Leaving Great Harbour caused me the most apprehension I’d had about leaving an anchorage since St. Martin. I had gone through The Narrows and the Windward Pass (never a good labels to see on a chart), the Pillsbury Sound (I guess the rocks would be soft here) and Current Cut (another ominous sounding name) on a ferry from Road Town, Tortola to St. Thomas to get our visas extended (once again). The ferry ride confirmed my suspicion, the actual conditions were far more worrisome than the charts reflected.

So I spent the departure morning with the owner of one of the restaurants pouring over charts and talking about the most favorable routes. He wasn’t much help when it came to currents and wind directions (the items I was most concerned about); he basically ended up giving me the old worn-out Caribbean nonsense I’ve heard so much of in the last couple of years: “Just head on down this way, through these cays and then you’ll round these rocks here, then you got to squeeze through here, then you’re home free, it’s easy mon, but whatever you do, don’t follow the ferries because they end up on the rocks all the time.” Oh great, how encouraging to hear that pilots who navigate these waters daily “end up on the rocks all the time,” but I scarcely believed it. Thousands of boats navigate these waters every month without incident. We would just have to stay diligent.

After checking out of customs in Great Harbour, which by the way, was to date the worst customs experience we had in the Caribbean, we headed back to the boat to check on the crew and the progress they’d made to ready the boat for the voyage.

We’d weighed anchor by 11:00am, two hours after I had wanted to be off, and headed southwest toward the Windward Passage. The light wind and seas were pleasant, though our progress was slow, and by the time we made it between Lovango Cay and Durloe Cays (the actual Windward Passage) and approached The Brothers (two rocks sticking out in the middle of the Pillsbury Sound – the soft ones, I presumed), the wind backed off to 3 knots and the current was pushing us backward – exactly what I had feared.

As we fired up the engine and motored toward Cabrita Point, the entrance to Current Cut, the wind shifted out of the south-southeast (the Island effect I anticipated), and we shorten the sheets and beat through the narrow channel between the southeast corner of St. Thomas and Great St. James Island.

Just after exiting the cut, and breathing a sigh of relief, we turned west and continued motor sailing downwind to Charlotte Amalie when the transmission failed once again. So we turned of the engine and sailed the remaining way to our anchorage.

Fortuitously, we arrived after the last cruise ship had departed Long Bay so we sailed into the anchorage unmolested while putting more oil into the transmission. We started the engine and ran it just long enough to maneuver around the anchorage, drop the hook and get it set.

He convinced us to make a side trip to Great Harbour, Jost Van Dyke, BVI to talk to his boat-building students while they were all there working during spring break. We both thought it would be great to have his kids talk to my kids about their mutual experiences at being apprentice shipwrights. Unfortunately the timing of our arrival didn’t quite work out (the students had gone back home the day before), but we got to see the project and talk about it with Kevin (go to www.sloopnews.org for more info on this fantastic project).

So the stay on the island ended up being all about relaxing after a month of work and intense activity at Nanny Cay. OK, the non-work activity was mostly partying, but it was still intense. The first order of business upon our arrival was to send the crew ashore for a “search and seizure” mission (finding everything of necessity on the island — dinghy dock, grocery store, laundry, internet, telephones, bank, etc.) But to their dismay, civilization on Jost Van Dyke consists of a few homes, lots of famous bars, a few rooms for rent and one really old church – the perfect place to put your feet up, Caribbean Style.

As a result, most of our days were spent wandering around Great Harbour, chatting up the locals, enjoying the company of new friends (and some old) and fellow travelers, skin diving off Pull And Be Damned Point, getting in some internet time at “the office” (Foxy’s), or lounging at the beach at White Bay.

Next stop, Charlotte Amalia, St. Thomas to provision for Haiti.

We headed out of Nanny Cay Marina after a morning of anxiously re-installing the transmission’s heat exchanger (it blew an o-ring the night before) and testing all the other engine-related systems. As we motored through the narrow inlet bordered by the jetties that were so menacing just weeks before upon our crippled entry, and rounded the southern coast of Tortola in the benevolent ten-knot breeze, I put the most apprehensive crew at the helm, Tracy. I’m not sure why she was so tentative about piloting her home, but I pretty much had to order her to take the wheel, “and smile when you do it!” Besides, the seas were incredibly calm in the western end of the Sir Francis Drake Channel, and I thought it might be a long time since we saw sailing conditions so perfect.

As we approached the western end of Tortola and entered the pass between the Thatch Islands and Soper’s Hole, I took the wheel to weave our way in very light wind (in the lee of the island) north through the narrow pass and all the bottle-necked boat traffic going in every direction. But once we made it through the pass, we were unpleasantly surprised by 15 to 20 knots of northeast wind, the resulting seas and menacing clouds on the horizon. It was like a completely different day; definitely the “island effect” in full force. For the first time on Kai Ohana, we would be beating the rest of the way to Jost Van Dyke.

So I cheated. I fired up the engine, putting it through its first real test since the transmission refit, and we motor-sailed the five miles (about an hour) to our destination. But by the time we got to Great Harbour, she was overheating and we had to drop the anchor quick. As with pretty much every anchorage in the Virgins, the bay was full of boats so we had to anchor further out than any of the others in about thirty feet of water. Because of the northeast wind, the anchorage was surprisingly calm though it seemed very exposed to the Atlantic Ocean – any southeast blow would make the bay untenable at best.

As soon as the engine cooled down, we discovered the overheating problem was caused by an empty antifreeze reservoir because a hose had been reinstalled improperly, which produced a loop or air gap in the system giving the impression there was more fluid in the system than actually existed. The sensitivity, complexity and intricacy of the systems on a boat still amaze and befuddle me. It’s true what Tania Abei told one of the kids in an email: “Your learning curve is going to be steep for quite awhile.” It will be nice once this hill I’ve been peddling up for the last two years starts to level out.