Currently as I type this we are “hove to” about 7 miles North of Jost Van Dke in the waters of the British Virgin Islands. “Heaving To” is a way of parking your sailboat. You back wind the jib, push the main sail a bit up from centerline, preferably you reef them both, then you turn the wheel so the boat would steer upwind if it had any steerage way. Since you don’t, the combination of the wind pushing the bow down and the slight upwind steering from the rudder balances the boat. You move forward very slowly while sort of side slipping through the water and it can be a life saver, in rough weather you can park, sleep, make a hot meal, and so on. In REALLY rough weather you can run a sea anchor out and virtually stop all the boats motion and ride out a nasty blow. But for us now, we’re just burning time.
It is 10:00 at night, and dark as midnight in a coal mine. Slight exaggeration, we can see the lights of St. Thomas, Tortola, Jost Van Dyke, et al but what we can NOT see is anything unlit. Such as certain islands, marks, shoals, and the like.
Yesterday it became fairly obvious to us that we’d have little chance of making it to Tortola before daylight ended. You can look at a chart, look at the winds and waves, look at the instruments and eventually it penetrates your thick skull that no end of heroic efforts is going to coax that extra bit of speed for the next 24 hours to get you there.
The timing was maddening really, we could tell yesterday that if everything broke just right we could skate in by mid afternoon Saturday. Then the wind direction changed, pushing us West of where we needed to go and that whole mid afternoon thing quickly unraveled.
As I mentioned in my last post, we have some fairly strong ideas about entering a harbor (or any constricted navigation area) that we’ve never seen in daylight in times of restricted visibility. A harbor entrance as familiar (to us) and easy as Block Island’s Salt Pond is considerably more daunting in the dark or pea soup fog – and the only time I ever ran aground there was 10:00 in the morning on a bright sunny day! That inlet is narrow, with current and occasional shoals (to be fair that grounding was in the middle of the channel when a shoal built up there…) but we know it. Entering an unknown harbor in the dark? An excellent way to pile your boat up somewhere and get hurt.
Tomorrow morning as we make our approach to the BVI’s at sunrise we’re going to look at this and say “Cake! I can’t believe we huddled off shore this is MILES WIDE with nothing to hit”. But the truth is we’ve been sailing non stop since about 11:30 in the morning on November 9th and it’s been more than a week since anyone has had a full night’s sleep. So really, it’s better to stop, catch our breath and a few ZZZ’s rather than break one of the fundamental rules we operate by just because we are tired and just want to get there already.
So tomorrow we celebrate our arrival, but tonight we rest and bob around someplace called the “Barracuda Banks”. We’ve waited years to get here, we’ve spent the last eight days sailing hard and safe to get here, it would be a shame to rack it all up on a rock because we couldn’t wait for the light!
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At 11/18/2012 02:25 (utc) our position was 18°34.18’N 064°50.66’W
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