Like Putting Sausage in Its Casing - At 25 Knots

We left Buddy and sailed the 10 nautical miles to Nevis. Nevis is a separate island from St. Kitts, but one country. We had a great sail to Nevis the wind was a steady 16-18 knots, with 20 knot gusts. The waves weren’t too bad at about 3-4 feet.

We are kind of getting used to is going to a new place and not knowing where to anchor. We have a guide book, which is only so helpful. The kind people of Nevis put in mooring balls that you can tie up to instead of anchoring. Nevis does not charge for their mooring balls. When we got there the mooring ball we grabbed was just down the beach from the Four Seasons Hotel. That is the beauty of having your house that moves, you get the same view as the person paying $800 a night during low season for “free”.

We explored the beach and went to Sunshine’s beach bar for lunch. It is a short walk from the Four Seasons. Many of the guests escape the Four Seasons prices and come to Sunshine’s. It was an interesting mixture of locals and the Four Seasons crowd.

The next day we went into Charlestown, the capital. Charlestown is a quaint village right on the water. Hamilton was born in Charlestown. We did the tour of his home along with other sites of Charlestown.

One of the things about sailing is that your schedule is dictated by the wind and weather. According to our wind and weather app we were going to have a good window to go to Guadeloupe that night. The distance was about 68 nautical miles. If we left during the day, we would have been pushing it to arrive during light. We wanted to make sure we were arriving during the day, so we decided to leave that night. Our route was getting past Nevis, then the winward side of Montserrat and into Deshaies (pronounced DeeHey) Guadeloupe. Seems simple enough. It started out as the wind app predicted, but once we got past Nevis, the wind kicked up to 20 knots Constant with the gusts up to 23 knots. The waves were 5 to 6 feet. Oh well, so much for the wind prediction app. Margie and I took two hour watches as we made our way through the churning dark seas.

I learned that the lower Leeward Islands we were going to lie to the east/southeast of each other. The wind on this trip was a 40 degree wind angle. All sailboats have a different ability to sail up wind. Most catamarans don’t do great upwind. Monohulls can go higher into the wind than a catamaran. It makes a difference on how you steer your course. Our boat does good at about 45 degrees wind angle. We had to steer our course off the wind.

Due to the velocity of the wind and the fact that we were sailing at night, we started with one reef in our main sail. As the wind started picking up we added another reef. We are pretty conservative on our sail plan especially at night. A reef in a sail is what you do to reduce the amount of sail to the wind. A catamaran can get overpowered by the wind and tip over, which is not a good thing. Unlike a monohull a catamaran will not right itself. That is why we like being conservative. Our boat manufacturer gives us the wind speeds for when you need one reef, two reefs or three reefs. As our sailing instructor said, if you need three reefs you shouldn’t be sailing.

We were making progress towards Guadeloupe, when on my watch at about 2 AM the line holding up the sailbag failed. There are two lines holding up the sailbag, which keep the main sail from spilling out when you have reefs in the main sail. With two reefs in, there was a lot of sail spilling out onto the top of the cockpit. That was a big problem as I was worried the sail was going to rip or tear on an edge of the bimini.

I woke Margie up and told her we needed to get the main down and tuck it back into the sailbag. We always were our life vests when we sail at night with a tether. I clipped in so I could move about the top deck and try and get the sail back into the sailbag and zip it up. It was not easy as the deck was pitching pretty bad from the waves and Margie was trying to steer the boat into the wind. It was a struggle to get the main sail back into the sailbag. It was like trying to put sausage back into a casing after you squeeze it out. I finally got it back into the bag and zipped up after about 45 minutes. Everything was secure at that standpoint and we got back on course with just the jib and the engines on.

Deshaies, Guadeloupe about 10am the next morning. We were very glad we left at night. Our sail was about 16 hours, which meant that if we left early morning we would have gotten there in the dark, so even though we had a little middle of the night excitement again, we made the best choice in sailing over night.

More on Guadeloupe in my next post.

It gets a little chilly at night.

Our lazy Lazy Jack lines that broke

Margie is entertained by ABBA and James Taylor on nighttime crossings.