Saturday, April 25, 2015

Some people have a dog or a cat that live on board with them, some might even have certain types of fish. My family, on the other hand have a pet chicken. How's that for eccentric? We found a chick about to be eaten by a (black) cat. After searching for it's mother and coming up with nothing, we took him (or her) home. The next day was the same, so the decision was made that we would keep him (or her). Jabez and I decided it was a boy and christened him Chico (which in Spanish means little annoying boy....   Actually I made up the annoying part) He's about 3 inches tall and he's yellow w/ black stripes on his back. He is also utterly adorable.
                               The chicken is the one in the middle, that's not wearing a striped t-shirt.


Baby Chico


And now the air is filled with incessant cheeping. He may be very cute to look at but behind the warm and fuzzy exterior, a  little devil lurks. ( I meant that in a good way Chico, stop biting my feet!)




By Anneleize Strauss
25 February, 2015

14 degrees, 48 minutes North
24 degrees,  48 minutes West

First entry in the log book, leaving Ilha Brava in the Cabo Verdes islands, heading for St Martin in the Caribbean, a distance of 2,210 miles on the open ocean.

From the Captain :
3 times, that‘s how many times we got pooped in this one passage. 5 times, the number we have been pooped in 13 years.
Pooped meaning that a wave comes, jumps over the stern or the poop, over the boat, enters the cockpit and comes down the hatch and supplies you with a wet bed, a temporary indoor swimming pool, and then the interior of the boat with sheets hanging to dry, sheets crusted with salt water. Needless to say we do not have enough fresh water to wash sheets while on passage. So after the second linen change the boat looked like an alley way in an old Hong Kong movie.
3 is the number of fish we caught, with 2 being the number we actually landed and 1 being the number of the one that got away.


 mahi mahi mid ocean

We left on a morning with a stiff breeze, created by the capillary action of Ilha Brava. Within 20 minutes of our friends, ‘Fun en Bouille’. With the wind from Brava, we were in 30 knots of wind within 10 minutes after leaving the anchorage.  But the idea of sitting for another stint of reinforced trades, the siroccos, was not appetizing. With the williwaw’s pushing the boat from side to side, winds blowing from a 180 degree range at gale force and then be gone, just enough to break an anchor loose.
We set our sights on the Caribbean.
Sailing next to our friend’s yacht, it was nice to see the family on board, with their baby in hand and their dog on deck, standing, barking at us. Though we would only stay in this position for a few hours, and by early evening, even their navigation lights were far behind us.

our pals sliding off waves

The wind and the unusual action of the sea didn’t dissipate much. We mostly sailed across the Atlantic with winds in the 20 to 35 knot range, constant.
The only time the wind dropped to less than that was 5 days out from St. Martin, when the barometer dropped 5 points, too rapidly, and then steadily raised up. The thunderheads started building big looming anvils on the horizon, which would blow up the tops like they do in the Midwest in the summer, sucking moisture, and by early evening start accelerating in speed, which, a pure nature lover might say, ‘a beautiful array of lightening was to be had’, though as a sailor we pronounce that same term as , ‘ouch, here it comes.’
Days rolled into days, with a steady pattern. Each person being woken up for their individual watch, finally the dream has come full circle: where we have these two totally capable crew members, called Anneleize  and Jabez.

They are able to stand a watch, make a meal in the kitchen (galley) and generally entertain themselves and sometimes us, while life goes by in 6 hour increments.

 Lines and lines of Sargasso on the ocean, getting tangled in the fishing lines/

Something new for us on this crossing were floating beds of sea grapes.  For more than 1000 miles most probably the biggest aquarium in the tropical  region, that usually seems nearly devoid of life. There were gardens upon gardens, lines upon lines of these bunches of golden sea grapes. Never were there 20 minutes that didn’t go by that you weren’t sailing in between or through a patch of this sea grass.
At one point we startled a shark, fast asleep, nestled in a patch of this sea grapes. When we saw him, our boat was within 2 meters of where he was sleeping. That was a first for us.

At times the boat would start vibrating and shuddering, like an old bicycle with a skew tire, when you pick up just a little too much speed. It turns out that the sea grapes would accumulate around the propeller in such a huge cluster that it would form disturbance around the rudder drag, which caused this wobble in the boat. Only by swinging the propeller, turning the shaft inside the boat, were we able to release the sea grape clusters. Strange how something that they make women’s perfume products with can be such a nuisance while we sail. But quite unusual to look at, in the sunlight the leaves shine yellow, which is quite a contrast with the deep blue ocean , these lines and patches of gold.


 the mighty flying fish looks like a B 52 bomber ready for take off!

We had thousands of flying fish taking off daily, we spotted whales or sometimes just their spouting, and dolphins coming to play with the bow of the boat.




dolphins, hard to capture in a photo.





moving through day and night

One thing we did notice, we did not have one clear sky sunset. The western horizon was always covered with a slight bank of clouds, and the first thousand miles the haze in the air that was caused by an easterly wind, like the sirocco or williwaw, blowing the Sahara sand, which covered the sun many days, and left a thick mud cake on the rigging, the sails and the lines .

When I was first told that the reason why there are surf-able sand dunes in Colorado, in the Rockies, and the sand originates from the Sahara, more than 4,000miles away, I though it a little bit of wishful thinking.



But I have seen the sand dunes in Colorado , pure white, and I’ve also been in a Sahara sand wind storm 1,300 miles off the African coast, that you can barely see the disk of the sun. Interesting, this little Mother Nature of ours.

Anneleize as we approach St Martin on our 15th day

For one thing we were fed exceedingly well on the trip. And one of the delicacies that we had aboard was a leg of Serrano ham, a type of prosciutto,  from Iberia, Spain. A swinging pendulum from where it hangs next to the mast, an ever shrinking pendulum .
What were the high points?
Getting out of fleece.
Catching dorado for the first time in years.
 Seeing how our children do understand and have benefitted from being around a life where a lot of responsibility, including a responsibility of safekeeping their parents, in the middle of the night, have blossomed.

After 14 days at sea and 14 nights, there was not a single uninterrupted smile when ‘land ahoy’ was uttered.  We glided around the NE of St. Martin, rolled into Marigot bay, and I wasn’t sure whether the champagne was opened first or whether we were in the water first, once the anchor was in the sand.

When that same day someone noticed there was a strong wind warning out for the last few days, only then did we realize that maybe that was the reason we didn’t see a single sailboat out when we did our last few hundred mile approach  to our landfall in the Caribbean.
The joke is what’s the difference between a surfboard and a sailboat? On this trip, maybe only that we had a refrigerator on our surfboard.

That was from our Captain.

Driving North

Since bad weather and sickness made us miss Torres del Paine, this was the next best thing for me. The colony of Rock-hopper pen...