The Last Boat Trip

I’ll take a little break from the building action to mourn our boat.  As I write this in February 2018 we’ve just wrapped up the finances from the sinking of “Cata Rose” in St Martin during Hurricane Irma.  As we were swapping documents with the insurance company it brought to mind our last trip on her, which was just prior to starting construction on the foundation of the house.  “Cata Rose” was our second charter boat.  We bought her at a good discount during the 2008 financial crisis.  Sunsail, a big boat charter company, was having trouble selling boats that year because buyers were scared off by the crisis.  We ended up with pretty much an even swap of our old charter boat “Caitlin” for the new boat.  One fortunate thing was that we were able to buy both boats during crisis/recessionary times (Caitlin very shortly after 9/11).  As a result both boats in the end actually ended up making a little money during the times we had them.

We had almost a month of vacation.  We needed to camp on the land again to do some final surveying and have some Island time.  We also needed to visit the boat since we had moved it to a new charter company and wanted to see how they were taking care of her.  The new company, St Martin Yacht Charters, was in St Martin.  The plan was to camp for a week, take the short hop to St Martin and use the boat for 10 days, then back to the land for the final week or so.  St Thomas and St Martin are only about 80 miles apart, so rather than fly back to Atlanta from St Thomas to get to St Martin we planned on going directly from St Thomas.  I mean, it’s only 80 miles, how much can it cost?

Turns out, a lot!  In the end we figured it out, but about $250 round trip ticket and a hotel stay in San Juan was required.  Arriving in St Martin we loved the location of the boat right in downtown Marigot, the capital of the French side of the island.  Great restaurants and shopping were just off the dock.  We were tempted to just leave the boat parked at it’s slip and blow off the whole sailing thing, which in hindsight might have been a good idea.

The guy managing the boat at the time was Thierry.  French of course, and a hard core sailing man in his 40s.  He’d done all sorts of crazy sailing stuff and still actually liked trying to get the most out of the wind at all times.  By this time in our sailing career we were mainly interested in getting to where the rum was, and if it meant going upwind then the motor came on.  Thierry on the other hand still did all that bothersome “tacking” stuff, which is a sailing maneuver where you spend three times as much time going upwind versus the more sensible thing which is burning diesel.  Thierry asked us what our plans were.  Up till then, the plan was no plan, just sort of wander around a few miles a day and drink and eat a lot.  Thierry, being the St Paul of adventure sailing, soon talked us into going to St Bart’s and St Kitts.  St Bart’s is about 15 miles from St Martin, and St Kitts about 30 miles past that.  Easy Peasy! We had done the same trip about 10 years before, but that was on a borrowed (and much bigger) boat.  So with the holy fire of Thierry’s sailing evangelism in our foolish heads, we set off for ADVENTURE!

After the mandatory stop in Grand Case (a small village with about 30 wonderful restaurants along the main street), we proceeded to blitz in full speed mode down to St Kitts.  St Bart’s was a whistle stop, although on the way Buttercup began to notice the difference in the ride of a 32 foot boat versus a 45 foot boat.  It wasn’t that bad, 6-8 foot waves and about 20 knots of wind.  We were going upwind within about 40 degrees of where the wind was blowing from, which on a sailboat means it seems a lot bumpier than when you are going downwind.  A little solid green water was coming occasionally over the bow and drenching us, which just means you need to put more sail up and go faster.  I tried to explain this to Buttercup, but she wasn’t buying it.  Spent the night in St Bart’s, then blasted off early for St Kitts.  The waves were a little bigger and the wind a little stronger.  Princess put on her life jacket and started holding on to things.  I told her since we were getting all the upwind work done going to St Kitts, coming back downwind was going to be a skate in the park.  She still wasn’t buying it.  She did buy it about 6 hours later as we rounded the Western tip of St Kitts and hit smoother water.

As we cleared customs in the main town of Basseterre I started counting the days we had left before the boat would be back.  Thinking I must have miscounted, I counted again.  Unfortunately that didn’t change the result that we needed to start back in 3 days.  We should have planned better.  Oh well, we headed off toward the prettier Eastern side of the Island.  Getting there, a lot had changed since we had been there last ten years before.  A huge docking facility for mega yachts was under construction, along with an accompanying high end resort development.  Things were looking up for the Island.  We decided to head for a very nice beach bar in front of the boat.  Arriving there we ordered a couple of pina coladas for $25 each.  Don’t panic!  Here in St Kitts they use Eastern Caribbean dollars ($) with the exchange rate being at the time $7 EC to $1 US.  As we were hanging out around the bar we noticed that everyone except for us were pretty people and that there were lots of ice buckets with champagne being served.  A group of supermodel looking girls took an interest to us.  Buttercup really enjoyed telling them her story of our death defying ocean crossing as she wiped the storm deposited salty crust off her brow.  I went to go pay the bill and threw down my $50 EC plus a tip.  The bartender then informed me that the prices were in US dollars.  No problem, no wonder everyone there was so pretty!  Later I found out that the place is rated number 8 in the world for beach restaurants.

Back on the boat, time to kick back for a couple of days and actually have fun for once.  Cranked the motor to charge the batteries.  What’s that noise?  An alarm!  The motor had started to get hot.  The problem was apparent when I opened the hatch and saw that the raw water cooling pump belt had broken.  Diesels on sailboats have two cooling pumps, one for saltwater that runs to a heat exchanger to cool the engine’s fresh cooling water, another to run the fresh cooling water through the engine.  No problem!  After looking for an hour for the spare belt, big problem!  Without the belt we couldn’t run the engine for more than a few minutes without overheating it, so that meant no battery charging.

For the next two days we explored St Kitts by taxi.  We enjoyed the sights of the parts counter at every auto parts store on the island.  No where could we find a belt that would even come close to replacing the fairly small raw water pump belt.  We tried to call Thierry on the French cellphone he had given us, but of course it didn’t work in St Kitts.  The boat needed to be back in St Martin in three days as it had a charter booked that started the day after.  So I made the command decision that since it was a sailboat, we didn’t really need the engine all that much anyway.  We had conserved the battery power so we had plenty to run the GPS and a few lights.

As we blasted off after clearing out customs at Basseterre, it was later than I would have liked.  We had wasted a couple of more hours on the futile cooling pump belt search.  We had found an “Emergency Belt” and put it on.  With the engine slightly above idle, it lasted almost 5 minutes. No worries, I told Princess.  Remember, this is the downwind leg and it was going to be easy.  For the first few hours, it was.  Then just as it began to get dark about halfway to St Bart’s the wind shifted 50 degrees.  The waves also decided to get in the act and get higher too.  So here we are, bouncing around upwind with green water over the bow again.  And now with no sun, it was cold!  Buttercup put her lifejacket back on and for good measure tied herself to the boat.  I spent most of my time cursing the fact that I couldn’t use the autopilot because we had to conserve electrical power.  The GPS was working though, and we were making a good 7 knots.  The clouds began to show up as well, and since there was no moon it was soon darker than a coal mine.  I was aiming for a bay on the South side of St Bart’s since if we went into the main harbor we wouldn’t be able to sail out the next day if the wind held the same direction.  This bay is a nature preserve.  For some reason just as we got within a couple of miles of it the caretaker decided to turn off the only light on that beach.  The other problem was that there is a big rock/little island in the mouth of the bay.  With both nature’s and the electric beach lights off I decided the prudent thing would be to find the big rock first just to be sure of our position.  The GPS map feature isn’t always accurate so I didn’t want to trust it entirely.  The bad thing was that we were still rocketing along at 7 knots (that’s fast in a sailboat!) so I finally got scared enough to take down some sail and slow to 3 knots.  Buttercup was pleased by this action.  Slowly crawling around within a half mile we strained to find the rock.  The GPS wasn’t helping the night vision much with it’s lighted display.  Finally as we got within 100 yards of the rock we did find it, fortunately not with the keel.  As I suspected, it wasn’t exactly where the GPS thought it was.  Great, now that we knew where the rock lied, we could do that pilot shit and make a compass course and stuff.  So we did, and when I thought we were there I started the engine long enough for Princess to get the anchor down.  As we settled in for the night it got stormier, so I got up a couple of times during the night to check if we were staying in position.  It was kind of pointless though, it was really dark!  In the beautiful morning that followed we woke up to see that I had put the boat in the same spot I would have if I could have seen anything.  After our Mutual Admiration party we set sail for St Martin.

Arriving in Grand Case a few hours later we gave Thierry a call to get the update on when the mechanic would show up to fix the belt.  Thierry and the mechanic were AWOL.  Turns out it was the day after Bastille day so everyone was a little under the weather.  Thierry’s Girl Friday Agnes was on the case though, and brought me the part.  One thing I always enjoy on these trips is mechanikking in paradise, so I changed the belt myself.  The next day we motored the short distance to the charter base, just because we could!  We were done with sailing for a while.

Over the next year or so we were just too busy working on the house to make it back over and use “Cata Rose”.  As Hurricane Irma approached St Martin in September 2017 the charter company moved her from her outside location to the inside lagoon, Simpson Bay.  That night she sunk along with a whole lot of other boats.  A month later I got a call confirming she had sunk.  We were sad of course, but the insurance money will go a long way toward finishing the house faster.