Mountain in the Sea

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.

Saint Martin (not Sint Maarten)

Saint Martin, or SXM as it's popularly known due to the IATA code of its famous airport, is an island shared by two countries. The northern 60% or so is an overseas collectivity of France, which basically means it's considered part of France and participates in their elections but has a fair amount of autonomy. The southern 40%, named Sint Maarten, is formerly part of the Netherlands Antilles but since 2010 has been a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The difference is transparent to most travelers, who arrive at the big airport on the Dutch side, clear Dutch customs, and then go merrily about their business anywhere on the island with only road signs and a profusion of boulangeries and pâtisseries and gastronomic cafés to indicate one has crossed over to the French side.

For cruisers it is not so simple. When you anchor on the French side you check in with the French, and on the Dutch side you check in with the Dutch. If you move from one side to the other, you must check out and then clear in with the new authority. Once you are anchored and checked in, though, you can freely move between the two sides on land or via dinghy. The main French anchorage of Marigot and the secondary one at Grand Case are both exposed to north swell, while the Dutch anchorages of Simpson Bay and Phillipsburg get a fair amount of wake and wraparound eastern swell. Of course for excellent protection one can anchor inside the famed Simpson Bay Lagoon, with anchorages available on both French and Dutch sides. All other things being equal, superyachts stick almost exclusively to the Dutch side and cruisers tend to gravitate toward the French side, due to the ease of clearing customs and immigration and the almost total lack of fees (or at least the French failure to collect published fees).

Being the cheapskates we are, plus having a dog (who the French don't care about), and myself having fond memories of Marigot from the 2014 Heineken Regatta, we decided to anchor at Marigot and check in on the French side after our crossing of the Anegada Passage on 10-11 January. We anchored on the west end of the large fleet in Marigot Bay, which put us just about abeam the entrance to the lagoon. I dinghied to a floating dock deep in the Marigot side of the lagoon and walked a few blocks to the local Budget Marine, where I was able to clear in by computer terminal via an easy 10-minute process (including learning the French keyboard) and a $2 donation to charity. It's fantastically easy, and is the same process used further down the islands in Guadaloupe and Martinique.

A walk around Marigot revealed that it was hit very hard by Irma and has a long ways to go to recover. Frankly, I didn't recognize it from five years ago. Quite a few buildings are completely destroyed with their grounds overgrown by brush; many others are damaged and have not been repaired; others are being repaired but are currently covered by scaffolding; and even of the buildings that appear to be in decent shape, many are unoccupied, their former businesses shuttered. Even the neat little waterfront promenade and market looks dirty and unkempt whereas it was formerly quite nice. It's pretty sad to see. Local liveaboards and longtime cruisers report that petty crime and dinghy theft is prevalent. I'd been inclined to believe reports of post-Irma crime on SXM were exaggerated, but perhaps not. We certainly kept the dinghy locked up tight at the dinghy dock and at night on our davits.

In the lagoon on both the French and Dutch side, there is quite a lot of destruction evident in wrecked docks, half-sunk boats, and mastless derelicts. There's been an effort to find and mark submerged wrecks with small bouys, so cruisers anchoring in the lagoon don't get tangled up. Many of the wrecks are pretty obvious due to masts and other bits rising out of the water, however. On land, the Dutch side seems to have recovered much more quickly than the French. There are a lot fewer destroyed buildings and most of the pre-Irma marine and tourists businesses seem to be back to their old selves. The Dutch Simpson Bay Lagoon bridge and causeway bridge are both operating normally, though the French lagoon bridge is still out of commission. Interestingly, you only pay for a bridge opening if you check in on the Dutch side. You can go through both bridges, anchor on the French side of the lagoon, check in with the French, and pay nothing more than your $2 donation.

We meant to get over to Grand Case and otherwise check out the island, but ended up spending much of our time chasing down practicalities and stayed anchored in Marigot while dinghying to the Dutch lagoon side. I found a machinist to fabricate a mount for our second alternator when we return to SXM this week (we're in Statia at the moment), and we had a diver put on the free 3-blade prop we got from Howard on S/V Safara. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be a good match for our boat...we're getting a weird harmonic hum at 1400-1800 RPM and rather nasty noise and vibration (cavitation?) above 2000 RPM. We took it to Saba and Statia and have tested it out along the way. There's a pretty big increase in drag when sailing in light air; where we formerly saw 5 knots boat speed when beam reaching in 10 kts of wind, now we get closer to 4 knots speed. We are seeing a lot better speed under power over our 2-blade prop, even in our reduced 1800-2000 rpm window, and it seems to drive the boat through chop a lot better. We've decided to bite the bullet and ordered a 4-blade feathering MaxProp propeller. It's a lot of money ($3850) but combines low drag when sailing with much better speed and driving force under power. I figure as we already spent so much money to install the perfect engine, transmission, and driveshaft, it makes sense to get the best prop we can.

We did find time to climb Fort Louis for a nice view over Marigot Bay, enjoyed coffee and croissants at Marigot's waterfront pâtisserie, gave Piper some fantastic beach playtime, watched jets land over Maho Beach, and found the local cruiser happy hour hangout in Simpson Bay Lagoon, appropriately called Lagoonies. We hung out with S/V Be As You Are several times and helped them fix their roller furling, met their friends on S/V Freed Spirit, and had dinner with a nice young couple (Lara and Rick) and their lovable but rambunctious pup Roger on S/V Mai Tai. So it was a nice and productive four days on St Martin even though the sad condition of Marigot did cast a bit of a pall on things. Then we cleared out via the same quick and easy $2 computer terminal and set sail for a fantastic week in Saba and Statia - I'll save that for the next post. Tomorrow we're sailing back to SXM ahead of a week of high winds and big north swell, but will be checking into the Dutch side and probably going into the lagoon at some point. Besides the practical boat stuff (2nd alternator, MaxProp, engine 50 hour service), we hope to rent some scooters and check out the rest of the island for a day.

Repower is Finished - On with Cruising!

To nobody's surprise at all, the repower took a couple weeks longer than expected. This was mainly due to our decision to replace the old two-piece drive/prop shaft with a single piece, only to discover that it could not be machined in St. Thomas but was instead manufactured and shipped from Ft. Lauderdale. This was happening right around the holidays, which I think interfered a bit, and then shipping (via USPS) was a mess - it actually got returned to Florida, then mailed again to St. Thomas. The result was that we didn't actually get the shaft until just after the New Year. Meanwhile we sat on the dock at $67 a night, which was frustrating. We launched the dinghy and used it to run Piper around the corner to Vessup Beach, which was a nice cruising-like break from the dock. I picked up a 9-day double Rio trip over Christmas (gotta pay for all this shiny new machinery!) while Dawn flew north to be with family. Back on the boat, we worked on miscellaneous projects like servicing our winches and recaulking our teak deck, and then celebrated a nice, fairly low-key New Years Eve in Redhook, staying up until nearly 3am.

The shaft, new engine and transmission went into the boat on Friday, Jan 4th, about as easy as the old one came out although Kevin did have to take a few more things off of the new engine. We were told fairly late that our second alternator's brackets wouldn't work with the new engine, and not wanting to spend more time in St. Thomas to have a new bracket machined, I chose to install a battery switch to allow the 120A alternator that came with the engine charge either the engine or house batteries (and also allow either bank to start the engine). We do want to keep the redundancy of a second alternator, but this setup buys us some time to get the new installation right. Solar and wind are doing a pretty good job of keeping up with our usage, but it would be pretty disconcerting to head out cruising with no other means of charging your house bank.

After the engine was physically in the boat on Jan 4th, I had to head to the airport to fly to Atlanta, where I had my 9-month recurrent training on Saturday and Sunday. Kevin did more of the installation on Saturday but not everything was done, so he finished up Monday morning, at which point I was back. By Monday afternoon we'd started the engine for the first time - a very exciting moment - but it was too late for sea trials, so we did those Tuesday morning. The engine ran very well, but it was obvious we're pretty underpropped with the new engine. I think we were with the old one too, but now it's especially bad. Other Tayana 42 owners with 53-57 hp engines get about 6-6.5 knotsin flat water at 2400 rpm; our old engine gave us 5.5 on a good day; with this one we're getting 4.8. It's only an 18-inch 2-bladed prop with (I'm guessing, there's no stamp) around a 12-14 inch pitch, which is quite small. Kevin advised us we should repitch or get a large prop as soon as possible, and we decided to do so in St. Martin, where the marine facilities and services are considerably more abundant than St. Thomas.

We left the dock at American Yacht Harbor for good at 11am Tuesday with a terribly embarrassing incident, our first ever docking disaster. With a narrow fairway to maneuver in and a brisk crosswind piping up, a miscommunication between Dawn and I plus a misjudgement on my part led me to try to turn out before I had room to clear our rather large neighbor, M/V Tabula Rasa, whose bow was sticking well out into the fairway. We ended up getting blown into her huge anchor, which neatly inserted itself between our forward lower starboard shroud and upper starboard shrouds. The owner and a bystander came running to help, along with two cruisers on small dinghies, and between all of us we were able to extricate the rig from the anchor's clutch and push Windbird clear. We circled back to the T-head to apologize and make sure there wasn't any damage; thankfully both boats escaped without harm (well, we slightly bent one of our stanchions). It was a couple of really tense minutes and could have been a lot worse, and it left us feeling a bit shaken all day, definitely taking away from some of the glorious triumph of escaping Red Hook with a brand new engine.

We motored to Maho Bay, our favorite anchorage on St. John, where we swam with turtles and I gave Windbird's bottom a good scrub with my snuba rig (it was surprisingly clean for 2 months in marinas, so unfortunately the scrub didn't improve our speed much). Piper got in some good beach play time once the beachgoers went home, although the sunset patrol of vicious noseeums cut short his fun. It was a lovely evening with brilliant stars, and it felt so great to be out cruising again.

The next morning we sailed downwind back to Cruz Bay, where the local insurance adjuster, Marty Carlson, had asked to see the boat again. The one thing he hadn't been able to figure out, and something that had bothered me too, was just how the top end of the engine got so full of water when the bilge flooding had only reached the bottom of the rear main seal. A remark from the mechanic who worked on the boat in Puerto Rico gave Marty an idea, which was quickly borne out once he inspected our cooling/exhaust system. Our raw water, after it exits the heat exchanger, goes through a vented loop above the water line before returning to the exhaust elbow. The vented loop drains into the scupper hose. Because I apparently neglected to open the scupper seacocks before we left the boat for the summer, once they filled up with water it backflowed to the vented loop, filled the water muffler (that I had drained), then came up through the exhaust and flooded the top end through one or more open exhaust valves. The boatsitters were still negligent for not bringing the cockpit flooding or bilge flooding to my attention, but my inexplicable failure to ensure the scupper seacocks were open after I exercised them (it was on my checklist, and had been crossed off) was the original disastrous mistake. It remains to be seen how our insurance is going to handle this.

After Marty inspected the boat, we motorsailed around the south side of St. John to Lameshur Bay, our 2nd-most favorite anchorage in St. John. I enjoyed some spectacular snorkeling around the point there, and it was another beautiful night with only one other boat around. The next day, Thursday Feb 10th, we were off the mooring at 11am and headed ESE to St. Martin, 95 miles away. We had a great weather window for motorsailing across the notoriously rough Anegada Passage (which wags call the "Anegada Pukeage"). It was a little slow and choppy at first, but soon the wind went almost directly south and quite light, and the seas settled down and our speed crept up. We crossed in quite a lot of company, for many cruisers had been holed up in the Virgins waiting for the Christmas Winds to break. While we were about 15 miles out, our friends John and Belinda on S/V Be As You Are radioed back that there were several lobster pots in 100 feet of water just after crossing the dropoff while approaching St. Martin. Since I had my usual 4am-7am watch and didn't want to wake Dawn up early, I slowed down and altered course to the south to cross the shelf once there was enough light to see any lobster pots. We got into Marigot Bay at 7:20am Friday and found a nice spot to anchor in 11 feet of crystal clear water over a perfect sand bottom. And that's where we are now.

I'll write more about St. Martin later, but my first impression is that they got really, really hard hit by Irma and they've been a lot slower to recover than Puerto Rico, the USVI, and even the BVI. Marigot is a shell of its former charming self. Quite a few completely wrecked buildings have been left where they lay, the bush quickly overgrowing them. There are still dozens of sunken and half-sunk boats in the lagoons. It's still beautiful here and there's a lot of boat activity, and the marine industries seem to be back up to full speed (largely fueled by all the salvage and repair work, I'd guess). But I'd guess it's going to be several years yet before St. Martin fully recovers from Irma.

We ran into our old pals Howard and Doris from S/V Safara here; they actually hailed us as we were pulling into Marigot. Last year we weathered the blow of the season in Mayaguana with them (and our friends on Sea Otter), and made the short crossing to Provo in their company. They quickly scooted across to the DR and it was several weeks before we saw them once again, in Luperon. After that they scooted down the chain to Grenada, and this season have been working their way back up to St. Martin where they're doing some work on the boat. Yesterday I got on the cruiser's net to inquire about a 3-bladed propeller, and Howard came back to offer a 19" x 13" specimen from his bilge, for free! I'm cleaning it up today and we'll hire a diver to put it on tomorrow, and hopefully it'll be a good match for the engine. If not, we'll have to choose between buying a new fixed-blade prop or springing for a nice MaxProp or VariProp feathering propeller. They're a lot of money and require extra maintenance but have much better power in reverse, have field adjustable pitch, and have far less drag while sailing than a traditional 3-blade prop.

Our other project here is getting a new bracket fabricated for the second alternator. A machinist should be coming to the boat tomorrow, and can hopefully draw up some plans. Then it looks like we'll have good weather to head to Saba and Statia for a week before coming back to St Martin. We'll finish exploring the island, get our practical stuff wrapped up, and I'll fly out for a 4-day trip; then my parents will be flying in and we'll head out with them to St. Barth, (possibly) Montserrat, and Antigua. It's good to be out cruising again!