THE Picaroons are very, very happy right now.  We are chilling in the morning sun in Boqueron, a huge, calm bay on the western coast of Puerto Rico.  The water has been more or less glassy for the past 24 hours since we arrived, with the exception of a light sea breeze from the west yesterday evening that nicely cooled down the boat.  The climate here reminds us of how hot and muggy Curacao was; the air is clear, crisp and relatively cool, so despite the warm temperature and hot sun, you don’t end up sweating like a pig and filthy at the end of the day.  Philip compared it to the difference between steaming in a sauna and sitting in a cool room with a nice, hot fire.  We even slept with BLANKETS last night — first time in a year!

After a full year of pretty difficult sailing experiences, it was refreshing to spend four days at sea with moderate winds (ranging from 12-15 to 20-25) and seas.  On Monday, we got going at about 9am, but getting up the stern anchor took us a full hour — something we fully expected, as we’d not moved it in four and a half months.  The stern line was entirely coated in barnacles and a stinging, fern-like plant that immediately turned into stinky, brown mush as we pulled the line onto the boat.  We had already decided that it wasn’t worth trying to save the line, as the barnacles had worked their way into the fibers and would weaken it, so we just chopped it off and handed it to Peter of Filia Maris to donate to the windsurfing school to use on their buoys.

We had the double-reefed main up before we left Spanish Water, rounding the corner into the open ocean in 25 knots of wind and some pretty steep NE swells/wind chop.  The 7 miles motorsailing to the southeast, straight into the wind and swell, to the end of Curacao weren’t a lot of fun, and took us four hours of bashing into jarring waves, but thankfully didn’t dispirit us for the days ahead.

After we rounded the eastern tip of the island, we fell off the wind into a starboard tack about 60 degrees off the wind and got Monica, the Monitor wind vane, going on the first try.  We didn’t change this point of sail for most of the next four hundred miles.

After a rough first 24 hours with strong winds (27-30 apparent) and high seas on top of a NE swell, things calmed down by the second day and we spent the next three days talking about how if all of our sailing had been so nice, the past year would have been very different.  It wasn’t pleasant to live on a bouncing 20 degree heel for days on end, particularly with our ballroom cockpit that has no sideways-facing seats and just a big couch on the stern, but we managed by essentially lying flat on our backs on watch, popping up once ever ten minutes to check for ships or other dangers.

It’s a good thing that Monica worked well, because we discovered just as we left Curacao that Otto the autopilot wasn’t working (again — but this time it seems to be an electrical wiring issue, which should be fairly easy to identify and fix).  Otto wasn’t the only casualty of the trip — on the first day we discovered that we’d lost all of our water.  We were close enough to turn back, but because we had tons of gatorade and other bottled drinks, and 5 gallons of fresh water in a jerrycan, as well as 10 days of survival rations in the ditch kit, we decided to keep going.  We thought that perhaps the problem was one we’d encountered before, where on the starboard tack, the water settles into the port tank and the pumps attached to the other tank can’t get to it.  Sadly, though, it looks like we did spring a leak somewhere, so today’s task is to find the problem and repair it.  No big deal…

Once the seas calmed down a bit about halfway through the passage, we were making a very respectable 5 knots or more, and the crushing boredom of the previous few days was alleviated by finally being able to read without hurling.  We sailed until about 10 miles out then fired up the engine to motor into the bay, marveling at the glassy calm once we entered the bay.

Boqueron, the town where we’re anchored, is not a clearance port (you have to check into customs and immigration each time you enter, and sometimes leave, a country).  The guidebooks we have indicated that you were supposed to anchor in Mayaguez, about 15 miles up the coast, but some people just went straight to Boqueron and took the bus to Mayaguez to clear in, a practice that was officially verboten and really frowned upon by a couple of tetchy customs officers, who then required you to sail your boat up to Mayaguez. When we arrived, we were slightly nervous about this scenario, and to boot had no idea how to get a bus to Mayaguez or if it even went to the industrial port area where customs is located.

Luckily — and this is what I LOVE about cruisers — shortly after we arrived and anchored next to another boat flying their yellow quarantine flag (indicating that they also hadn’t cleared in yet), we overheard on the VHF a conversation between that boat and another about clearing in.  Mojo, the boat next to us, had a phone and was planning to call the U.S. customs officials to get information about clearing in.  During the conversation, a third boat that was a few miles out, called “Break,” how you indicate to folks on the VHF that you want to enter their conversation about clearance procedures. Emboldened, I called “Break” and joined in, and — in true cruiser style — John on Mojo welcomed me and took our boat name to add to the list of folks for whom he was collecting information.  Now, here’s the cool part — even though John found out that he could just clear in over the phone because he had a local boater card, he went ahead and made several other calls for those of who thought we needed to go to Mayaguez, informing us that it was fine to stay in Boqueron and even arranging a taxi service to pick us up.  What a guy!

We got the taxi from the dinghy dock with another couple and their young son and were in Mayaguez within a half-hour, where we learned from the Customs officer that we didn’t need to come at all and could have just called in ourselves, because we have the necessary “User Fee Decal,” a ridiculous term for a registration with customs for U.S. boats re-entering U.S. waters. So, if you’re a U.S. boat entering U.S. waters, you should know that you can skip the whole re-entry procedure by getting your user fee decal in advance and just calling customs when you get in.  Awesome!

While up at customs, I asked the officer what the procedures were for checking out; in most countries, you have to clear out of customs and immigration to get your “clearance papers,” which most countries require when you check in.  The officer looked at me strangely, and said, “Um, you just leave.” In the past year of dealing with Caribbean bureaucracy, I’d totally forgotten that the U.S. has no procedures for clearing out – w00t!

It’s odd to be back in the States, but not really back in the States.  The street signs are the same as in the U.S., albeit in Spanish, and we passed tons of familiar fast-food joints and other chain stores.  People seem to be incredibly polite and friendly, with American-style openness overlaying Caribbean warmth. Everyone we met was totally bilingual – which will make it easy to manage, but harder to learn Spanish!

Once back in Boqueron, starving and totally exhausted after only a couple hours of sleep the night before, we grabbed a quick lunch and scoped out the provisioning options, which are miserable.  There are only mini-markets, and no place in town to buy fresh vegetables.  Yetch.  We’re going to have to do a run to Mayaguez by bus or rental car later this week, which isn’t a bad thing, as we need to get a mobile modem and hit the WalMart for some essentials, but it would be nice to be able to grab fresh food right in town.  Besides, a car rental would allow us to explore the area a bit — there’s apparently a national park nearby, a huge dry tropical forest well-known for its 130 species of song birds.

Clearly, we have a lot of adventures to come in Puerto Rico.  We’re both thrilled to be here, especially after a relatively easy passage, and looking forward to the next few months.

Although cruisers’ plans are written in the sand at low tide, we’ve changed our plans and decided that rather than heading west to Colombia and Panama in the fall, we’re going to head north for another season to Puerto Rico, the DR, Bahamas, etc, then make our way back to DC for a year or two to make some more money.

This is a good thing.

We will have been out of DC life for nearly three years at that point, and while the primary purpose of returning for a land sabbatical is to top-up our cruising kitty, which has been hit hard by the many, many, many boat repairs, we’re both missing our friends and family, and I’ve even found myself looking forward to working again on the issues that matter so much to me.  Not to mention the fact that this life is gruelling, and both of us could use a break from the adventure and hard work.

The biggest challenge, however, seems to be finding a place to dock the boat.  Most of the marinas in DC proper don’t allow live-aboards because they are on national park land, and the one that does doesn’t have any space available.  We’re looking at a small marina out by Fort Washington, which also might not have space, so we might end up near Annapolis, which would kind of suck.  Not only would it require a buying car (UGH), but it would mean a long commute and a real lack of proximity to our friends.

In any case, we’re rather looking forward to coming back!

8/17: Important clarification — We are heading back to replenish the cruising kitty, but we aren’t running out of money.  We just want to avoid hitting our savings too hard, and would like a higher standard of living than we have at the moment, and and we really miss our friends and family!!  So no worries, peepsicles!

WE are safe and sound in Curacao after four relatvely painless days, notwithstanding an hourlong beast of a slog upwind and up current when we overshot our last gybe. This place is amazing, an odd mix of desert cliffs and cacti above mangroves.

Today we are resting and cleaning up the boat, and tomorrow we will head into town to check in and provision. More later when we have internet.

ON June 16,2011, Picaroon cast off the dock lines and set sail from Annapolis, MD, headed for Solomons Island.  (She did have some help in the form of two crazy humans and two miserable cats.) We only made it two rivers south to the Rhode that day, diverting because winds on the nose meant we wouldn’t make Solomon’s by nightfall – a story that would become increasingly familiar as we voyaged, but we had finally left on our adventure, albeit over 8 months after we originally planned to leave.

And here we are, one year later, sitting in the cockpit in gorgeous Grenada, enjoying morning coffee, after one of the hardest years, nay, the hardest year, of our lives.  And one of the best years.  All kinds of awesome and horrible, wrapped up in one.

In honor of our one-year anniversary, we’ll be doing a series of posts reflecting on the lessons and laughs, trials, tribulations and triumphs of the past year.  OK, and more prosaic posts, like the other day’s on finances.  So hold on to your seats, loyal blog readers, ‘cause here we go!

Miles traveled:  3,755 NM, or 4,318.25 of your land miles

Number of countries visited:  11 countries – U.S., Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Barts, Nevis, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada.  But only 7 nation-states, as the USVIs are part of the U.S., technically, and the French islands are all part of France, and Bermuda and the BVIs belong to the UK.

Average moving speed: 4.06 knots per hour, or 4.67 of your land miles per hour.  Sad, we know.  Did we mention how often we were beating into 30 knots of wind?

Highest speed: 7.6 knots – hull speed.

Hours spent moving: 924.5, or 38.5 days

Days on which we moved the boat: 93, or 25% of the days since casting off

Longest passage: 9 days (from Bermuda to the BVIs)

Gallons diesel used per month: 20

Gallons water used per day: 8

Blog hits: 23,313 visits by 7,078 people (55,264 page views).

Words written on Pip’s book: 39,502

Articles Heather had accepted for publication: 6

Pairs sunglasses broken or lost:  9

Because of the popularity of our first “what I learned” posts, I thought it might be fun to do a series of posts reflecting on what we’ve learned in this first year out.  Here we go!

Weather forecasts are astoundingly unreliable

We learned this lesson early: setting off for our first offshore coastal hop from the Chesapeake Bay entrance to Cape May, NJ, we were relying on NOAA’s predictions for 10-20 knot winds to keep us moving without too huge a challenge on our first big trip on a new-to-us boat.  Hahahahaha!  Our the very first day, we diverted back into Hampton, VA after struggling with 25 knot winds (we’re old hands at it now!) and ended up dragging anchor in the middle of the night in a 45-knot gale (the first of many on our trip).  Who knows why we trusted NOAA again when they forecasted several days of 15-20 knot winds for the offshore passage, but two days later we were again in a 45-knot gale . . . 20 miles offshore, a rough to learn a new boat, particularly when the rigging decided to undergo its initial creep and loosen the mizzen mast, and the bow platform splintered in the waves.  But it didn’t get much better after we started paying for Chris Parker’s forecasts – while more correct much more of the time than NOAA’s, we still had numerous days on the passages to Bermuda and the BVIs when the winds and waves were significantly stronger than predicted, and from a wholly different direction.  After that, we started reading the weather forecasts with a grain of salt, looking for general trends rather than expecting accurate forecasts.

IF you’re playing the home game, you are probably doing the numbers in your head and thinking “Hm. 250 nautical miles in 5 days. That’s . . . not very fast”. Well, you’d be right. Yes, we left York Town on Monday and arrived in Cape May on Friday, but in our defence, we did hit a couple of snags along the way.

Hampton Flats or The First Gale

We left Chisman Creek on Monday morning expecting a smooth, long reach down the Bay and out into the Atlantic in a nice F4 breeze. By mid-afternoon, however, we were beating hard into Force 6, listening to the NOAA weather station’s soothing robot lady voice tell us that this part of the Bay was experiencing only 5-10 knots. Not believing her, we decided to put into Hampton Flats–a small anchorage next to Fort Monroe, which guards the entrance to Hampton Roads. The anchorage was a little choppy, with about 15 knots coming off the river, and noisy, what with the highway bridge right next to it.

We awoke at midnight to a howling gale. The boat was slamming up and down, sideways on to an angry 3-foot chop. We got on deck quick-sharp, still naked, with that mix of adrenaline and grogginess that is becoming altogether too familiar since we left land, just as the anchor started to drag. The anemometre pegged the wind at 45 knots–Force 9! About a hundred yards behind us was the rock breakwater in front of the fort, and the engine, once we cranked it up, didn’t have the oomph to power forward without risking overheating. HB put a precautionary call in to the US Coast Guard in case things went truly pear-shaped while I rounded up the cats and did other tremendously useful things. After a few minutes of dragging steadily down on the rock wall, the anchor snubber–a length of nylon warp that cushions the boat if it pulls up against the chain–came off. This turned out to be a good thing, because it made us realize we should probably drop a bunch more chain out. This we did, letting out 175’ which held, finally and for the rest of a very sleepless night.

So yeah, that was kind of dramatic. On reflection, we only had 75’ of chain out, which in 20 feet of water plus 6 feet up to the bowsprit is only a 3:1 scope–not nearly enough! No surprise that we dragged once the wind perked up. However, nothing came of it so we can chalk that one down to learning.

The following morning, feeling more than a little tired, we drove out into the Bay, set a course past Thimble Shoal Light for the centre span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridgetunnel. The Chesapeake Bay Bridgetunnel is mostly bridge, but in the centre dips under the water for a 500 yard span to let big boats through. The resultant gap has a fairly strong 2 knot current. We knew this, and had timed our approach to take advantage of the ebb which took our speed over the ground up to over 7 knots and made navigating a little interesting.

Not long thereafter we were in the Atlantic Ocean! Clear green water interrupted by leetle swimming crabbies and pink jellyfish and dolphins. The wind was fair and behind us, the sky was blue, we were making great time and all was well with the world.

The Second Gale

Our first night passage was uneventful. HB took the middle watch, from 0000 to 0400, and reported tracking a couple of thunderstorms to the south, neither of which ever got closer than 20 miles away according to our radar. Night time on a small boat is quite magical; the stars are bright this far from the city lights, even with a three-quarter moon off the stern lighting up the waves. We saw the occasional freighter off in the distance, but otherwise the sea was ours alone.

I was on watch at dawn, which was gentle and beautiful and marred only by the waking of the blackflies, which infested our boat some point off the coast and bit like hot needles. At one point the galley was so overwhelmed by them that we would run through it as quickly as we could, slapping at our ankles.

The following night, at around 0100, the wind started to pick up, reaching about 30 knots (F7) before HB woke me to take down everything except the mizzens’l and heave-to. We’d played around with heaving-to the previous day and never managed to make it work well. Under mizzen alone, the boat would swing between beam-on to the wind and nearly tacking, making for a safe but somewhat uncomfortable motion as we rolled.

We stayed hove-to for the next 12 hours, alternating between huddling on deck and barely sleeping, fitfully, below as the wind rose to Force 9, topping out at about 45 knots. The sea was an awful chop: short 8-foot waves that rolled us 35 degrees from side to side and made even simple tasks extraordinarily difficult. The boat never felt in any danger and we had plenty of sea room (several thousand miles of it, aksh) but we were making about 1.5 knots leeway in exactly the opposite direction we wanted to go.

We were neither of us much seasick, but extreme fatigue made us really stupid: both of us were working on about 3 hours of sleep over the past 72 hours. It was extremely hard to sleep. The motion was vile, during the day the blackflies were sufficiently bad to keep us awake even when totally exhausted. This fatigue made it very hard to think. Minor problems took on much greater proportions, and the whole time we were operating in a sort of thick fearful fog which we only really shook off when forced to confront the problem of the masts falling down . . .

An hour into the second dog watch, HB called me on deck to deal with the help her tighten the mizzens’l, whose luff was sagging. In doing this, I noticed that the base of the mizzenmast was pumping back and forth. This is not a good thing. The chocks which wedge the mast into its hole had come loose during the gale, probably because the rigging wasn’t sufficiently tight. Partly this is the fault of the riggers, who didn’t complete the process of tightening the jibstay when they fixed the bowsprit. However, I can’t entirely blame them, since I had since noticed it was a bit slack but couldn’t actually tighten it because the #%*ing roller furler installation makes it impossible to get a spanner [wrench in American - HB] on it. We managed to get the backstays tensioned and reinstall the chocks, but in the process noticed that the bowsprit platform was breaking and coming off with every pounding wave. This I can cheerfully blame the riggers for, and will do so in writing, because they had neglected to screw it back on! I had to crawl out onto the bowsprit in waves that frequently dunked me up to my waist and lash it down.

That, thankfully, was more or less the last crisis, and very much represented the climax of the whole voyage. The wind started to slack off a little, and although it was another 12 hours before the seas would ease, we were able to raise a jib and start making some way again. We’d lost more than a day of mileage.

We got into Cape May late afternoon yesterday and are just starting to get the boat back to normal.