My phone recently took a dunking, in about 3" of rainwater in our dinghy. So we may not have many photos for a while, until (and if) I recover photos from the memory.
On Tues Jan 15th, Jacque from Atlantic Divers came to Windbird to install the 19x13 3-bladed prop we'd been gifted by Howard on Safara. Afterward we pulled up anchor and did a quick sea trial, which revealed that there's some significant vibration above 2100 rpm and a strange harmonic hum from 1400 to 1800 rpm. We decided to continue to Saba as planned anyway, at 2000 RPM, which still gave us about 5.5 knots. For a while we were able to pure sail but then the wind died to around 10 knots on the beam. That's usually good for 5 knots of boat speed, but the increased drag of the new prop was so pronounced that we only saw 4 knots, at which point I decided to motorsail in the interest of getting to Saba before customs closed.
From St. Maarten, Saba looks like an enormous rock sticking out of the water 24 miles south. As you approach, this foreboding impression doesn't change much. The tiny redroofed cottages clinging to the sides seem dangerously out of place, like the Far Side cartoon where the airline pilot wonders "What's a mountain goat doing up here in these clouds?" The base of the island is ringed by particularly steep, dry and crumbling 500' cliffs, with the open sea crashing at their bases. The lee anchorage is basically an open roadstead, fairly rolly and choppy even in relatively calm conditions and completely untenable with a big north swell. Most of it is too deep for most yachts to anchor, so the national park has installed (currently) 5 yellow mooring balls between Ladder and Wells Bays. There used to be ten, which doesn't speak highly of their strength in nasty conditions; at 60' of depth and with a dearth of recent free-diving, I didn't have the lung capacity to inspect all of ours. The sole consolation was that if it broke, we'd be blown out to sea rather than dashed on the rocks. Assuming we were on board at the time, that is. That said, we had a pretty good window to visit Saba: 10-15 knots out of the east, small north swell trending northeast. We rolled all four nights we were there, quite uncomfortably for two of them, but that's just the price you pay to take your boat to Saba.
We were tied to our mooring by 4:30pm; we launched the dinghy from our foredeck, lowered our Yamaha Enduro 2-stroke with the outboard crane, and headed to shore. There is only one place that is practical to land the dinghy under most conditions: the small harbor at Fort Bay. This was about a mile and a half from our mooring ball, maybe two miles from the northernmost one. Most of it is in the lee of the island, but once you turn the corner at Tent Bay it can get pretty windy, choppy and wet. The harbor provides excellent protection, though, and there is plenty of space for visiting as well as local dinghies. One thing I noticed immediately: nobody locks their dinghies here. And apparently, not their cars or their front doors either. Crime is very low, a rarity in the Caribbean.
Customs and immigration was still open when we got there at 5pm, and checking in was a fairly simple process though both forms you fill out are somewhat long. They didn't ask about Piper; we were still using the health certificate from Puerto Rico in November, which the BVI had indicated they'd still accept if we'd chosen to stop at the BVI before crossing to St. Martin. There were no customs charges inbound or outbound. Normally after checking in you'd visit the National Park office (also in Fort Bay) to register your yacht and pay fees, but as they were closed I did it the next morning. There are two fees: $3/person/week for the marine park and $1/person/day for the land park. All in all our four night stay came to $14, which I thought super reasonable. Note that the $10 hiking tag is no longer required, it is covered by your $1/day.
There's not a ton at Fort Bay, though a little more than I expected: two dive shops (third is expected to reopen in a few months), customs & immigration, some well-kept restrooms, a bit of light industry, the island's only gas station, and two bar-restaurants. We visited the second of these, a fisherman's bar atop the currently closed Saba Deep dive shop, several times during our stay. It's a really cool place with cheap beer, good food, and a great local atmosphere. They often have extra fresh fish you can buy at a reasonable price, we got 2+ pounds of super good Wahoo for $20 (our own fishing hasn't been very productive lately. Doesn't help my lures are getting fouled by Sargassum seaweed every two minutes).
On Wednesday morning I paid our park fees and the attendant called a taxi for us. Rodney was a very friendly South African who has been living on Saba for 12 years; his Dutch wife runs the Bizzy B bakery & deli up in Windwardside. He didn't have time to give us the full island tour that morning since the ferry was coming in, but that worked out perfect since we wanted to hike Mount Scenery. After showing us around the quaint villages of The Bottom and St. John, Rodney dropped us at the trailhead just as you enter Windwardside. The trail was immaculately kept but steep; it was a good 2-hour slog up 1000-some steps and 1600 vertical feet to the summit. We really lucked out on weather. It was cool and shady during most of our climb, the clouds parted just before we reached the top, we had stupendous views out over the island (and to St Maarten, St Barts, Statia, St Kitts, and Nevis), and then shortly after we left the clouds closed in again and gave us a refreshing mist for the way down. We had Piper off leash for most of the hike and he loved it, probably covering twice the distance and vertical that we did.
Back in Windwardside we had lunch at the Bizzy B and walked through the cute town. What little tourism there is in Saba is largely concentrated in Windwardside, where there are a number of rental cottages. I stopped at the Sea Saba dive shop and signed up for an afternoon dive the following day; they felt that due to my inexperience (10 dives logged) and relative lack of currency (last May) I should just do a single fairly shallow dive and see how things went. It ran $65 plus $10 for equipment rental, $4 for national park fee, and 4% tax. At 3pm Rodney picked us back up and we finished driving around the island. Overall we were quite impressed at how neat and tidy everything is and how friendly the locals are. It's a really cool place. If we were staying longer, there are a ton of hiking trails, which were the only means of transport on the island until the mid-20th century. Everything arrived by ship, was landed during calm periods only at Ladder Bay, was hauled up to The Bottom via a steep set of stairs hacked out of the cliffs, and then hauled overland by porters or donkeys via the trails. Amazing. The Sabans finally took it upon themselves to build "The Road That Couldn't Be Built" between 1938 and 1958. They then carved themselves an airport on the only semi-flat piece of land on the island, which opened in 1963 and currently has the distinction of being the shortest commercial runway in the world at 398 meters. The Fort Bay Harbour followed in 1972, and now Saba has both ferry and airline service connecting it with surrounding islands.
My dive on Thursday was at Tent Bay Reef, on the southwestern corner of the island. I got back into the swing of diving quite easily; it's always felt pretty natural to me. The dive went to a maximum of 65 feet, but most was at 30-40 feet. There was a ridiculous amount and variety of sealife, and visibility was really good. Among other things I saw 6 or 7 blacktip sharks, huge permit almost as big as the sharks, several green turtles, and a couple octopus. The terrain included an interesting wall and a nice swimthrough. I was down for a full hour. When I got back from the dive, Dawn encouraged me to sign up for the following morning's 2-tank dive, noting that if I was going to do much diving anywhere this season, Saba should be it as it is world famous for its excellent diving. So I did, and both of those dives were as good as Tent Bay Reef. The first one of the morning was at a pinnacle known as "Twilight Zone;" it rises to 80' from a surrounding seabed of 250' depth. The fact that we could see the seabed from the top of the pinnacle and even higher gives you a good idea of how awesome the vis was. Again, there was an enormous amount and variety of sealife. Unfortunately I was breathing air (not certified for enriched nitrox, yet) which at 100' depth limited my bottom time to about 20 minutes. The second dive was at "Babylon," and while not quite as spectacular was still a pretty cool dive. After I got back, Dawn and I went snorkeling up on the north end of Wells Bay, and even that was pretty special.
I would have liked to have spent another day in Saba to do more hiking and hanging out in The Bottom, but we wanted to also go see Statia and had a bit of a limited window before weather would force us back to St. Martin. So on Friday afternoon I checked out with customs, that night we hung out with a nice cruising couple on the Valiant 42 S/V Aleta, and the next morning we dropped our mooring to begin the 19 mile motorsail to St. Eustatia.
On Tues Jan 15th, Jacque from Atlantic Divers came to Windbird to install the 19x13 3-bladed prop we'd been gifted by Howard on Safara. Afterward we pulled up anchor and did a quick sea trial, which revealed that there's some significant vibration above 2100 rpm and a strange harmonic hum from 1400 to 1800 rpm. We decided to continue to Saba as planned anyway, at 2000 RPM, which still gave us about 5.5 knots. For a while we were able to pure sail but then the wind died to around 10 knots on the beam. That's usually good for 5 knots of boat speed, but the increased drag of the new prop was so pronounced that we only saw 4 knots, at which point I decided to motorsail in the interest of getting to Saba before customs closed.
From St. Maarten, Saba looks like an enormous rock sticking out of the water 24 miles south. As you approach, this foreboding impression doesn't change much. The tiny redroofed cottages clinging to the sides seem dangerously out of place, like the Far Side cartoon where the airline pilot wonders "What's a mountain goat doing up here in these clouds?" The base of the island is ringed by particularly steep, dry and crumbling 500' cliffs, with the open sea crashing at their bases. The lee anchorage is basically an open roadstead, fairly rolly and choppy even in relatively calm conditions and completely untenable with a big north swell. Most of it is too deep for most yachts to anchor, so the national park has installed (currently) 5 yellow mooring balls between Ladder and Wells Bays. There used to be ten, which doesn't speak highly of their strength in nasty conditions; at 60' of depth and with a dearth of recent free-diving, I didn't have the lung capacity to inspect all of ours. The sole consolation was that if it broke, we'd be blown out to sea rather than dashed on the rocks. Assuming we were on board at the time, that is. That said, we had a pretty good window to visit Saba: 10-15 knots out of the east, small north swell trending northeast. We rolled all four nights we were there, quite uncomfortably for two of them, but that's just the price you pay to take your boat to Saba.
We were tied to our mooring by 4:30pm; we launched the dinghy from our foredeck, lowered our Yamaha Enduro 2-stroke with the outboard crane, and headed to shore. There is only one place that is practical to land the dinghy under most conditions: the small harbor at Fort Bay. This was about a mile and a half from our mooring ball, maybe two miles from the northernmost one. Most of it is in the lee of the island, but once you turn the corner at Tent Bay it can get pretty windy, choppy and wet. The harbor provides excellent protection, though, and there is plenty of space for visiting as well as local dinghies. One thing I noticed immediately: nobody locks their dinghies here. And apparently, not their cars or their front doors either. Crime is very low, a rarity in the Caribbean.
Customs and immigration was still open when we got there at 5pm, and checking in was a fairly simple process though both forms you fill out are somewhat long. They didn't ask about Piper; we were still using the health certificate from Puerto Rico in November, which the BVI had indicated they'd still accept if we'd chosen to stop at the BVI before crossing to St. Martin. There were no customs charges inbound or outbound. Normally after checking in you'd visit the National Park office (also in Fort Bay) to register your yacht and pay fees, but as they were closed I did it the next morning. There are two fees: $3/person/week for the marine park and $1/person/day for the land park. All in all our four night stay came to $14, which I thought super reasonable. Note that the $10 hiking tag is no longer required, it is covered by your $1/day.
There's not a ton at Fort Bay, though a little more than I expected: two dive shops (third is expected to reopen in a few months), customs & immigration, some well-kept restrooms, a bit of light industry, the island's only gas station, and two bar-restaurants. We visited the second of these, a fisherman's bar atop the currently closed Saba Deep dive shop, several times during our stay. It's a really cool place with cheap beer, good food, and a great local atmosphere. They often have extra fresh fish you can buy at a reasonable price, we got 2+ pounds of super good Wahoo for $20 (our own fishing hasn't been very productive lately. Doesn't help my lures are getting fouled by Sargassum seaweed every two minutes).
On Wednesday morning I paid our park fees and the attendant called a taxi for us. Rodney was a very friendly South African who has been living on Saba for 12 years; his Dutch wife runs the Bizzy B bakery & deli up in Windwardside. He didn't have time to give us the full island tour that morning since the ferry was coming in, but that worked out perfect since we wanted to hike Mount Scenery. After showing us around the quaint villages of The Bottom and St. John, Rodney dropped us at the trailhead just as you enter Windwardside. The trail was immaculately kept but steep; it was a good 2-hour slog up 1000-some steps and 1600 vertical feet to the summit. We really lucked out on weather. It was cool and shady during most of our climb, the clouds parted just before we reached the top, we had stupendous views out over the island (and to St Maarten, St Barts, Statia, St Kitts, and Nevis), and then shortly after we left the clouds closed in again and gave us a refreshing mist for the way down. We had Piper off leash for most of the hike and he loved it, probably covering twice the distance and vertical that we did.
Back in Windwardside we had lunch at the Bizzy B and walked through the cute town. What little tourism there is in Saba is largely concentrated in Windwardside, where there are a number of rental cottages. I stopped at the Sea Saba dive shop and signed up for an afternoon dive the following day; they felt that due to my inexperience (10 dives logged) and relative lack of currency (last May) I should just do a single fairly shallow dive and see how things went. It ran $65 plus $10 for equipment rental, $4 for national park fee, and 4% tax. At 3pm Rodney picked us back up and we finished driving around the island. Overall we were quite impressed at how neat and tidy everything is and how friendly the locals are. It's a really cool place. If we were staying longer, there are a ton of hiking trails, which were the only means of transport on the island until the mid-20th century. Everything arrived by ship, was landed during calm periods only at Ladder Bay, was hauled up to The Bottom via a steep set of stairs hacked out of the cliffs, and then hauled overland by porters or donkeys via the trails. Amazing. The Sabans finally took it upon themselves to build "The Road That Couldn't Be Built" between 1938 and 1958. They then carved themselves an airport on the only semi-flat piece of land on the island, which opened in 1963 and currently has the distinction of being the shortest commercial runway in the world at 398 meters. The Fort Bay Harbour followed in 1972, and now Saba has both ferry and airline service connecting it with surrounding islands.
My dive on Thursday was at Tent Bay Reef, on the southwestern corner of the island. I got back into the swing of diving quite easily; it's always felt pretty natural to me. The dive went to a maximum of 65 feet, but most was at 30-40 feet. There was a ridiculous amount and variety of sealife, and visibility was really good. Among other things I saw 6 or 7 blacktip sharks, huge permit almost as big as the sharks, several green turtles, and a couple octopus. The terrain included an interesting wall and a nice swimthrough. I was down for a full hour. When I got back from the dive, Dawn encouraged me to sign up for the following morning's 2-tank dive, noting that if I was going to do much diving anywhere this season, Saba should be it as it is world famous for its excellent diving. So I did, and both of those dives were as good as Tent Bay Reef. The first one of the morning was at a pinnacle known as "Twilight Zone;" it rises to 80' from a surrounding seabed of 250' depth. The fact that we could see the seabed from the top of the pinnacle and even higher gives you a good idea of how awesome the vis was. Again, there was an enormous amount and variety of sealife. Unfortunately I was breathing air (not certified for enriched nitrox, yet) which at 100' depth limited my bottom time to about 20 minutes. The second dive was at "Babylon," and while not quite as spectacular was still a pretty cool dive. After I got back, Dawn and I went snorkeling up on the north end of Wells Bay, and even that was pretty special.
I would have liked to have spent another day in Saba to do more hiking and hanging out in The Bottom, but we wanted to also go see Statia and had a bit of a limited window before weather would force us back to St. Martin. So on Friday afternoon I checked out with customs, that night we hung out with a nice cruising couple on the Valiant 42 S/V Aleta, and the next morning we dropped our mooring to begin the 19 mile motorsail to St. Eustatia.
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