Week 47: Sint Maarten to St. Kitts (65nm)

Rig repair completed, we headed off to St Kitts (with an unplanned Statia diversion), where we found one of our new favourite bays. With sleep the #1 priority, we hunkered down there for a few days before heading up to Basseterre to meet up with Mark and Jackie Ragland, who are long term friends of the Austs ever since Mark coached Laura at high school volleyball.

Captain’s Log

24 Mar: A fairly quiet day as we discovered that not much happens in Sint Maarten on a Sunday. Laura managed to used up the last of the fish in her Thai curry and we caught up with a bit of preventative maintenance on the steering system.

25 Mar: Despite the work on the boat being finished, the FKG guys were happy for us to stay on their dock until the bridge opened for us to leave the lagoon towards the end of the day. So we headed out to the nearby boat shops and picked up some super strong rope (in case another wire failed), some electrical switches (for some minor upgrades to the VHF & stereo) and a BBQ (because grilling is good). We then headed back out to Simpson Bay and got everything ready for our passage to St Kitts, before enduring another rolly and disrupted night.

26 Mar: We set off before 7am since we had a 55nm upwind sail ahead of us and put out a sail plan for what would be one of our tougher sails this year – 20 knots of wind and 2m waves. Serenity was chugging along reasonably well, but we were struggling to get the steering balanced (reason still TBD), which meant we weren’t able to make quite as much ground as we hoped. We therefore diverted to our backup plan of Statia, where we hoisted the Q(uarantine) flag and spent a quiet night aboard before continuing the sail to St Kitts the next day.

27 Mar: Another somewhat exposed anchorage meant another very rolly, sleepless night so we were both struggling to be our happiest selves today. We set off to St Kitts and discovered the wind had become light and variable, which made sailing into the 2m waves a far too taxing a proposition given our mental state. So, we decided to motor the remaining 20nm, and once Laura had got us checked in we scooted over to the ‘most protected anchorage’ in St Kitts and got a very welcome quiet bay to recover in.

28 Mar: What a difference some uninterrupted sleep makes…and the setting of this bay with unbroken views over the ocean sunset to the west also helped to revitalise Serenity’s crew. We checked off some small jobs in the morning including cultivation of a more favourable holding tank micro biome, cleaning all the salt and ash from the decks (another negative for Statia) and testing a toilet pump friction theory before heading into land for some exploration. The nearby new Christophe Harbour marina was mostly empty but had a few nice superyachts to ogle, and the surrounding development at the Salt Plage beach cafe was good for a beer whilst we tried to get a glimpse of the green flash (see Parting Thoughts below).

29 Mar: Spent an enjoyable morning cleaning the stainless and pootling (a technical sailing term for ‘working with limited purpose’) around Serenity, and then headed into shore after lunch to try the coffee place at the fancy marina. They paired their excellent cappuccinos with fast WiFi, so we caught up on all our favourite podcasts before heading back to the anchorage for some snorkelling in the star fish infested waters. A live steel band was playing in the bar, so we enjoyed it from the cockpit as we also witnessed a feeding frenzy on the numerous ballyhoo that come out here at night.

30 Mar: After over three months of essentially continuous wind from the east, it was eerie to wake up to almost dead calm and meant that we had to motor the short hop up to the Port Zante marina, which was located in the centre of the St Kitt’s capital, Basseterre. The lull in the wind also meant that we felt the true temperature in the Caribbean for the first time; it was seriously hot and made getting Serenity ready for our impending guests a sweaty ordeal. Thankfully we had time for a quick shower before the Raglands arrived and, after showing them around Serenity, we completed a whistlestop tour of Basseterre before enjoying an authentic ‘local’(?) Thai meal and then watching UVA get through to the final four in March Madness (go Hoos!).

Story of the week

As the log above perhaps indicates, it’s been a bit of a quiet week with no major stories, but a selection of mini-stories instead:

From repairs to upgrades

Whilst the boat jobs list continues to replenish itself thanks to the underlying laws of entropy, it is certainly the case that the number of new repairs continues to slow and that has paid us back in getting more time to see the places we visit and general downtime on the boat. In fact, it got to the point recently in St Maarten that I was bored enough want a job to do with nothing immediately available. This was the impetus to change mindsets and think through about desired upgrades vs. repairs, which is a much more enjoyable type of project.

One of the things that has always annoyed me on the boat is that the VHF is down below, and it isn’t always easy to hear if we are getting a message while on deck (especially if we are playing music). The only solution so far has been to turn the VHF up really loud, which is fine unless you then go below and have the life scared out of you when a random conversation occurs. I’d picked the Delos skipper’s brain on this (who we learned had a cockpit speaker and mic), and he confessed that the cost was pretty high and suggested we just take up the handheld. Not a bad idea, but it only works if you remember to bring it up and charge it before hand. I was convinced there had to be another way.

So I dreamed up a plan that allowed me to connect one of my existing cockpit speakers to the VHF on a switch, so we could choose to use it for music of VHF as the situation required. The wiring seemed basic and since the only investment was a $10 switch I was able to get approval from the finance committee (i.e. Laura) without a detailed business case. I then spent an enjoyable couple of hours tinkering away (included cutting apart an old pair of headphones for it’s aux cable – waste not, want not) and was delighted to find my solution worked even better than I could imagine. The power on the VHF speaker output was really good and so generated a really good volume without any form of amplifier (which forums had of course warned me was essential). It feels great to be able to tick off one thing that has been a low level but long-standing irritation and I’m excited to get to spend more time on upgrades vs. repairs over the coming months.

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Statia, Schmatia

When we made the decision to divert to St Martin for our rigging repairs last week, one of the negatives was that we would end up missing going to Statia, which was the island between Saba and St Kitts; however, as ‘luck’ would have it, we ended up over-nighting at Statia when the conditions deteriorated on our sail to St Kitts, and whilst we didn’t go ashore we were confident that we had seen enough of the island in our 10 hour stay.

The island anchorage was dominated by LPG transport ships, and there was a constant smell of gas floating around the bay which was slightly unnerving. On top of this, Statia’s method of garbage disposal is to burn it, which whilst not uncommon in the Caribbean, is pretty unpleasant when it is upwind of the yacht moorings so that your boat is covered in a layer of ‘tr-ash’. Finally, as mentioned above, the bay is so unprotected that all the boats were rolling around and I doubt more than a handful of hours of sleep were enjoyed anywhere. It’s strange since our pilot book was reasonably positive about Statia and we have found it’s author to be fairly reliable, but in this case he was wrong and we would advocate spending longer at Saba instead.

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Salt Plage & Whitehouse Bay

In sharp contrast to Statia, our first overnight stop in St Kitt’s at Whitehouse Bay instantly became one of our top ten bays. Firstly (and most importantly given the previous night) it was protected from the swell and so we were able to get some solid sleep and feel vaguely human the next day. We then discovered that the bay boasted almost everything we could need: a variety of underwater life to keep Laura occupied, a beach bar which cheap beer and live music, and a nearby coffee shop with excellent cappuccinos and WiFi – all it was missing was a grocery store (which we later found out they do actually have)!

We also discovered a fun game in the evenings, after wondering a while about the splashing coming from around the boat once the sun had set. It turns out that a type of small fish called ballyhoo were congregating in the bay (perhaps to spawn) and this was bringing in a whole range of larger predators since ballyhoo are apparently very tasty, and this was what led to all the splashing. We could shine a light in the water, which would highlight all the action below including some large demon fish (their eyes glowed orange in the torch). Some of the ballyhoo ended up jumping into the dinghy in their terror (without puncturing it!), and seeing as they are such a delicacy for game fish we kept them for fishing.

Parting thoughts: The Green Flash

Laura and I are pretty pleased this week that we’ve managed to make a small contribution to science by separately confirming the existence of the green flash. This was a phenomenon that we had heard about at a number of beach bars over the years, but having never seen it ourselves we had started to think it might be folklore used to sell more cocktails by this point.

For those that aren’t aware, the green flash is an easily missed visual spectacle the takes place at the moment that the sun is setting; however, it is limited to occasions when you have an unbroken view of the sun setting over water, and the frequency of pesky clouds getting in the way when you finally find a spot with a west facing ocean view is what drives its rarity.

Now that I know it does in fact exist, I took some time to understand why and found this useful website. The short answer is that the sun’s yellowy orange colour comes from the red and green parts of light spectrum (blue having already been scattered by the atmosphere and colouring the sky), and green has a shorter wavelength compared to red. As a result, when the sun is just falling out of view there is a moment when the red light waves can no longer wrap around the planet and shoot above your eyes, whilst the green is still able to hang onto the curvature of the earth. It’s worth saying that it isn’t as dramatic as you think when you first hear about it, but still fun to look out for (which hopefully is now easier that it’s existence has been confirmed by the reputable Serenity First journal :)! ).