Conditions preceding departure: Incessant “Christmas Winds” (15 to 25 knots) have been blowing for weeks on end. Been anchored off Explorer Island in the lagoon since Preston has had his wisdom teeth removed on January 22, 2008. The crew is anxious to leave the island, but the Captain is hesitant. Seas have been 5 to 8 feet with a 6 to 7 second intervals (meaning steep square waves) in the Anegada Passage for as long as the wind as been blowing. Favorable weather window forecasted for maybe two days, but I’m not convinced.
We decide to run for Virgin Gorda anyway. On the morning of February 25, 2008, we weighed anchor in the lagoon and followed a number of boats into the channel from Simpson Bay (on the Dutch side of the lagoon) to the Marigot drawbridge for the 8:15 opening. The tide was slightly less than half way out and I was concerned with our 7-foot draft (we’ve only just made it through the channel at high tide). We grounded in the north part of the channel, but accelerated to the point of digging our way through. A 90-foot luxury yacht behind us grounded where we did and missed the bridge opening.
We sat on the hook in Marigot Bay in nearly dead calm all day (something we were very much enjoying) and prepared the boat for the passage. At 9:00pm we were blessed with a final farewell from our Czech friends Martin and Romana, and by 10:00PM, we had the anchor weighed, sails hoisted and were on our way west toward the southern tip of Anguilla.
By 11:00PM, we were traveling at 1-2 knots in 5 to 8 knots of wind and I took to my bunk for some shut-eye. Sara and Alexis had taken turns steering all night (I woke every hour to check on them), and I took the helm just before sunrise (5:00AM). Since we had worked our way out of the lee of St. Martin, they had both grown increasingly sick, and by the time I took the helm, they were ready for bed.
We had just gotten around the southern tip of Anguilla (nine miles in seven hours) when the first squall hit. The wind went from five knots to 20 knots in an instant then calmed to slacked off to 15 to 18 knots thereafter. By 9:00AM, we had picked up a few miles, but we appeared to be on a collision course with a freighter (we were heading west/southwest, they were heading northwest). With one eye on the growing freighter to our south and one eye on a growing squall to our north, I feared the worst, but the 25 knot wind from the approaching squall left me no choice but to veer north west (into the wind to relieve the sails), which allowed the freighter to pass with plenty of room to spare. Forty minutes later, we were back to 15 to 18 knots of wind and skating toward the Virgins.
Against Preston’s advice I decided to drag the dingy behind us, but it was becoming very apparent that I had made a grave error in judgment. The dinghy was really banging around in the swell behind us, and I knew the weather was only going to get worse over the next 24 hours — how long it would take us to get into the lee of Virgin Gorda. But on we sailed in the growing wind and swell and prayed for the best because there would be no way we could have gotten that dinghy on board in those seas, not without tearing something (or many things) up in the process.
Preston came up to keep me company at 9:00AM, but he didn’t look too good. Lauren came up shortly thereafter, and she didn’t look so hot either. I on the other hand felt miraculously well. I have been very prone to seasickness in the past, but I had been spared of it so far. For the next several hours we took turns steering and sleeping in the settee. The wind had built to 18 to 22 knots and I actually thought at the rate we were going, we might make it to Ginger Island Pass by sunset, especially if we used the engine. So we fired her up, picking up a few more knots and watched the chart plotter for an hour.
It was evident that if we made it to the pass by sunset, we wouldn’t have enough time to anchor in front of Spanish Town in twilight so we turned the boat up into the wind and reefed the sails down in 25+ knot gusts dipping the bowsprit every few waves and nearly capsizing the dinghy. I came as close to getting sick here as I did the whole trip.
We shut the engine off and calculated on the chart plotter the downwind tacking strategy we’d have to take to slow us down enough to get us into the pass by sunrise. I was exhausted, though I’d recovered from the reefing experience, and I tried to get some sleep on one of the settee benches while the boat pitched and yawed, waking up every so often to check and re-check my calculations, inspect the rigging (at some point in the chaos, we accidentally jibed which broke the port fore spreader off — it was hanging on by the spreader light wiring and beating the rigging aloft) and look with dread at my still-attached, but badly abused dinghy.
Lauren and Preston took turns at the helm while I dozed, but by sunset, they had both gone under for some sleep in their own bunks. It was lonely at the helm by myself, but there was no time to dwell on it. The seas were tall, very steep and close together — as the bow would come off the back of a swell the stern would immediately lift with the oncoming one. The boat never found a rhythm and had to be constantly corrected for fear of accidentally jibing again. And the dinghy would surf down the oncoming wave, sometimes plowing into the stern of the boat and then jerk on the slacked painter as Kai Ohana would pull away. It was waking a nightmare. By 9:00PM, I had resigned myself to the fact that we would probably be replacing the dinghy in the Virgin Islands.
The wind had relaxed at sunset to 16-18 knots, but after it got dark, it was back up over twenty and didn’t let up until sunrise. By 10:00 I was literally hallucinating. The compass, right in front of my face, with its red glow was starting to take on a life of its own. It looked like a face in my blurred vision and as it bobbed in its fluid, it looked as though the face were trying to say something. Just before I had gotten immersed in a conversation with this newly animated object, Lauren had come up to check on me. “God, I hope you’ve come up to relieve me because this compass is trying to talk to me!” I confessed. “Yeah, I can relieve you,” she replied, “but I don’t want to hear about any faces in the compass.”
I laid on my stomach in the settee on a couple of pillows, gripping the edge of the bench for fear of sliding forward or backward off the bench, and slept in fits and starts, raising up occasionally to look at or discuss the proximity and course of nearby boats. Lauren, bless her soul, took the helm until 2:00AM, which provided me enough rest to get me through the early morning shift with a somewhat clear head. By sunrise, the lights on dark horizon faded into the profile of the islands and the wind had dropped to 8 to 12 knots. We should have shaken out the reefs, but Preston was still down below and I couldn’t bear the thought of pointing back into the wind, slamming the bow into the oncoming swell and un-reefing the sails. So I watched as one boat after another raced into the Ginger Island Pass while we crawled.
Eventually we made it into the Francis Drake Channel and in the lee of Fallen Jerusalem, we motor-sailed north (in the northeast trades) in a “mill pond” toward Spanish Town. As the motion of the boat slowly abated, its hibernating inhabitants started to come to life — first one, then another, and another, crawling out of their cabins rubbing their faces and trying to see through the sleep (and who knows what else) that sealed their eyelids. By 8:00am, we dropped the sails and then the hook in 30 feet of water off Spanish Town, Virgin Gorda.