Passage to Cuba. From the Lesser Antilles to the mysterious Turks and Caicos. What people write and read on the open ocean, what big stupid fish will bite, and a little mathematics that turned out to be prophetic
A problem from the captain (just a simple maths problem): “Lady Mary leaves the Turks and Caicos without clearing out. Under full sail, the yacht heads away from the island at 8 knots. Four miles offshore, she is spotted by a Coast Guard launch stationed in the harbour. The launch races after her at 16 knots. Question: will Lady Mary manage to get beyond the 12-mile limit of the territorial waters before the patrol launch catches her?”
— a lazy session of mental gymnastics aboard. The first mate is thinking about how to solve the problem with an equation; the captain knows how to solve it in one and a half steps. Nastya looks at them both, sighs, and listlessly scratches something with a pencil... Sighs again... For which, half an hour later, she acquires the underground nickname “Sofya Kovalevskaya.”
The young sailors on passage to uninhabited islands .
Day four of the journey from the Lesser Antilles to the Turks and Caicos
On the first day, the female half of the crew finally got a broadside right on the waterline from the captain for their excessive attachment to the internet, which was fading away along with the silhouette of St Martin (it was simply time to set the sails and rig the preventer on the mainsail...).
Lady Mary is heading north, keeping to windward of Puerto Rico and gradually leaving the waters of the Caribbean Sea astern. We are heading out into the Atlantic again, bound for the independent Turks and Caicos Islands, north of Haiti.
Map of the region showing the Turks and Caicos. The starting point for this leg of the journey is St Martin. The island is not marked on the map, but it is right next to Anguilla. Can you find it? 🙂
On the second day of the passage, everyone was engrossed in reading when the fishing rod suddenly began rattling merrily, and a huge mahi-mahi took the “piece of wood.” (Yes, yes, these strange creatures have no interest in colourful silicone squid or gleaming little fish; instead, they fall for some homemade-looking contraption with a huge hook—which, incidentally, costs just as much as the aforementioned glittering lures.)
Get off, you brute! Nastya whispered as an incantation (well, our senior young sailor is no fan of fish!). But the magic words did not work, and the crew set about getting the fish drunk as it thrashed on the hook (we have already used up half a bottle of rum on fishing. That is the sort of crew we have: only the catch drinks rum :)).
St Martin recedes into the distance, taking with it the last decent internet we will have for a month and a half. And the mahi-mahi did not make it into the shot—they are underwater 🙂
The work of processing the catch and dealing with the aftermath earned the internet lovers an amnesty and restored the crew’s former goodwill: as Matroskin the cat used to say, working together brings people closer. And for the next two days, from morning till night, we feasted on fried steaks for lunch; the same again, but with soy sauce and onions, for dinner; the captain’s sashimi with wasabi and lemon for afternoon tea; and finally, to round things off, a pot of fragrant fish soup in place of breakfast, lunch and dinner on the second day. Well, there were also cornflakes with milk, heaps of fruit, a box of Snickers bars, sandwiches with lightly smoked cheese, and the freshest celery, delivered straight from France to the Caribbean....
And now, for the third day running, no one has even attempted to fish. Attempts to eat still occur, but purely for entertainment rather than out of hunger. On that well-fed note, we decided to make contact on 11 February, but morning found us in the unpleasant company of grey, squally weather systems, with rain and 30-knot winds.
Rainwater collection system. The moment you set it up, the rain stops instantly
The winds whipped up five-metre waves, steep and short, and we had to take down the cockpit awning to free the mizzen and reduce windage. Meanwhile, the sea lashed over the coachroof and clouds billowed on every side. There was no one left to
make contact with outer space,
because all the hands had wilted away into their bunks, while the skipper helped Iron Felix (the autopilot) steer. After raging for about twenty-four hours, the squalls and clouds moved on, and the ocean is behaving more or less decently now. The sun is blazing, the waves are gently rolling the hands from side to side, the pots of food are conveniently wedged inside the bosun’s “chair,” and there is no awning—in short, everything is just as it was during
the Atlantic crossing
:).
Yes, we are back in the ocean: sailing along the Atlantic side of the Caribbean, we have almost reached 20° north and have started to freeze :). The thermometer in the saloon reads +30°C, yet it does not feel hot at all, while +25°C with wind and rain calls for a fluffy towel and hot tea. We’ve grown accustomed to the warmth, you see, sir. Yes, sir. (The first mate has taken to rereading The White Guard and Demons, which has duly left its mark on her vocabulary) :).
Ocean sunset No. 1283
The main shipping lanes must run somewhere else, and we see ships on the horizon literally only once or twice a day. The navigation systems promise that we will be at anchor tomorrow; there are just over a hundred miles left to go. Nastya is devouring her third volume of Fenimore Cooper, while Ladunya is writing a book called Travellers with Peacocks—or rather, dictating it to Mum. We really must publish some excerpts sometime!
And between bouts of writing, our young sailor watches Peppa Pig in English (thanks to
Buska from the catamaran Mana-Mana
) and is already dropping things like “It is not funny!” into conversations, appropriately and in flawless British English. That makes everything genuinely very “funny” for us, and we tackle our various pending chores with renewed vigour. In her delight, the first mate even mended the captain’s cap, shot through by a treacherous squall, emblazoning the proud letters “RUS” across the forehead. In short, we are quietly getting on with this yachting business....
If only we didn’t feel quite so queasy... 🙂
Young sailor on watch, captain in his cap )
Farewell to our St Martin acquaintances
Ocean sunset No. 1284
And this is what awaited us in the Turks and Caicos very soon )