Adventures on Beannacht

It felt like survival out there. Leaving Luperon was really hard. In our last few days there Gaia and Sarabande had arrived in the anchorage, and for a few days the 8 of us, including Tom and Karmen, hung out loads and swapped tales of our various trips since we were together in Turks and Caicos. Doubt about the way forward has been gathering in Kel and my minds since we arrived in Luperon as we worked out how little funds we have left and kicked around ideas for work in the next few months.

To top that off we met Luc and Andresa. Luc is a French catamaran builder who arrived in Luperon 14 years ago on a trimaran he built himself in Brazil. Sadly Andresa moved to France with their two daughters during our first week here, but we would love to spend a season relaxing with Luc.

Suffice to say leaving Luperon was a hard decision, and I think we only actually left because we’re meeting mum and dad in Tobago at the end of June.

Pulling out of the anchorage at 6pm on Monday we both felt there were some ominous signs. Chris Parker, our weather over SSB radio guy, had been struck by lightning on Saturday night and was out of action until Wednesday, so we’d only a 2-day-old forecast to work with from him. Added to that Bruce Van Sant, the author of what has become our favourite sailing reference book ‘The Thornless Path to Passages South’ was out of town on Sunday morning and didn’t do his usual forecast.

It was hard to decide whether it was only the sad feelings about leaving friends, but after the first hour or so both of us were in low spirits and weren’t enjoying the conditions. The winds were scheduled to be 7-13 knots, with 3 to 5 foot seas but already the winds were significantly higher and with an easterly swell to motor into we were only making 5 knots or so.

Aside from making slow speed the first night went as expected. Hugging the Dominican coastline we gained some protection from the night lee and at noon on Tuesday we were pulling into a sheltered anchorage at the eastern tip of the north side of the island where we jumped in for a quick wash and made some food for that evening’s passage. And that’s when things started to break down a little.

When I went forward to drop the anchor I realised that the pin that locks the anchor to the deck fitting had been bent by the force of waves crashing over the bow. I deployed our secondary anchor and then got working on removing the pin. I lashed the anchor to the deck with rope and thought nothing more of it. At about 5pm I was down below making dinner and Kel was at the helm just rounding the cape before we headed south down the eastern coast and crossed the Mona Passage. Kel shouted for me and as I ran up on deck I realised that she’d heard the anchor break lose and that we were in the process of losing 300 ft of chain and a very expensive 45lb anchor in the middle of the ocean.

Fortunately the chain jammed in the locker door about 200ft out and with some quick thinking and two pairs of bruised hands we managed to get a halyard onto it to prevent any more from heading over the edge. We were both amazed by how heavy the anchor and chain were in rough seas, the load increasing dramatically as the bow oscillated with each wave. It was obvious we were not going to pull this in by hand and would need to setup a winching system.

Thinking on the fly we rigged a system where we could tie a line onto the chain at the bow roller, lead it though a block on the toe rail at the shrouds to our largest cockpit winch. With one of us winching and the other tailing we could bring in about 20 feet of chain at a time. It took us over an hour to get the anchor back above the water and on deck. Shattered and emotionally downtrodden we decided we would continue down the coastline in the night lee before heading out to see at first light on Wednesday morning, at this stage we’d motorsailed for over 24 hours and only made about 100 miles.

The winds helped us out through the night and we both felt fairly good about the Mona, a difficult passage that causes problems for boats of all sizes in the wrong conditions. But when we tacked north east to head out to sea the winds died and we realised that we weren’t going to manage to sail across and thus would eat into our limited fuel much earlier in the journey.

It has to be said at this point that my maths really isn’t as strong as I think it is. We’d bought additional diesel cans in DR increasing our capacity to 55 gallons, and knew that our engine uses about a gallon an hour, thus we could motor for 55 hours. Our normal motoring speed is about 6.5 knots, and so we had a tank range of about 360 miles, which for a passage of 370 miles seemed fine. What we hadn’t considered was that (a) our boat speed would be much closer to 4 knots, and (b) whilst the journey was 370 miles in a straight line, the conditions would require us to tack back and forth along the coastline, increasing our distance travelled.

We stopped the engine for 10 minutes at 9am on Wednesday to review the charts and discuss our options. With only 35 gallons of fuel onboard and making about 4 knots we could motor for 140 miles in a straight line, certainly enough to cross the 70 mile Mona, but nowhere near enough to make it to the BVIs, and our intended landfall of Tortola. The sea conditions were perfect for the passage though, and if we turned back to refuel could we guarantee that we would be able to cross tomorrow? We couldn’t, and so opted to press on and decided that should the wind fail to kick in we would contact the US Coastguard and request permission to take on fuel at the other side. By tea time that night we’d made about 70 miles to the north east, and were more than halfway across the Mona.

Through the night we tacked again and were really fighting to sail at any angle with an easterly component, in the early stages only managing about 170º, although during the day this improved to about 140º. At 11am, about 15 miles off the Puerto Rican coast we radioed the Coastguard and requested permission to motor to San Juan for fuel. Thankfully they were sympathetic and we switched on the engine and motored along the coastline the remaining 65 miles.

Again we made much less progress than expected, at despite a projected arrival of 8pm we pulled up to San Juan Bay Marina at 11pm to be met by two US Customs and Border officials.

 

(heading out to sea for St Thomas, but I’ll finish this tomorrow.)