I take the safety of my crew seriously. If I have to prioritize my objectives for a passage it goes like this: (1) water out; (2) stick up; and (3) crew on board. (Thanks to Fatty Goodlander for distilling it down to these managable instructions.) Whenever my crew hasn’t been to sea for a while or I have a new crew member on board, I am more nervous than usual regarding item #3. “Sea Legs” are a real thing, and you only get them by going to sea. Sea Legs get weaker the longer your crew spends on land. While time in anchorage helps maintain the Sea Legs reasonably well, it is also too easy on the legs. Sea time is the only thing that truly maintains Sea-Leg Strength.
Trustworthy Sea Legs
As we headed into the Bahamas Passage, my Captain and Mate’s sea legs were sorely out of shape. They have not gone to sea at all since May of 2023! To make matters more nerve wracking, we had a First-Timer aboard for this trip. Miss Poppet Peabody. She is a sweet little baby, and I would feel quite sad if I lost her overboard. I expressed my concern to Andrew and he agreed. We decided to install netting around my lifelines to help the situation, but being as how she is a cat, she walked right through that netting to perch herself on the most precarious edge of the toe rail.
“Poppet, the center of the boat is much more safe than the edge.” I would try to tell her. But, she is like a headstrong 10 year old girl right now and this caution only caused her to bound onto the liferail to climb the 1 inch, polished stainless steel (slick!) tubing that makes our bimini shade and solar arch mount. I shook my head and had a moment where I missed Katherine Hepburn quite desperately.
You see, I could trust Katherine Hepburn. From the moment she came aboard she had seasoned sea legs. She immediately understood that she should treat the edge of the boat like a cliff face and that falling off could very well mean death. She climbed things, but carefully. She stayed centerboard, and when we were out at sea - excepting two times when she felt she needed to make a point - she stayed on her sailing shelf just inside the companionway, on a crewmember’s lap, or on her sailing beanbag under the dodger.
Poppet on the other hand...
Cannot be trusted.
The closer we got to departure time, the more ridiculous she got about climbing to my highest, most unstable edges!
I keep thinking she will fall in, and she has twice, but only because the leash Andrew and Leslie are using to try to keep her in control was too short for her antics and pulled her into the water. She has never fallen in due to a failure of her own balance. Ship Cats. Overconfident little devils, aren't they?
Calicos Calm The Sea
The morning of our departure, Andrew took to the bow and offered Neptune his ceremonial share of rum. Andrew doused me, splashed Grin, offered a tipple to Leslie and then to himself. Poppet was not on deck, so the Captain descended below to hunt her out. She had been watching the action through the bow hatch from my forward berth. There, he cornered her. She looked up with an innocent and trusting face as he anointed her with her own splash of rum. “Protect us all as we go, Neptune. Be kind.” Then, the anchorage slid sideways past me as I motored out of the Luperon harbor.
I had an unreasonable hope that Popppet would just stay below. Katherine Hepburn hated the sound of the motor and would immediately go to her “engine-cubby" in the furthest reaches forward to avoid the noise. Poppet, however, doesn't seem to care. Despite the engine she climbed out into the cockpit with designs to roam the deck. Leslie caught the latches on her harness with the clip on the leash and Andrew grabbed her to seat her on his lap. She looked far (far) to comfortable from the get-go.
The waves were jumbly and there wasn't a breath of wind as we put some space between us and the Dominican Republic. We knew we had a light wind passage because it's the only kind of passage the Armanda would approve us to have. (See prior two posts on being locked in.) So, we rumbled along in the waves for a few hours before we could feel the slightest breeze off my starboard stern quarter. As soon as we could, we unfurled my sails and caught the wind. Powering down, we discovered we could carry about 3 knots of boat speed under sail alone. Slow, but fine, especially considering the route we are planning for this sail.
Our ultimate goal is Georgetown, Bahamas. It's the big cruising destination with customs, immigration, and port ontrol available to check us into the country. It is about 3-4 days of sailing away. However, despite the calm wind from the Southeast now, in a little over 48 hours, the wind is scheduled to switch to the North and get a bit fiesty. So our plan is to reach Mayaguana, and shelter in the anchorage without going to shore until the weather blows over. Mayaguana is only really 36 hours away at my normal average pace, but that would place us there at dark and the entrance through the reef is notoriously shallow. So, we plan to sail slow and enter early in the morning once there is light.
A two-day sail in light following winds is a perfect introduction for my sailor's flabby sea legs and Poppet's inaugural sail. By the evening of the first day, the jumbled waves had organized themselves into something more consistent and they were falling from around six feet to closer to three. The water past my hull gurgled kindly rather than roared and the song in my rigging was soft. The sailing was (dare I say…) pleasant! Poppet alternated between cuddling Andrew in the sea berth and joining Leslie in the cockpit to sit at the stern and look at the bubbles pass behind us. This became her favorite spot.
“Calicos calm the sea, Poppet." Leslie said as she kept a protective hand on Poppet's leash. This is a Japanese sailor's superstition that we all quite like to entertain. And at least this passage, it seems to be working.
Poppet stared in wonder at everything. The bubbles behind my hull, the white wing of sail extended out on the pole, Andrew and Leslie wearing their own harness and leashes. Its the first time she saw that! She seemed right at home, unafraid, or as she has been described before: “Totally unfazed.” She was only a little frustrated that Leslie wouldn't let her climb up into the solar arch.
Mayaguana
We arrived at Mayaguana at dawn on the second day. Andrew took to the bow as coral spotter and Leslie took her typical role behind the helm. We followed the Bahama's famous “Magenta Line.” A single purple line that cuts across the Bahama’s charges showing sailors the singular safe path for travel inside reefy shallows. Leslie called out depth readings as Andrew pointed her away from any obstacles he could spot in the water. At one point, I closed my eyes and held my breath to increase my buoyancy juuuuuuust enough to avoid the tickle of the sand bottom on my keel. We anchor near a couple other boats over gorgeous water, but when Andrew dives in to check the anchor he discovers that I have only inches of water below my keel.
We move to a deeper spot and I felt like I can breathe again.
We settle into our post-passage morning, a pot of coffee in the cockpit while everyone enjoys the view. We hear honking across the anchorage and are romanced when a “flamboyance" of neon pink flamingos did a fly-by.
I think Poppet was impressed with the color of the water.
We had a few lovely days to wait here in this anchorage. Andrew and Leslie enjoyed swimming laps around me in clear water over sand and beds of starfish. As the wind came up from the north, we moved to a different spot in the anchorage that seemed to have more protection and less wave fetch. A mile away from any other boats, we had the place all to ourselves. I thought this was a great thing, until...
The Captain Is Not On Board
The morning after the highest winds had dissipated, Andrew wrestles Smirk II from his newly installed holder built of copper pipes covered in plubming hose and attached to my stanchions with hose clamps. (Don't tell a Ship’s engineer he needs a well-designed $2,000 menagerie to hold his paddleboard. It will only inspire him to prove that garbage pulled from my spare parts bilge will do.)
“I think that boat up there is about a mile away upwind. That's my usual workout. I’ll be back in about 40 minutes." He said. An hour and 15 minutes later, Leslie is on a work conference call when I give her a nudge.
“He said he'd be back in 40 minutes. It's been a while. Can you see him anywhere?” Leslie unpeels the binoculars from their bag and starts scanning the anchoarge and the coastline while her conference call continues forward, voices in her ear.
No Andrew in sight.
…to be continued.
