Sailing to Isla Vieques
After Salinas WildChild slowly made her way ever eastward into the prevailing trade winds until finally she was ready to make the jump across to the island of Vieques. The sail across the opening was kind of awful, like one of the ten worst sails WildChild has ever had. Although she is a good girl always happy to sail to windward, due to her fabulous design, it can be remarkably difficult to sail headlong into 3-8 knots of wind from the bow that is so light and swirly that it wiggles about your compass +/- 30 degrees. Have you ever tried to sail into light swirly winds before? To say it is frustrating is being polite at best and glossing over reality with a pretty paint brush at worst.
I began to get rather frustrated in my relationship with mother. When she is in these light unstable moods it can be remarkably difficult to deal with. Finally I get WildChild set up and sailing to windward at “around” 50 degrees TWA in the light wavy conditions, I settle back to read a book and relax, and before long a slight mood swing of mom shifts the wind 40 degrees across the bow and WildChild begins to backwind her genny. Grrrr… and super Grrr… I drop the book and quickly flip the Autopilot to manual, grab the helm roughly and swing the wheel hard to starboard hoping to correct the accidental tac before WildChild runs out of forward momentum.
She smashes thru one more wave too many in the light winds and she fails to come about and correct herself. Grrrr… fuck fuck fuck… we are now in an accidental heave-to without enough forward momentum to bring her back across. With quick thinking I quickly get the motor turned on and running, create enough forward motion for the rudder to grab some water, and WildChild slowly comes about again.
I feel like an immense failure for my third accidental tac in a week, but this is sailing life. We don’t always control everything, shit happens all the time. It is how we deal with the mistakes that defines our character. There is no point freaking out about it, no use kicking myself in the self esteem all day, just deal with the failure and move on.
I get WildChild back on course slowly sailing badly upwind in remanant waves much bigger than the prevailing winds could ever possibly cause. Slowly and with great patience to handle, and positive self talk to counter balance, the creeping feeling of failure and defeat, slowly WildChild climbs her way forward. I notice on the chartplotter that we are sailing as tight to the wind as we can and straight into a freighter weirdly just sitting directly in our path of travel.
At 5 miles away I hail the freighter and ask them their course and intention. The polite and professional captain, with the heavy indian accent, informs me he is adrift, simply floating with the wind and waves. I figure he must be working on engine repairs or something. I inform him that I am sailing tight to the wind with limited manoeuvrability and our CPA (Closest Point of Approach) will be within 0.2 nautical miles, essentially we are on a collision course. I either have to lose all the windward water I have made or hold steady.
I am super hesitant to give up my hard fought sea room to windward, so I inform the captain of the freighter to keep an eye out for us and in an hour, when I get closer, I will hail him again on VHF 16. He acknowledges my info and says that if necessary he will restart his engines and make way for us if necessary. He will keep an eye for us from his bridge. I worry that if he finishes his repairs during my approach, and suddenly restarts his engines and lurches forward, it might affect my carefully planned manoeuvre.
WildChild holds course for the next hour, and as luck would have it, his drift, and our sideways slip are equal and we are still about to ram him. The results of which will clearly result in some nasty paperwork for the freighter captain. Of course, given the unwritten gross tonnage rule, despite the actual rules of the water that give me right away, I will yield to the Goliath. When we get within a respectable 0.5nm miles of the big ship WildChild makes a necessary tac hard to starboard and switched to a port side tac, heading now out to sea again away from our destination.
We were making such good course too… sigh… what a shame… but this is sailing life. I have my Garmin inReach clipped to the open dodger window for reception and I text with my friends for company during the sail. My texan friend urges me to stay calm and centered and just accept things as they are.
This added an extra hour to our sailing day but did improve our wind angle to Vieques. Eventually as the winds settled, WildChild starts to make good course towards her destination for the day as the afternoon winds steadied, strengthened, and bore off just a little to the ESE.
We arrive at our anchorage on the end of Isla Vieques just as the sun is setting. We get the hook set in the dark as the stars come out and retire to some dinner and television for the evening. Another long day sailing to wind concluded we are both in a quiet mood. This is the sailing life.
In the morning the winds are supposed to get much stronger today and barrel in from due East. We are safe in our nice calm anchorage on the West side of the island. To get to where we want to go, another 10 miles due East to Esperanza, where the Bio-luminescent bay tours are, we will have to spend a few hours smashing to windward in 15-20 knots of wind on the nose. This of course will mean 1 to 1.5 meter waves at around 4-6 second intervals (1 boat length) which can get uncomfortable to smash into.
Probably the right decision was to stay safe for the day until the weather settled down, but… Elena really wanted to see the bio-bay. So we lifted the hook and set out again. The sun was out for most of the short 4 hour smashy smashy ride and I was dressed in my new Captains uniform at the helm. It was a bit too rough to relax and read a book so I just studied the sails and the water while eating candy.
I have spent so many thousands of hours sitting at the helm of WildChild in so many different conditions. I get bored so quickly. Singing and dancing like a crazy women only fills so few hours in the day. But.. candy always makes me happy.
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Esperanza Bad
So a bit of background here. As we were sailing the last few weeks along the south coast of PR whenever I engaged a local sailor in conversation, and broached the subject of Vieques, they all told me they avoid it. When pressed for details… in very polite words they eventually got to the point of… well there is very high crime there. Dinghy thefts are pretty bad and dinghy outboard engine thefts are super high. They explain that the cultural difference between the two islands, Vieques and Culebra, is pretty polar opposite.
The culture of Vieques is not so welcoming and inviting and respectful of the cruising boats, they have an unwelcoming vibe about them. They do not have dinghy docks to allow cruisers to come to shore, like cruisers are unwelcome. They filled the bay with private mooring balls to try and get money out of cruisers and take away any possibility of anchoring for free. Here is should be noted that all the government of PR mooring balls are free. They let this guy, Chase, run a crime ring unimpeded by the local police, stealing from boats. They do nothing to prevent this self appointed harbour master from robbing cruisers.
And so… the local sailors of Puerto Rico… who know this… just choose to avoid Vieques all together, it is just safer to skip it. Culebra is wonderful they say and totally the best place to go.
Read these reviews taken from the Active Captain notes on Navionics for yourself.
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Bio-luminescent Bay
And so as WildChild sailed that day along the south coast of Vieques heading towards Esperanza these thoughts weighed heavily on my mind. Are we going to be safe there? Will anything be stolen off the deck of WildChild? Will our dinghy get stolen like so many others? We are really on a tight budget, if they stole all the jerry cans we have on deck, given they are full or water, and we had to replace them, how much would it cost us to replace…? like around $800… and that is more than we can afford to lose. If the dinghy got stolen, it cost $4,000 cdn and we would have no way to replace that loss. We would be really screwed.
The risk of trying to get in to see the bio-luminescent bay, called mosquito bay on the charts, seemed like quite a gamble to take. Just how good was this bay? Was it worth the risk to try and visit? Elena still wanted to go and see it, but she had nothing to lose, I did.
What I had heard from sailors I had spoken to that morning was that if you anchor in the next bay over to the east, called Sun bay, it was safer, but still always lock up your dinghy.
We arrived in Sun bay and dropped our hook a respectable hour before sunset, a little close to the only other boat at anchor, a Canadian CAT named Sayanara. As I was still at the bow making sure I felt comfortable about the set of the anchor and our swing radius, We get hailed by name on VHF 16. It was the captain of the CAT beside us. He invited us over for sundowners and conversation.
As I am still extremely homesick, I was super excited to hang out with other Canadians.
The captain of the vessel is a man named Richard, that amazingly, knew me. It took me sometime to place the memory, he no longer had the beard he had when I met him 6 years ago. As we shared drinks together they invited Elena and I to join them after dark to go to the bio-luminescent bay. They had a plan… they had onboard an inflatable kayak… they knew where the road leading over to the bio-luminescent bay was… and they were going to walk over and kayak the bay on their own. Without paying the local tour companies their heafty $80 per person fee.
We jumped at the magnificent opportunity. That was so very kind of them. It took 2 trips in their dinghy to get us all to shore in the dark. Given the high crime nature of the area it was decided that one of the men would stay in Sun bay in the dinghy to guard it and the yachts at anchor. Then they would switch off.
We all walked with flashlights on the moonless night about a kilometer down the road to the public, and very crowded, landing shore for Mosquito bay. There were probably like 6 or 7 large passenger vans from the tour companies and maybe 60 people gathered on the 30 meter wide shore. The tour companies had their rental kayaks stacked up and organized their groups to launch while we inflated our little kayak.
In groups of two we took turns. Elena and I were the second group to get to go paddle out into the bio-luminescent bay. I have seen bio-luminescence before, lots actually, so it is not so heart stoppingly amazing to me anymore. Even Luperon bay had some good bio-luminescence on a few dark nights. The most amazing bio-luminescence I have ever seen was definitely in the cold St. Lawrence river last year near the Sagenay river mouth.
I will admit though… the luminescence of Mosquito bay was pretty cool. The waters of the bay are shallow, approximately 6 feet deep, and not so clear in the daytime, but the clear strong glow as the paddle cut thru the water was cool. Sometimes as we paddled slowly along we would disturb a fish nearby and it would swim away quickly in a green laser trail like a shooting star underwater. The effect of splashing my hand around beside the kayak in the water was trippy to watch. It seemed almost as though there was a green glowing fire encasing my paw. The glow is strong bright and very clearly visible.
I tried taking pictures for you… but alas.. it seems this is one of those things you need to see for yourself in person, all pictures just turned out as blackness.
It was a cool experience.
Probably not worth the $80 per person the tour companies charge for a 30 minute paddle in the bay. They turn over 3 group per night.
Us girls got so lucky that Richard and Kim invited us along that night. Like the universe conspired to give us a gift. Often when sailing things go not according to plan and often not so great. Today things went not according to plan… but like a million times better. We were so extremely lucky and so grateful for our good fortune.
If Richard or Kim ever read this blog… thank you a million times a million for inviting us along. We are so very truely grateful for your gift.
With WildChild safely under guard we did not have to worry about our stuff getting stolen so we could relax and enjoy the experience.
Now we move on to the much raved about Isla Culebra.
But that… is another story…
Cheers Sailors
Captain Lexi… the happy