been approaching the south shore of Antigua in the dark.  We could see a smattering of lights along the coast, but as Antigua didn't go in much for lighthouses, there was nothing to indicate the western edge of the island.  But, just in time, dawn first sketched the dim outline of the island, and then filled in the details with mountain peaks, beaches and palm trees - a familiar, and very welcome sight. 

1980 (13) - Bequia Revisited

Postcard - The National Bird of St. Vincent

To go to the beginning of this book, Tropic Moon: Memories, click HERE.

After our three-day stopover in St. Lucia, we bypassed St. Vincent and sailed to the island of Bequia, 55 miles south of St. Lucia.  We left at 7:00 a.m. and arrived in Bequia at 8:00 p.m.  We had anticipated entering the harbor in the dark.  We felt confident doing this because we were familiar with Admiralty Bay from our stop there the previous year, when we’d been heading north with Tony and Joyce.  We anchored Tropic Moon after my unsuccessful attempt at running down a buoy.  Ed had pointed out two lights ahead of us, and told me to aim in that direction.  I incorrectly assumed that both lights were on shore.  After a bit, Ed signaled me to turn a little more to starboard and, when I did, we slipped past the large, lighted buoy that I hadn't realized was there….

In bed that night, I woke up around 1:00 a.m.  A little voice said, "Why don't you go take a look outside?"  It was common practice, if one of us got up during the night, to pop our head out the hatch and take a look around.  I tried snuggling deeper into my pillow but the voice seemed insistent, so I sleepily started out of my bunk.  I was startled to see Ed fly off his bunk, head for the companionway, and dash up on deck.  Our anchor had dragged, and we were quickly drifting out of the harbor.  Tropic Moon had managed to pass three sailboats, without hitting any of them.  We had open water till we either went out to sea, or ended up on the rocky coast we would have had to bypass.  I started the engine, Ed pulled up the anchor, and we motored back into the bay to reset it. 

It was an exceptionally windy night and, as we saw the next morning by the positions of the boats, we weren't the only ones who had dragged.  I thought it rather curious that I had woken with a feeling that something might be wrong.  I asked Ed what signaled him, because he knew before we got on deck that we’d dragged.  He said the sound of the water was different.  It was lapping against the side of the hull, meaning that we were crosswise to the wind, rather than pointing into it - as you do when you're safely anchored.  His antennae were working well that night. 

Bequia, a small island, is the northernmost of the Grenadines, a 50-mile chain of islands belonging to St. Vincent.  Bequia's official flag is the flag of St. Vincent.  The unofficial flag of Bequia (above) features three black waves, which stand for the Bequia Channel, the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean, as well as a black humpback whale, Bequia's main icon.

Bequia was one of the few inhabited Grenadines.  The town of Port Elizabeth in Admiralty Bay was the center of the island's population.  We’d wander down one road, and a couple branch streets, and we'd have covered Port Elizabeth.  The combination Police Station/Post Office also housed Customs and Immigration.  Tourist shops, grocery stores, a church, a bank, and a gas station lined the main street.  I was pleased with the "supermarket" which seemed very well stocked with several items, like peanut butter, that I hadn't been able to buy in the French islands.  

Postcard - Friendship Rose

While at the store, I asked for bread.  I was told the boat wasn’t in yet.  All bread and baked goods came from St. Vincent, five miles north of Bequia.  The food arrived, along with other supplies, six days a week, on a native trading schooner, Friendship Rose.  The bread was usually unloaded around 3:30 p.m.  The mob scene at the store was unreal.  I got caught in it my first day, and was trapped in a crush of about twenty people, all grabbing for the bread.  Taken with the mood of the crowd, I overbought by about three loaves.  Most of it molded before we could eat it.  That didn’t happen again, because I discovered that if I came in at 4:00 p.m., there was still plenty of bread left.

1980 (12) - St. Lucia

The Pitons, St. Lucia - Internet photo.

To go to the beginning of this book, Tropic Moon: Memories, click HERE.

The next morning, with a favorable wind, we again headed for St. Lucia.  Tropic Moon was pointed southwest, with a southeast wind.  We had a beautiful beam reach, doing the 25 miles in 4-1/2 hours.  We sailed to Castries, the capital of St. Lucia.  Our anchorage was outside of town at the St. Lucia Yacht Services in Vigie Cove.  It was a Friday afternoon, so we hurried by taxi into Castries to take care of our business.  When a boat plans to stay at an island less than 72 hours, it can be cleared in and out of customs at the same time. 

Our afternoon in Castries was a good example of what it was like to take Ed anywhere.  By the time we finished at Customs, Ed was already limping.  We went a block down the street to American Express.  Ed plopped in a chair to massage his leg, while I took care of getting more travelers checks.  We then walked a couple blocks to a large department store.  I was picking out Mother’s Day cards; when I looked around, Ed was on the floor.  We moved to the book section, shopping for paperbacks, and did our selecting with Ed scanning the lower shelves from the floor.

The next stop was the supermarket.  I left Ed sitting on the front steps, writing out the Mother’s Day cards, while I did the shopping.  When I came out of the store, I piled the groceries around Ed.  He waited there while I walked to the post office.  I got there just after it closed, but ran into a helpful postal employee.  He told me about a stamp machine in the wall, and explained that 50 cents in local stamps would send a letter, airmail, to the States.  I fed quarters (EC currency) into the stamp machine – and emptied it.  I ended up with only two stamps – enough to mail one card.  The man came up to me, and I told him my problem.  I had two Mother’s Day cards to mail, one to my mother, and one to my mother-in-law, and could only mail one.  Which one should I send?  He threw up his hands, as if indicating this was a problem too difficult even for Solomon.  I opted to mail the card to my mother-in-law.  I explained I was on a sailboat leaving the island.  I asked him if he’d post the other card for me on Monday.  I gave him the card, and the fifty cents.  (Both Moms received their cards.) 

I headed back to Ed, and babysat the groceries, while he hobbled across the street to a hardware store.  A taxi driver had his eye on us.  When Ed came out of the store, we took the taxi back to Vigie Cove.

The motor yacht, Kalizma (Elizabeth Taylor’s old boat), was also anchored in Vigie Cove.  We talked with Sam, the boat’s agent.  We asked about Jonathan, Kalizma’s first mate, whom we’d known in Grenada.  Sam told us that Jonathan had died in a scuba diving accident, at the Pitons, on Easter Sunday.  Altogether, I think we heard three different versions of Jonathan’s death, but it seems he dove with only half a tank of air, and ran out.  He either suffocated, or had a heart attack, or maybe both go together.  As Sam said, the women were all crying - Jonathan was quite the lady’s man.  Jonathan’s body was sent to Trinidad, to be cremated, but then the government in Trinidad refused to release the ashes.  We gathered that the Trinidad folk didn’t like white South Africans, and claimed there was some problem with the passport….  A couple months later, we heard that Sam was still faring, unsuccessfully, in getting Jonathan’s ashes back from Trinidad.

Postcard

The only stop, other than Castries, that we had planned for St. Lucia was a visit to the Pitons.  We sailed there the next day.  The Pitons are a famous tourist attraction.  They’re a pair of impressive mountains, nearly 2700 feet high.  They seem to rise almost vertically when you’re close under them.  The bay, Anse de Piton, is tucked between the two peaks.  The water in the bay is very deep.  The method of anchoring is to go up close to the shore, drop the anchor, and swing the boat around, backing in, to tie a stern line to a palm tree on shore.  Some local kids were earning money by taking stern lines and tying them to palm trees.  We had two helpful young fellows who, when asked, provided their own version of Jonathan’s death.

Normally, Anse de Piton would have been packed with sailboats, anchored side by side.  But, as it was race week up north in Antigua, there were a total of three boats there that night.  Winds howled eerily down the mountain and through the bay.  I was very uncomfortable there.  While standing on deck that night, I felt like someone was looking over my shoulder.  I quickly turned, but only saw the dark mountain looming above me.  Perhaps it was the thought of Jonathan dying there that had me spooked.  I was very glad to leave the next morning.  We took several slides of the Pitons, but none of them came out.  The battery on our light meter also died at the Pitons.  Those were the only pictures from our travels that we lost.