Author: Dena

Patillas kept us interested for far longer than we expected, with green jagged hills and thin beaches, plenty of birds and a little bit of water wildlife. We were into letting the propulsion battery charge and not rushing out to the next port, but mostly? We liked it there. We were a couple-few days in when we realized we were running out of some basics. The town beach was about a half mile east-southeast, but the only convenience store was much closer to the north. It would save us both rowing and walking if we could just… James spied something that looked a lot like a concrete staircase up the hill on the north side and, sure enough, we were able to beach the boat and get up to the two-lane highway that serves the area. Yeah, this is fucking awesome. The walk was not long but it was nerve-wracking as highways without edges tend to be. We picked up some groceries and I (Dena) tried to charm the guy running the place with my Spanish. The shopping was more successful than the charming. A tree ripening a thousand mangoes had let some go in the wind and we picked the least damaged up to bring back to the boat with us. Unfortunately, the convenience store was a real one-stop-shop and had more space dedicated to plumbing parts than pills and James can’t do without his old-man-prazole. We dedicated ourselves a few days later to stretching our legs again, this time heading into Patillas proper for some drug store and supermarket action. It was three and a half miles into the green hills TOTALLY AWESOME SHOPPING COMPLEX and I am so glad that we remembered to bring water. Once we got past the winding coast road to the straightaway that[…]

The day after my last day, it rained. Mostly softly but also with some vigorous downpours. My satisfaction with that situation reminded me that it’s important to decompress after an intense work experience. This job was more like Krohne and Hamilton Marine than like the Three Mile Harbor debacle or the horrifying Windham Falls unethical quagmire. I mostly like the people I worked with and, while I have a heavy dose of judgement about how the bosses handle their business, I’m not rooting for their misery. At the same time, I always wondered whether I would be able to support the catamoron charter industry. This kind of crewed charter, meals included, is so far outside my experience and so opposite from my dearest desires that it seemed likely that I’d pick up a paycheck or two, holding my nose the whole time, and then flounce out with my opinions intact. Instead, I ended up with a group of men (some sooooo young that I couldn’t help blinking with puzzlement at them sometimes) who were up to the task of boarding these shitty boats from pitching dinghies in ridiculous chop and acting as the experts in plumbing, electrical, engines, aircon, rigging, and so much more. It’s hard to be snooty when these guys were coming to me for the float switch and then going back out there, in all kinds of tropical weather, with their strippers and crimpers and butt connectors and all the same things that have kept me and James and Beluga Greyfinger alive and safe for so long. So many of us were liveaboards and not a one was on a catamoron. They’d seen the shoddy construction of these floating palaces and, perhaps I’m wrong but, I think they had higher standards than gaining expansive spaces that become[…]

So we sailed on to St. Thomas, USVI from Martinique and moored up in Redhook Bay. The voyage was one of the most intense sailing experiences of our lives which, as you know, is really saying something. We set off from St. Anne’s Bay shortly after a squall that pulled us along at a good clip all the way to sundown. The wind was fresh off the beam and the seas were kindly till well after sunset. As night set in and we took on the dog-watches we entered the Dominica Channel with all the bright eyed innocents of a couple of kids day sailing in a dinghy in Harness Creek. It didn’t take long to get schooled. The Dominica Channel is 22 nautical miles wide, 7,000 feet deep and carries a 2,000 nautical mile fetch across the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a brutal body of water that on any given day can lay waste to most little boats and of course we had to do it at night. The only things that changed when we entered the channel were the wind velocity, the angle, size and shape of the waves, in other words, every(fucking)thing. The seas were not only angry, they were downright infuriated with screaming banshees in the rig and a 10 foot broadside slap every few seconds in sets of three. This went on for hours, so many hours, before we made the lee of the island of Dominica but we were about 30 nautical miles off the coast of that island so we saw very little reprieve throughout that second day at sea. Even though we had marching storms throughout the day, we never actually got rained on and as we got north and east of the Windward Islands the weather settled into a more traditional Caribbean[…]