Time to Get Out of Here

Time to get out of here. Storm season, babies aboard during a thunderstorm, playing shipwreck, and rotating squalls Lady Mary is bringing to an end her longest stay since the Canary Islands, off the coast of Mexico. One thing or another has kept us here. The other day, friends came to visit us from Mérida—Zhenya, his wife Dasha, and his sister Tanya, each of the women with a nursing baby, plus two fine lads, Sam and Petya, aged 7 and 9. The guests got a taste of field conditions while still in the dinghy: heading into the wind and waves, the sea drenched everyone from head to toe, even the little ones. The plan had been swimming, snorkelling and jumping off the bowsprit, barbecuing and sunbathing. Except all the old baths in our neck of the woods have run out, and no new ones have been delivered yet. Which is no bad thing, because when you live in the tropics rather than holiday here, the best weather is overcast but dry. . As for dry weather, you’d be better off heading to the Sahara for now; this is the wrong season here. Humidity inside the boat has risen from the usual 70% to 78%. For most of the summer, the clouds gave the little island of Isla Mujeres a wide berth. Sure, we got drenched a couple of times, and the dinghies bucked desperately astern, trying to leap into their owners’ arms, but more often the picture was this: lightning and thunder to port, thunder and lightning to starboard. Not a scrap of daylight to be seen, the shrouds humming in the wind—but it all swept quickly towards Cancún, the resort metropolis on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, and emptied itself there. Other towns on the Riviera Maya groaned under downpours, while aboard our boat, apart from a couple of storms, the all-hands emergencies lasted half an hour, and then the sun came out again. That was how it was as recently as a week ago. . A Rotating Affair And somewhere over the Atlantic, west of the Cape Verde Islands, storms are born and race towards the Caribbean, winding themselves into hurricanes. Right now, we are anxiously forecasting the behaviour of Irma (main photo, forecast), which has already been upgraded to Category 3 and hasn’t even reached land yet. Will it turn north? So far, the full force of the hurricanes is either flooding Texas or preparing to bomb Florida; the Bahamas will get their share too. For now, the Yucatán is being hit by squalls. They have reached us as well. Remembering the summer they wasted, the thunderclouds are now pretending to be cyclones: they come in from the south-east, blacken the sky and flash with lightning, make a feinting tack towards Cancún, dump a ton of water there, then suddenly dive at our anchorage, completing a full circle within a mere hundred square miles. Fifty metres of anchor chain in three metres of water. Everything off the deck. The yacht bucks and swings through 180 degrees, while the crew rushes around shutting hatches, trying to leave it until the very last moment (the heat hasn’t gone anywhere); awnings are furled and unfurled, windscoops moan plaintively and snap sharply, threatening to tear, and buckets take up their appointed positions beneath the drains. An avalanche of rain crashes down with animal fury, hammering thousands of nails into the deck and bouncing off the sea’s surface as if it were asphalt. Soaked to the bone, the cap’n’s teeth chatter with cold as he unties and lashes down whatever we couldn’t manage. Visibility: 50 metres. A savage crack splits the grey cotton wool, and the first mate jumps with a shriek. “Mama, I woke up... Oh... from such a loud-thunderous sound. That thunder is deafening!... But at least I can draw on the windows,” the young sailor voices every thought as she wakes. “I’m going to unsteam the windows now. Unsteamed windows are better, aren’t they?” The weather forecast still shows partly cloudy skies and 10 knots of trade wind. The children found a weather window . “And the Hold Is Leaking” We didn’t meet our friends off the ferry: a squall came through just then, and we couldn’t get off the boat for a couple of hours. Until then, the children were afraid the rain would fill the dinghy to the brim before we had time to get ashore, while the adults were afraid Lady Mary would gallop off somewhere without us in that wind :). By morning the weather had cleared, and five adults and six children found themselves together aboard the yacht, eager to sunbathe. Then, once everyone was aboard, it hit. We had to take steam baths inside and water baths outside instead. Even the “skirt” around the mainmast couldn’t withstand the force of the rain. Water streamed down the mast into the saloon; bowls and saucepans covered the floor. Rice hissed in the pressure cooker, and a frying pan sizzled with Chinese-style vegetables (we decided that grilling wasn’t particularly compatible with rain and 30 knots of wind blowing from every direction). During breaks in the weather, the young sailor and the fine lads played shipwreck up on the bow—after all, the weather was just right for a shipwreck. So one of the cap’n’s or first mate’s eyes was always trained on the bowsprit. Unable to understand why this strange little flat had suddenly started dancing and splashing, the babies were teleported into the wheelhouse by a joint effort: “Come on, let’s lower Mum first, and then the ‘suitcase.’” It turned out that if you sat in the cockpit right up against the wheelhouse, you could drink tea even in the rain and barely get wet—the awning stretched on the windward side kept the horizontally flying drops from drenching whoever was sitting there. But if you sat a little farther aft, one lurch would send a bucketful of water flying a metre and a half off the awning to sober you up with a shower. Sunbathing? Who needs it? Boring. This, though—this was a proper attraction. Especially since breaks appeared towards evening, and even the clouds in the west were tinged pink. Everyone was happy and gave thanks to Poseidon that we managed to return ashore dry. And the next morning it started all over again.... Time to get out of here, we all sighed in unison with the cap’n. We’re thinking of getting out of here on Wednesday. The adventures continue :).