As much as we loved Trinidad, the time to leave came much more quickly than we wanted it to.
To a cruiser schedules are an anathema. This is something that is hard to convey to the non-cruiser, after all they rarely commit themselves to the land-bound equivalent of a passage at sea – days out of reach of land, moving 24×7 off shore. Most people on land view a full days driving as a long trip, and if you are driving from New York to California you stop for the night. If the weather is bad you can pull off the road and find a hotel or stop for dinner. We don’t have these options when we are out of sight of land.
One big advantage of the cruising lifestyle is you can pick your weather, or at least try to. Back when we were living on land we’d head off someplace for a weekend or a week of vacation. You had to get back Monday for work, or this was the week you took off so you had to deal with it. The result? Sailing in conditions that are less than ideal because you have to get home on Monday or avoid a hurricane that is coming up on your preselected week. Stress, aggravation, and less choice lead to potentially more dangerous sailing conditions – not unlike having to make that drive from Ohio to Maine in a driving snow storm instead of sunny dry conditions.
We cruisers are tied to the weather, and being somewhere to meet someone or something at a specific date can throw a monkey wrench in the works. So we need to leave enough time to make sure we don’t force ourselves to have to sail when we don’t like the weather or think it is dangerous.
For this winter our deadline is self imposed, we are planning to visit the U.S. for the holiday season, and we wanted to get Evenstar through the Panama Canal before we caught our flight out of Panama City on December 17th. Getting through the canal takes some time for the paperwork and we invited some friends down that had always wanted to do a canal passage to join us so we had a target week in mind. Putting some “weather padding” into the schedule, and we wanted to be in Panama before Thanksgiving so in case the weather doesn’t cooperate we would have some wiggle room to still hit our dates. This meant leaving around the end of October to early November.
Trinidad to Panama as the crow flies is a little over 1,000 Nautical Miles (1 NM = 1.15 Statute or ‘Land’ miles). There is the small issue of South America sticking up in the way however. Not only do you not want to smack into South America, but Venezuela has been issues with piracy like behavior and attacks on cruising boats so we were well advised to steer well clear of Venezuelan waters. Roughly halfway along the roughly 1,150 NM route around South America lies the ‘ABC’ islands – Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. These make a nice halfway point and someplace to catch your breath for the crossing from Aruba to Panama.
Because of the location of the continental shelf, ocean currents and prevailing winds the waters between Aruba and Panama can be some of the world’s worst if you catch the weather the wrong way. I’ve talked to circumnavigators that described their most horrible passage in that stretch of water. So the plan is usually to sail to one of the ABCs, usually Aruba, and wait for a good weather window for making the next leg of the trip.
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| Bocas del Dragón |
So with all that in mind we began our preparations to leave. Unfortunately some troubles with our
refrigeration held us up a week before we finally set out on the afternoon of Friday, November 8th. Conditions were gorgeous, with good breeze expected though a little more down wind of what we prefer. We motored across the couple of miles of the Western end of Trinidad towards the Bocas del Dragón (Mouths of the Dragon) where the wind was flat, the gaps between the islands between Trinidad and mainland Venzuela. As we passed out of the Bocas del Dragón we got ready to set the sails as the island was no longer blocking the wind. With the main out we started to trim it then BANG! There was a loud noise and the main sail was flapping in the wind. We quickly saw that we had ripped the clew off of the main sail. This is the corner of the sail that attaches to the end of the boom and is a high stress part of the sail.
What broke was not the sail itself, but rather the hardware in the clew had separated from the sail. Our clew is has a large block (like a pulley) and is attached to the sail by some high strength webbing, stitching, and glue. Our best guess is that while the corner of the sail has good UV protection on it from the sun maybe the threads weren’t so resistant to sunlight and were weakened after a year in the Caribbean sun. Sails are very susceptible to to degradation when left in the sun, I guess the thread is no different. Without a main sail though the sail to Aruba would be slow, and we were not comfortable with our options to get it fixed properly heading someplace we’d never been so we had to return to Trinidad. We furled the sail in (messily without being able to tension the clew) and turned around.
Now we had a problem though, as it was late Friday and we’d already cleared out of the country – in theory we were supposed to be gone within 24 hours of our checkout time. It was late afternoon and we weren’t likely to get back in time to get the sail repaired. As we motored back to Chaguaramas we called ahead to find a sailmaker and reached one that was open Saturday and would take our sail first thing in the morning and fix it that day. When we arrived back in the anchorage there was too much wind to get the sail down so we left it for the early morning.
Getting up not much after the sun on Saturday we wrestled the sail down and off the boat. The main sail weighs more than 100 pounds and is bulky, but Will and I got it to the sail makers. I can not say enough good things about Soca Sails, not only did they fix our sail before noon they also checked the head of the sail and made some repairs – all for a very reasonable price.
This all took some time, and by the time we got back to the boat were were pushing the 24 hours window pretty thin and we still had to get the sail back on. But we did get out that afternoon and tried again. This time the mainsail stayed together, and we were off again. But that’s the next post, where we have dolphins and a Mayday at sea…
