The first part of the report is here:
trip report part 1 So far we’ve braved the VIP lounge, 25-30 knot winds in the Drake channel, and visits to Norman (windy), Cooper (full) and Marina Cay (boxed in with one bad engine). Still lots of fun being had and we are on our way to Trellis Bay for a little engine maintenance courtesy of TMM.
Day 4 – Trellis, and Trellis again. Limped over to Trellis bay early the next morning with the port engine failing intermittently. Obviously we’ve got a fuel filter clogged, or maybe an air leak in one of the fuel lines. Anyhow, we missed picking up the last ball in the field since the engine failed right at the moment of truth which wasn’t really unexpected given its record so far. I managed to get a line from the mooring to a midships cleat as we drifted by and then we realigned all of the lines until we were lying properly.
Peter from TMM came out with a Leatherman, looked around the engine room and said we had an air leak in one of the fuel hoses. He tightened the hose clamps and ran the engines up and down and it seemed better. Great, might be able to make Leverick today after all.
We head out and the engine quits again 500 yards out of the harbor. Turn around and go back to Trellis and get a ball after circling around the mooring field menacingly in a counterclockwise direction. I must look like a total lunatic to everyone moored in the field.
We head in to Trellis to eat at the Trellis Kitchen, where the sandwiches are as good as advertised. It’s not noon yet, but I begin drinking beer, since I figure that 2 consecutive engine failure events before noon means that the sun’s over my personal yardarm. We meet a couple of people who live 20 minutes away from me in Maritime Canada, and Rick from “Sophisticated Lady” picks them up at the Trellis Kitchen. Small world.
TMM sends out Marvin this time, with a full toolkit, after we complain at them for a bit. Johnny from TMM and I are really developing some phone rapport by now. Marv takes the engine secondary fuel filter apart, it is full of black sludge. He replaces them on both engines, and pronounces the problem solved. Apparently there’s an epidemic of bad fuel going through the fleet. Whoever had “Caribbean Spirit” 2 or 3 weeks ago must have visited a dodgy filling station. We decide to stay tonight and head out tomorrow. Everyone’s still having a good time, we are in the BVI so its hard to get too worked up. Go to the beach for a bit on the east end of the bay, and return to the boat for a sundowner and an exciting half hour of watching people not quite picking up moorings and subsequently yelling at each other. Maybe they’ve all got engine trouble too. BBQ on board again, we are too beat to go out.
Day 5 – Leverick Bay. Wind is 25+ knots on the nose, but we are going to North Sound come hell or high water. Motor sail most of the way, hoping to get in early enough to sightsee. Of course, about 1/2 of the way there the port engine fails again. This is beginning to get annoying. We can restart it, but it is surging and stalling fairly often, so I guess the problem hasn’t been fixed yet. We keep going to Leverick regardless. Everyone is ready for the channel entrance to the north sound, standing by the sails, anchors, etc in case the engine fails in the middle of the channel with boats all around. Its still blowing hard, too, around 25 knots. This is getting to be a lot like work.
Thankfully the engine co-operates after a fashion and we manage to get moored at Leverick. She’s rolly here with the heavy winds and some chop, but we are safe for the night. I was hoping to take a slip, but there’s no way I’m going to try to maneuver into one with a balky engine in this wind. Quick swim, and my wife cuts away a little bit of old dinghy line wrapped around the port prop that she notices when getting back onboard. The dinghy painter’s got a couple of bites taken out of it too, apparently evidence of an ancient injury, but we think nothing of it. Lunch at Pussers ensues, and it’s pretty good. We make a reservation for Michael Beans, who I hear is not to be missed. Last time I saw him he was at Marina Cay, that’s how long I’ve been away.
My phone buddy Johnny at TMM sends out Pogo to have a look at the engine. Pogo bites the bullet and decides to clean the primary fuel filter screens. I probably should have traced them out and looked at them myself earlier but I didn’t know where they were and I’m on vacation dammit. Of course they are full of sludge too. Cleaning them is a dirty job, but Pogo’s up to the task. I can’t help but ask myself why they didn’t do this at the last stop, but they are cleaned now. WooHoo, working auxilliary power.
Beans rocks the house, of course. My first mate is particularly impressed, he’s in a fairly successful local band and he thinks their singer could learn a thing or 2 about audience engagement from Beans. His exact quote is something like “you can’t imagine how hard it is to get a roomful of people that engaged, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, when they are stone cold sober.” I don’t know who he’s calling sober, but it’s clearly not me. Then he places 2nd in the conch blowing. Not bad for a guitar player who had never seen a conch shell 20 minutes ago.
Dinner is at upstairs at Leverick. Last time I was upstairs it was run by Pusser’s, I think, so you can imagine my surprise at the place today. I was dumbstruck by the quality of the food and service. Me and the Mrs are foodies and wine snobs, so this place is right in my wheelhouse. The wine list features some of the most impressive names I've ever seen together in one place, which is pretty amazing given that I'm wearing shorts, flip flops, and a 15 year old tee-shirt from Sidney's peace and love. I also notice a couple of Magnums of Cheval Blanc when I pass the wine cellar en route to the bathroom which aren't even mentioned on the wine list. Clearly this place is owned by a very wealthy Frenchman.
After all that, I get a couple of glasses of cheap American Merlot since I’m poor, but that was great too. My wasabi tuna was terrific, and everyone else was most favorably impressed. I’ll be back again for sure.
Day 6 – Virgin Gorda, Saba rock. We rent a car the next morning, I’ve always wanted to tour the island. The drive is cool and it is a lot easier to land a car at the Baths parking lot than it is to land a dinghy on the beach. Unfortunately I forgot my parks permit paperwork, so I need to pay 3 bucks to get in. No big deal, at least the engines in the car work.
There’s a horde of Italians and Frenchmen off a cruise ship in the North Sound filling up the Top of the Baths for a buffet but we find a seat and eat a quick lunch. Next we go down the hill to the Baths where it was cool to see them with our crew who are there for the first time.
We hung around Devils bay beach for the afternoon, just us and 500 Italian dudes wearing “budgie smugglers”. Its a little crowded but still there’s room enough for everyone, and I certainly can’t begrudge other tourists the opportunity to experience it. I’m afraid that can’t abide the budgie smugglers, though. That’s a bridge too far.
I’ve always wondered what was over at the Coppermine, so we drove out there. It was pretty spectacular, particularly with the surf breaking in the 30 knot winds. Got back to Leverick in time to fire off to Saba rock to see if we could get out of the swell.
It was getting dark as we pulled into the mooring field at Saba, but now that I’ve got working engines I can do anything and I’ve got no fear. Picked up a ball and headed in for dinner. Everyone loved the Tarpon, going so far as to get some scraps from the kitchen to feed them. Unfortunately all of the food you throw them is stolen by smaller, swifter, bar jacks that literally eat the Tarpon’s lunch when it comes to pouncing on free food. Food was good at Saba too, and the service (especially at the bar) was great. We’d seen a few reports on TTOL about service issues, but I can report from my own experience that on Thursday Mar 8, 2012, the service was absolutely excellent. I got a Mojito, and most bartenders curse you for ordering one of them when they are busy, and they made it with a smile and a bunch of engaging stories too. Highly recommended.
Day 7 – Sandy Cay, Sopers. Finally I can sail downwind for a change, and with working engines to boot. Now we are living large. Set sail with reefed mainsail only, and hit 10 knots of boatspeed. It’s blowing hard out here. Get to Sandy Cay around 2:30 and drive around looking for a mooring, when something funny happens. The engines all work but the portside engine won’t go into gear it looks like. Maneuverability is a problem, so we stagger drunkenly around the anchorage, again, and pickup a ball.
Everyone who isn’t the captain jumps in to swim. I assume the transmission linkage is broken, since I’ve seen this happen on charter boats before. I check under the hood, that’s not it. Maybe the transmission is leaking, busted, or out of fluid. Check the fluid levels, and it is low. I’m about to add fluid, when the Mrs. pops up out of the water behind the boat and says she’s found the problem. Get this – the prop is gone. I ask her if she’s sure. She just looks at me; this is usually something you are sure of before you mention it, apparently.
I guess that line we cleared from the prop 2 days ago was concealing a larger problem, the bolt key must have backed out and been pulled off or loosened by the dinghy painter a while back and eventually the whole prop just spun out. Or maybe that port engine on the “Caribbean Spirit” really is cursed.
Everyone goes to the island, but you can’t land a dinghy, as the ground swell is running about 8 feet and breaking all the way up the beach up almost into the trees. They swim to the beach and wander around out a bit. Returning takes a few tries before they manage to get through the surf to swim back to the boat. Looks a little like Baywatch on the beach as everyone tries to punch through the surf.
Meanwhile, Johnny at TMM and I confer about the problem. After all this, it is getting harder and harder to convince TMM that I’m an actual experienced sailor, and not some demented serial murderer of diesel engines. He's professional and helpful though, and tells me that they can come to Sandy Cay in the chase boat or I can go to Sopers. He’d obviously prefer Sopers. We decide to go there for the night, but I’m a little nervous about driving around the Sopers anchorage, which will be quite full (and is pretty close quarters) this late in the day. With only one engine running hard and full helm you can pretty much just make this boat maintain a straight heading in favorable conditions and certainly can’t turn to starboard effectively.
With my normal sailing cronies, I’d dispatch one of them to the dinghy and use it as a tugboat to push the bow around, but that crew is 2000 miles away right now. Sailing into the anchorage is pretty much out of the question, since you can’t get the cat close enough to the wind.
It dawns on me that this may be one of the main tradeoffs of cat sailing, lack of full maneuverability without full engine control. The wimpy little Cat rudders don’t cut it for this type of situation. My old boat, a Beneteau 345, had a 5ft spade rudder and you could turn it on a dime at low speed. When the engine failed, which was often, we sailed or pushed it with the dinghy and it was easy to steer at dead slow speed. We sailed it from Grenada to Trinidad anchoring every night for a week without an engine a few years back. I can’t imagine doing something like that with a Cat. Sadly, this knowledge isn’t really helpful at this point.
We sail to the cut at Sopers and then start motoring. Fortunately, you can keep her on a straight course in here, since the seas are so flat that the boat gains a little extra maneuverability. Of course, running on one engine, into the 1.5 knot current in the cut here makes it slow going. Continuing my run of luck, the anchorage is full and there are no mooring balls. Bomba must be having his full moon tonight, methinks.
Traffic is pretty heavy and other boats keep passing close by us on the port side which freaks me out, since no one knows that my navigation is impaired. I called in a quick securite on 16, but I can’t imagine anyone’s actually listening. I’d fly the day shapes, if I had them, but I reckon that they’d not be that well understood by most of the sailors of the BVI charter fleet anyway. I can’t blame them; I’d assume I was drunk or stupid before I looked aloft for a bunch of cones and balls. Occam’s razor is definitely working against me in this case.
After a couple of abortive attempts to survey the depths of the mooring fleet, we decide to take a run at the Voyage fuel dock. Full marks to the crew, since I only decided to abandon mooring and make a run at the dock when I was about 20 yards out, and they managed to get the lines and fenders setup in no time flat. All things considered we timed it pretty nicely and got the lines off into the hands of the dock attendant and landed pretty quietly. Like the pilots say, any landing (docking) that you walk away from is a good one.
More to come, and everything works out happily ever after in the end, of course...
Rod
