A Sail of Two Idiots (32 page)

The best part about this sail was having clear skies and glittering stars. Hurray! No lightning, no pummeling rain, no gusty winds. Hey—this
was
kind of romantic.

At about 2 a.m. I was watching a bleep on our radar and could see a boat drifting closer to us. Just when I was debating what maneuver I would take to avoid it, the blip suddenly changed course (back to where it had seemed to be heading an hour earlier). Whew! I figured that the boater fell asleep and, when we came within a nanometer of each other, his radar alarm went off, sending him into action. There's another reason a radar is a nice-to-have.

That sail was a nice change of pace. Fluky winds may have added another three hours to our voyage, but that couldn't squelch our excitement to be starting a new day at our first French destination.
Bonjour
! and
Ça va
? St. Martin (or Sint Maarten to the Dutch) is shared by two countries (since the 1640s!): France to the north and the Netherlands to the south. We'd be going to the closest place to check in: Marigot, on the French portion's west coast.

Our first observation was that the customs agents were very informal. Checking in was easy and cheap (as on all the French islands we would visit).

Note: The French did start charging to anchor in Marigot harbor in 2009, but it was still less than in the Dutch anchorages. The Dutch charged for everything, from anchoring in Simpson Harbor, to going through their much wider and deeper Simpson Bay drawbridge, to anchoring on their side of the Simpson Bay Lagoon. Their customs fees were higher too. To save money, anchor on the French side of the island and use their drawbridge (if you have a shallow-draft boat—5 feet or less).

Our second observation was that the harbor had lots of rolling swells due to deteriorating weather conditions. That meant a trip inside Simpson Bay Lagoon through a drawbridge (the Sandy Ground Bridge). Gulp—or, as the French would say—
merde
!

Staring at the bridge, I found it hard to believe that a catamaran could fit through that narrow gap (supposedly 30 feet wide but it didn't look it). I'd also heard that the lagoon was really shallow in spots. Before I could completely freak out about it, though, it was showtime.

First the boats came out of the lagoon, so I drove around in circles waiting … waiting … Despite my fear, I crookedly smiled at Michael and gunned the engines. Never let 'em see you sweat.

I was elated to have another catamaran in front of me to set the pace and line up with.
On y va
! When I wasn't staring concernedly at the mast and the lifted bridge, willing the two not to touch, I was having paranoid delusions about what the people on the road were thinking as we slowly motored past. Most likely they were simply willing us to hurry up so they could get their
café
and baguette, but that's not what
I
heard.

Another first! We were in! With our mast still attached!

There were quite a few boats inside and lots of grass on the lagoon bottom. Apparently they hadn't done any dredging lately. We couldn't find any sandy spots to plop in, so we had to hope our anchor would hold in the grass. Success would depend on how hard the wind blew.

Once set, we dinghied around looking for some friends of friends we were told should be there. Not only did we find them, but after talking awhile it turned out that
they
were the boat that crossed our path during our overnighter and, yes, the person on watch
had
fallen asleep at the wheel and their autohelm had not kept them on course. They were surprised to wake up to see themselves in the cross-hairs of another boat. Our boat. What were the chances?

They and the rest of the crowd we had heard yakking it up on the VHF the other night were going to a parade on the Dutch side of the island and invited us along.
Bien sûr
! Once we all joined up, we were surprised to remeet Mike and Kim from
Child's Play
. Somewhere in a Puerto Rican harbor, we had given Kim a lift when her dinghy engine had gone kaput. How can you not get Disney's “It's a Small World” song stuck in your head? (LESSON 60, Déjà vu.)

When we were in Philipsburg during our bareboat fiasco, there was no boardwalk, only a bunch of rickety old shacks on the shoreline selling stuff. Now, courtesy of 1995's Hurricane Luis and a subsequent beautification project, there were four-street-deep stores and restaurants (made of concrete, not wood) running a mile along the shore. And who put all those huge ship terminals in the bay? Wow!

The parade was small and a bit odd, but worth attending if only to learn how to use the bus system, find a place that sold two beers for $3, and gather tips from others who had been there longer.

The rest of this chapter belongs in the What Broke? section, but because it's what we spent all our time doing, I put it here. We spent the next day farming out various boat parts to the multitude of marine stores that lined the lagoon. There are a lot of boat services there, most of them cheaper than anywhere else in the Caribbean, so it is
the
thing to do when you're there. What left the boat? Our genny for sewing, the starboard-side winch (the deck hardware that helps us trim the genny), the refrigerator compressor, and the leaking compass.

Even though we had just bought a lot of stuff on St. Thomas, and Puerto Rico before that, we still had plenty of new items to buy. One of our alternator's voltage regulators wasn't working again, which led us to worry about overcharging the batteries again. We also had to replace the cracking rope clutches (hardware stoppers that hold a line under tension), and we really needed to replace the corroding stovetop. No rest for the weary. If you don't know what all this stuff is, don't worry—you will.

Remember that storm system I mentioned? Tropical Storm Olga came barreling through in the middle of December, two weeks after the official close of hurricane season. I guess she didn't get the memo. Remember how I mentioned we'd be okay anchored in the grass as long as it wasn't windy? Slip sliding away. …

We actually stayed put as Olga hung around for a couple of days, bringing us winds from 25 to 30 knots. But our luck was not to hold, nor was our boat, and on the third day of Olga's onslaught the boat started dragging while Michael was onshore trying to get some chores done. I had stayed behind just in case. I could get the anchor up under normal circumstances, but we had put our 40-pound kellet on the anchor chain for extra weight. When I tried to detach the thing so I could get the anchor up, I discovered that the kellet's rope had become tangled with the anchor chain.

Both the rope and the chain were taut, so if I had any hope of disengaging the two, I would need to get some pressure off them. So picture me (or whatever you think I look like) gunning the engines, running forward, struggling with the kellet
and anchor and being unable to unsnarl them before overshooting the thing, running back, dethrottling, running back to the bow, realizing I didn't have enough power, running back … You get the picture.

I sat there for two hours running the engines to keep us from grounding until Michael got back and could do his part. Once the anchor came up, it was obvious that, while it
had
been buried (for several days, in fact), the grass roots had finally given way, putting us on the move with a bunch of useless sod on our hook.

After several attempts to re-anchor, we gave up. Although it was still windy, Hurricane Olga was on her way to terrorize Hispaniola, so we decided that it was safe to move back into Marigot harbor. The holding would be better, although there would be rolling swells. Well … swells or holding? It was a toss-up. We chose swells. Of course that meant we had to tackle the drawbridge again.

This time
Jacumba
was in the lead. The drawbridge light turned green and the bridge started to rise, so I headed into the canal. And waited … and waited. Suddenly the current grabbed us and started pulling us forward toward the half-open bridge. Aack! There were boats behind us and the canal was very narrow. About 12 dinghies full of sightseers were lined up like ducks on one side of us, and a catamaran was tied to a dock on the other. Yikes!

There was nowhere to maneuver. Putting the boat in reverse while fighting the current was a losing battle in such a confined space, and our steerage was next to none at such a low speed. We could only hope that the bridge would finish its excruciatingly slow ascent by the time we got there. Open, open, open!

Michael had no idea that I had no control over the boat, so he was
really
surprised when I gunned the engines. He stared at the partly opened bridge, then stared at me, then back at the bridge … What the?! I didn't have time to explain that I needed to get our speed up to get our steerage back and maneuver us away from the looming bridge posts, so I just eyeballed him to have faith in me. The looks on Michael's face and the faces of the observers on the road were classic, and I'll bet mine and the bridge operator's were pretty picture-worthy too. Everybody duck and inhale!

Okay, we're through. Whew!

Once we were anchored
securely
in Marigot, I realized I was waay overtired. I hadn't had a good night's sleep in a while and I was crabby. I was sick of fixing things, spending money, running from storms, worrying about dragging, sitting out weather, and getting abused by weather. There was so much unknown in front of us, which both excited me and exhausted me. Plotting the courses, worrying about uncharted reefs and anchoring conditions … Ugh. I headed to bed.

Once I got some sleep and felt more refreshed, I took solace from the fact that we had replaced, fixed, or upgraded just about everything on the boat. Other than routine maintenance, surely the “big” repairs were behind us. Snort—that thought just made me giggle.

What really reinvigorated me was that, once past Antigua, all the islands would be about three hours apart almost all the way to Grenada. No more night sails. Every three hours we could be in a new country.
Ooh la la
.

Merry Christmas!
Joyeux Noël
! Our second Christmas on the water, and some new friends were visiting. A quick background: You may remember that the previous year Stephen and Estelle ran a charter/sailing school on their Island Spirit,
Siyaya
, in the Bahamas. They invited us on board when their clients were okay with it, and we all learned together. Two of those students were Jen and Chuck, who had been in the market for a boat—specifically, the same make as ours. We had invited them to visit now that we'd been out for a while so they could pick our brains. They took us up on it! Think about it: They had last seen us barely able to sail but now trusted us enough to sail with us. What a confidence booster!

I wonder how they felt their first night on St. Martin when we pretty much flipped the dinghy with them in it. The lesson is coming …

Chuck and Jen were staying in a hotel in Philipsburg their first night. We brought the boat around to that southern harbor (an 18-mile trek and another swelly anchorage) and then dinghied in to visit them. Although we would have liked to just dinghy up to the beach in front of their hotel, the waves were too high to be safe. So we went all the way down to the other side of the boardwalk (probably about a mile), under a very low bridge (we had to duck), tied up, and hopped on land.

We met them in a bar, proceeded to drink way too much, and then decided that it would be a great idea to dinghy them all the way to their hotel as opposed to making them walk back down the boardwalk. The swells would be the same; our judgment was not.

Before Jen and Chuck could get out of the dinghy, a wave roughly assisted us, tossing us and everything we had into the water—the computer (the one we'd been using to check e-mails), our cell phone, camera …

Luckily, St. Martin had “cheap” electronics, and I had just completed a computer backup. Still, what we did was stupid and we were lucky that no one got hurt.
Just about everyone we know has a story like this, and every boater has probably had to replace a dunked phone, camera, and computer at some point (I thought
you
closed that hatch! I thought
you
zipped that zipper!). Back things up and be prepared—it'll happen to you too. Maybe you'll find a more interesting way to ruin your stuff; this one has been done already.