Crazy Sailing

Wednesday 6^th December 2017

Monday was a fairly quiet day. I relaunched the dinghy and tested the outboard … not so great. It is hard to start and has a tendency to stall even after it’s been running a while. I thought we might have bad fuel in the tank so I dumped that and replaced it with gasoline from the jerry cans we carry (which might also be quite old), but this made no difference. The spark plug looks good so I figure it’s either the fuel filter or the carburetor. It’s a bummer because our outboard has been easy to start and super-reliable up until now. I’ve ordered some spares from Honda, which Gloria will bring out with her, and a service manual that I hope to download on line.

In the evening Sylvain and Valerie from ZENlattitude came over to Cotinga for dinner. I cooked up some Wahoo and Val brought over a fantastic rice dish flavoured with coconut milk and a variety of spices. It has been great getting to know Sylvain and Val and we have become good friends. Sadly, they just left today, having finally completed repairs to their forestay that broke on the passage from Norfolk. They need to make progress down the islands as they are meeting their daughter soon. I hope that we’ll be able to meet up again when we head south.

On Tuesday I took Cotinga out for a sail with Matt Sellers, an English guy that I met watching football in the bar on Sunday. The trade winds have filled in substantially in the last couple of days and it was blowing 15-20 kts outside of the marina, so we opted to head east up the Sir Francis Drake channel in order to do our windward sailing early in the day. It turned out to be very windy and quite bumpy. A couple of squalls came through on the outward leg that topped 30kts on the gauge, but Cotinga handled them well with a single reefed main and stay sail. For the first time in my sailing experience we flipped the dinghy we were towing behind. At some point we realized that we weren't sailing as fast as we should be and when I looked around I could see the bottom of the dinghy as it plowed the water behind us. I suspect it flipped partly due to the conditions, but also because we tied it up too close to the back of Cotinga.  Thankfully, we were able to right it whilst underway. However, I began to feel distinctly sea sick, not having taken any preventative meds, and so we re-considered our plans to go up to Virgin Gorda and instead picked up a mooring at Cooper Island. After a rest and cold drink we left the mooring and had a very pleasant broad reach on a single tack all the way back  to Nanny Cay. We did get caught from behind by one further squall which prompted us to reef the genoa as the seas to our stern turned white with rain and the winds peaked at 35 kts! These were the fiercest conditions that I’ve sailed in but Cotinga handled it fine and Matt seemed totally in his element having spent a lot of time sailing in the North Sea. The only issue is that we lost one of the bolts from the inner forestay tensioning lever, but I’m having a new one machined at the marina and if that fails we can use a large clevis pin.

Tasha – if you are reading this – these were unusual conditions even for this area where the trade winds can blow quite strongly. We will make sure that we spend time in protected waters and beautiful anchorages when you visit.

On Monday I was out taking some shots of the salvage crew righting some overturned vessels. I was looking at a boat where a stand had punched through the hull when all of a sudden a Bananaquit landed on the section of torn fiber-glass looking for nesting material. Lucky timing on my part!

Abstract hull and a cute little Bananaquit ... what could be better!