Christmas Winds (this one is a travel log, with extra wind)

When we left Gorda Sound bound for Dominica last month we thought we had a one-day break in the Christmas Winds that would allow us time to get out of the really shallow water of the Anegada Passage before all hell broke loose again. How wrong we were! Two hours after jumping off at Round Rock we were down to 2 reefs and a staysail, hard on the wind in 30 knots of breeze. Calvin was back in delivery mode, charging along at 8.5 knots and 25 degrees of heel, punching through 5 foot waves on top of 10 foot swells. This little boat is pretty remarkable. It doesn't slam waves. Instead it blows them up. The majority of the waves are thrown to the sides. The other 49% explode up the windward side of the bow and arc back into the windshield and cockpit in great sea-green sheets.

We left at 6:00am and by 8:30 we were fully drenched and half the crew was well into the planning stages of seasickness. With 30 hours to go, it occurred to me that we should turn downwind and make a run for St John. Karen, Dani and Matt were fairly stunned that I would suggest turning back. But when they realized that I was not playing out a cruel joke, they happily bore the boat off and we had an awesome ride, surfing back into Sir Francis Drake Channel and then to the shelter of Maho Bay where we hung out until Christmas Day.

I think they call it "The Christmas Winds" because it blows like b-jesus. For nearly every hour of every day for the past 3 weeks it has been blowing 20-30 knots, usually closer to 30, from the east. When it blows this hard, for this long, the winds pick up huge quantities of sea water on their way across the Atlantic. Once desalinated, the water piles up into black bottomed cloud banks that sweep into the island chain at regularly spaced intervals of about 45 minutes in Antigua, up to about 90 minutes in the Virgins. The rain clouds hold the collected moisture until they are directly over Calvin, at which point they let loose their payload, usually accompanied by another 5 knots of breeze.

Our local SSB weather expert clarified the unusually high winds this year by telling us all that "it is related to La Nina". Oh, now I get it. We listen to this guy a few times a week because his British accent reminds us of a Monty Python skit.

We cobbled together a nice Christmas. St John is a wonderful island, thanks primarily to Laurence Rockefeller who essentially bought the place and gave it to us, the US taxpayers. We picked up a free mooring, courtesy of the National Park Service, in Maho Bay in 9 feet of transparent water and stayed there for 5 days. The North coast of St John is one spectacular beach after another, some of them deserted and others developed as camp grounds. All of the bays are bordered with live reefs and there are steep but well maintained hiking trails going back into subtropical forests and often crossing through the ruins of 19th century sugar mills. Needless to say, we could have ditched into a worse location.

We had an intimate Christmas dinner on the beach at Francis Bay with about 40 other cruising boats. It was an event reminiscent of Karen and my wedding; platters of food wilting in the baking sun, no shade, and nowhere for anyone to sit down because one of the overplanners had ordained that all the unsightly dinghies be left 200' down the beach from the party. It was fun though, at least for the adults. After the season's greetings, the conversations revolved around what boat parts were being waited on (big boat owners), how many feet longer we wished our boats were (the rest of us), and the fact that we were standing around wasting what would turn out to be one of two days of light, northerly breeze. As soon as the ice was gone so were we, back to Calvin to pack her up to head south early the next morning.

We pulled out of St John on Boxing Day at 7:00am, this time bound for Bequia. The wind was light, out of the north, due to a stalled low pressure system hovering over Puerto Rico. Since it was the 2nd day of light air the seas had flattened out and we were looking forward to a mellow passage. At 7:30am we tried to raise our friends on "Aquilla" to let them know we were on our way. They were not up that morning, but Mel and Jackie Cohen on "Feisty" were and they called back and asked us to join them in Antigua. We deliberated for about 20 seconds, no one could think of a reason not to go to Antigua instead of Bequia, and we simply punched a 70 degree left turn into the autopilot and took a 150 mile, 9 day detour. Such are the pressures of our current situation.

We had a rare, pleasant crossing of the Anagada Passage. With a 70% moon we made The Narrows, St John to Falmouth Harbor, Antigua in 25 hours of flat water tight reaching, switching from jib and mainsail to motor and mainsail whenever the speed dropped below 7.75 knots. Karen prepared her family's traditional Christmas dinner of fettucini, shrimp and scallops and we ate in the cockpit with the shadow of Saba Island rising out of the dusk ahead of us and Virgin Gorda sinking with the sun behind. During my watch that night I sat up on the high side of the cabin house watching Calvin knife along with everyone sleeping below and the autopilot steering the boat to a waypoint off Cade Reef, and I thought of all the passages I made from St Thomas to Antigua in the past on smaller race boats. Jeff and I took to Antigua Race Week a Pearson 26 and 2 years later a J-29, both with no engine, no battery power and no radio or navigational techniques other than dead reckoning with plasticized nautical placemats. We ate little in the way of food (I remember salt water-logged, green wheat bread on one trip and a 2 gallon container of pre-prepared macaroni and cheese on another) and basically no idea what we were doing. There was a kid named Nick on one trip who brought a sextant, but when it was too overcast to observe any worthwhile angles, he freaked out and started to pray. Jeff had a field day. We always got to where we intended but, as I recall, it took a lot longer, and we never smelled very good.

During her watch Karen stood on the bow and watched dolphins swimming in Calvin's bow wave. The moon was directly overhead and she said the phosphorescence was so pronounced that she could see the dolphin's trails long before they were close enough to the surface to see their bodies. Dani stood the last watch by herself. She sailed past what is left of Montserrat and saw the sun come up before the rest of us eventually crawled out into the daylight.

When we pulled into Falmouth Harbor around noon the Christmas Winds were back and they have not relented since. We stayed in Falmouth Harbor for several days, mostly exploring the beaches and hills, playing pickup basketball games with the local kids and gawking at the megayachts assembled there for the New Year's party. Our old friend Jol Byerly, the Moses Malone of Caribbean Yacht Racing, invited us to participate in their weekly race series so we gave Calvin a workout with a crew our new friends from the Caribbean 1500. At the awards party, Jol stood in front of the gathered participants, waited until he had everyone's complete attention and proceeded to describe his most recent bowel movement, which was not a good one. Local color.

On New Years Eve we had a 3 hour dinner on "Lulu," an Oyster 62 that beats "Calvin" in the lounging space category hands-down. Thirty minutes before the witching hour Dani went into crisis mode and hustled the party of 15 into the dinghys and down to the dockyard for the countdown, fireworks and Jump-up party. The event was orchestrated by a high energy local band that can best be described as a ska-speed metal-steel drum fusion. The song they played immediately following the stroke of midnight had only these lyrics- "I command you to jump" -which the singer repeated more or less nonstop for 45 minutes. Most of us could not obey long enough to reach the end(?) of the song but it was fun trying.

As I sit writing this, the boat is thrashing around on an 8:1 scope anchor line and the wind is howling through our rig. It does tend to get old after a while. We are in Deep Bay, Antigua now, on the northwest corner of the island. We have sailed up the west coast of the island over the last 3 days looking for a harbor with some semblance of shelter from the unrelenting wind but all the harbors in Antigua are lined up, east to west, with the valleys. The mountains are lined up with the hills that form the head lands at the ends of the bays. I remember that we figured this out early in the years we raced here and won a lot of races by simply getting in phase with windshifts that took us in toward the center of the bays and offshore when we were between 2 bays.

Pulling into Deep Bay yesterday we encountered a white squall. We saw it coming and turned the boat onto a broad reach. During the squall visibility was down to about a boat length and the dinghy flipped over several times, flying out behind the boat barely touching the water. We had taken the motor off before we left the previous anchorage but I think it would have been flipping even if the motor was still attached.

Tomorrow, according to the weather guru on the Single Side Band, we should get a brief respite with 20 knot winds for about 2 days and then a return to 30-35. Our plan is to provision and clear customs tomorrow and sail to Guadeloupe, where Karen can employ her mastery of the french language, on Wednesday. It should be an easy 55 mile sail and we are hoping that when we get into the lee of a really tall island, the noise of the Christmas Winds will subside.