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.

Wednesday morning, we bent our new sails on (the first set were re-made as they were originally cut wrong) while Chad was testing the water-maker and completing various other projects where we had to be in clean water to perform. When we’d finished all the chores, everyone went for a swim in the clear Caribbean sea — the kids testing the ratlines by jumping from them, the following plunge one rope higher than the previous, until Lauren and I cringed and asked them to “take it slow, you don’t have to jump from the platform (about 50 feet) on the first day!” (or ever for that matter…)

On Thursday we woke at 7:00 a.m. (after rolling all night in the now two-meter swell) and cleaned, stowed and prepared the decks for the day’s event. By 9:30 a.m., with butterflies in our stomachs (or at least mine), the moment of truth was upon us. We’d weighed the anchor, raised the sails and slowly sailed in the lee of the island, tacking back and forth a couple of times to get the feel of the boat (and making sure the new rig wasn’t going to come crashing down around our heads). Only after we were marginally convinced nothing was going to break, we headed north on a beam reach for the southern shore of Anguilla (about 6 miles away). The wind, blowing 8 to 10 knots as we headed out of Marigot Bay, built to 10 to 15 knots in the channel, and increased further to 15 to 20 knots in now seven to eight-foot seas on the way back — not the kind of environment I would have chosen for her first day out, but I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised with her performance and apparent strength.

We ran her engine all the way to Anguilla (motor-sailing just in case), but when we dropped the mizzen sail just shy of the southern shore of Anguilla, the engine stalled (motoring straight into the 8 foot seas sloshed the minimal amount of diesel we had in the tank which created air in the fuel line). So we sailed back to Marigot and anchored her under sail at 1:30 p.m. in the bay among dozens of boats whose white-knuckled owners appeared to be every bit concerned of us as we were of them. We then motored (yes, Chad bled the lines and got the engine back on line within minutes of anchoring) back through the drawbridge at 2:30 p.m. that same afternoon (threading breaking waves on each side of the channel’s entrance in the now three-meter swell — a very rare sight). After snuggling ourselves back up to our home in the calm lagoon, stern to, at the boatyard’s seawall, we celebrated with bottles of inexpensive (yet of high quality) French champagne (one of the many benefits of living in Marigot) and dined on Lauren’s traditional Thanksgiving diner.

As if the last few days weren’t fantastically successful enough, the fun had only just begun for Preston and me. The swell that had been building for the last few days had been projected to top out the day following our maiden voyage, and as couldn’t have been better planned for a birthday weekend, the combination of the swell and wind forecasted for the next morning was for a promising session. When Preston and I awoke at sunrise and motored our 14-foot rigid-inflatable dinghy out of the lagoon under the Marigot drawbridge, preceding the 25-minute trip to the north shore of the island, we were blessed with the light offshore winds as predicted. We thought we had butterflies in our stomachs the day before, we could only imagine, with a degree of timidity, how the day might unfold.

As we motored around the last craggy point dividing the Anguilla Channel and the open Atlantic, we could see in the distance a wave that we had only seen work like that once in the last two years — big wrapping, relentless swells marching their way into the bay and breaking ferociously on the reef. We were beat to the spot by a handful of French surfers on short boards who were tearing up the scraps on the inside and one guy way outside on a long board. After we dropped Sara off with the camera equipment (in a cove a half mile away from the break), we anchored the dinghy in 60 feet of water, much deeper and way further outside than we normally did on smaller days.

Preston paddled into the French crowd on his new custom-made Tony Bear short board, while I made my way out to the lone surfer on my 20-year-old eight-footer. The welcoming surfer ended up being a colorful Australian (as if there is such a thing as a stoic Australian surfer) mega-yacht captain for a famous American celebrity/businessman. We shared the choicest sets among the two of us, picking the fourth or fifth wave of the set as to not get caught inside if we didn’t make it. We were both admittedly surfing a bit more reserved than we normally would, mostly because of our respective advanced ages (but me more so because I was out of shape from working on the boat for 2 years and not working on myself. My friend, on the other hand, had a complete gym at his disposal on his client’s mega-yacht), but also because of the reputation of the spot. The memories of being ground into that same reef and its numerous coral heads on a similar-sized day over a year earlier during a hurricane swell (the scrapes down my left side, fire coral in my left arm and back, and the cylindrical pattern of embedded sea urchin spines in my right calf) were still fresh in my mind. I wasn’t going to duplicate that experience for anything, but it wasn’t going to stop me from getting my fill of waves either.

After riding four or five waves successfully (conservatively) each, I got a little careless and foolishly attempted a take-off that was a little later than I’d predicted, and as what usually happens in these circumstances, I got pulled over the falls. The resulting “rinse cycle” broke my leash (as per a premonition I had on the dinghy ride that morning), but luckily the board popped out the back of the wave and I was able to sprint to it, grab it and actually hold onto it while being buried by the next successive waves.

Once back outside, I felt fatigued, yet lucky that my wipe-out wasn’t any worse than it had been, and satisfied with my prior waves and without a leash, I said goodbye to my new Aussie friend and paddled back to the dinghy. As we weighed the anchor, the set of the day filed through the bay. As it cleaned up Preston’s wide-eyed friends on the inside, my buddy caught the largest wave of the day, riding it in big sweeping carves 300 yards to the rocky beach. After he kicked out, we noticed he was paddling back to his tender, so we motored the dinghy to him and threw him a drag line so he wouldn’t have to paddle 500 yards after such a stellar ride. I knew that expression of total elation on his face as it was reflected in the feeling I had in my heart of being blessed with such a great birthday weekend. Happy 47th!

Read the article here.