Hey again, I realize that I tend to write sporadically and randomly when the mood strikes me, today is such a day. I have been rather busy lately making miles towards home which has kept me rather occupied. Today I said goodbye to Vinay and finally have time to myself to relax, and vent into my writings and release the past from my soul. The journey is anything but boring, enjoy this ride with me too.

 

 

Captain is Always Responsible

I understand that time is linear and us tiny humans prefer to think of it that way, so if I can keep some kind of linear order to my writings you will appreciate it, except sometimes I find it hard to do. Please forgive me if I get jumpy today in time.

So like a million years ago… or was it a week ago…  hmmm?   I was in Salinas PR last blog and left there to sail to Coffin island, I needed to push the miles to catch a decent weather window to make the jump across the Mona passage. This new schedule was pushing me to sail in less than ideal conditions. I knew the sail that day would be short, only like 15 miles or so, but mother was a blowin 20-30 knots and the seas were lumpy.

The good news was that I had an experienced sailor that I have invested a lot of effort into training as crew, I had “good” help. Vinay is an old guy over 65 but delightful company. I am always uncertain about bringing old people onboard as crew, it’s hard to teach old dogs new tricks.

My crew knew full well we would be sailing that day in rough seas. I have a rule on the boat that there is no drinking or drug use the day before sailing or during the passage. I need everyone at 100% in their minds and reflexes in tip top shape, bad shit happens so fast on the ocean.

My crew, whom I respected as an adult able to make his own good decisions, decided to get rather drunk the night before the sail. He was hung over and messed up that day for that rough sail, he was in no condition to help his team, he let me down. He failed.

We were sailing along together in 25 knots of wind with seas 2-3 meters building from behind. I had been watching him all morning making mistakes and being confused or absent minded like mr. McGoo. I had to overwatch him like a hawk and keep catching his mistakes before they became dangerous. He made many many mistakes. Crew can be very stressful for me sometimes.

 

 

I was sailing at the helm and my crew was tethered into the middle cockpit handling the lines under my watchful eye. I did not catch every mistake on time though. This gets sailor’ey technical, which I had painfully and in great detail taught my crew to know and understand, which seems to never have stuck in his mind, but when the wind is aft of the beam your sails turn from wings into parachutes. The sails get trimmed differently when you need them to be big bags of air pushing you downwind. Do not sheet them in tight, do not trim them to be efficient wings.

When I am standing at the helm I cannot directly see the headsail. Vinay had been doing very poorly all morning but we did manage to get the yacht safely out to sea and on her way downwind in the building conditions. I was getting frustrated by how poorly Vinay was doing and how “dumb” he was that day, but I kept cool about it and kept watching.

We had to gybe the yacht, under my guidance we did it safely and Vinay was trimming the headsail, as he has done dozens of times. For whatever simple minded reason, he trimmed it tight into an efficient lifting wing and I didn’t notice it that time. He is staring at it and mentally not processing anything he is doing, not thinking at all, just empty.

Suddenly 2 minutes later we get gusted hard, winds over 30 knots for a few seconds and the wind had shifted 40 degrees. This caught the headsail almost from a beam and she began to lift to windward. The boat suddenly began trying to round up..!

The autopilot alarm goes off as it is unable to counter the lifting force of the headsail and the yacht begins to round up. I am at the helm and react immediately and properly and in a second switch to manual steering and bring her hard a lee to fall off and get the wind behind us again. Adrenaline coursing thru my body as I recover the yacht and reset the autopilot.

It takes mother nature 5 seconds to punish us for Vinay’s stupid mistake, and my bigger mistake for trusting him and not double checking that he trimmed the headsail correctly. Everything the crew does is always the Captain’s responsibility. His hangover while sailing has just become dangerous.

I fix everything and reset the sails myself and we continue on our way. Not five minutes later, Vinay is down below making food, when we get hit again by a hard gust, the whole yacht shaking and vibrating under the strain. I have everything under control when Vinay suddenly runs up from below and inexplicably suddenly starts sheeting in the genny…!

The exact wrong thing to do…!

And I had just finished explaining to him 5 minutes ago why it was the wrong thing to do the first time. Not a single word I said stuck in his muddled brain.

 

 

It becomes clear to me, I need to relieve him from the deck and solo sail the rest of this passage. My crew is in no condition to help his team and has failed to act responsibly. He let his team down and now he is dangerous out here. Mother has no forgiveness for fools or stupidity, she punishes every mistake every time.

So here is the interesting part of this story. He made mistakes, this is forgivably human, but think about the position this puts me into. Do you think I want to have to reprimand my crew..?  be the big mean heavy..? Come with the big stick and smack him for being a bad boy…?

NOPE… not at all… not for a second.

He is a grown man almost twice my age and he made decisions like a teenager to party before a big sail, he showed up for work hungover and useless. Shouldn’t I be able to trust a grown up to make better decisions…? I am not his mom, and I don’t want to HAVE TO  mother him, I shouldn’t need to mother him… but clearly… the evidence is… he cannot be trusted to make his own decisions. The safety of the boat is now at risk, he is dangerous and keeps fucking up because he is brain dead today.

As the Captain.. it is my responsibility and duty to deal with this before he gets us killed or breaks shit.

I sit him down beside me at the helm, explain to him what’s wrong, and send him below deck to sleep it off. I am kind about it, but I am very annoyed.

I don’t like being the captain… it’s stressful.

 

Sailing Puerto Rico

We had a lovely day exploring Coffin island the next day but the waters were too disturbed for much snorkeling, visibility bad. After the day of rest, mother was still in a blustery mood the next day. In a perfect world I would have stayed there for however long it took for the ocean to calm down, but I had a schedule to keep.

You can watch the last video about that 50 mile day of sailing in sporty conditions when we got hit by a rogue wave.    CLICK HERE    to see the video and now you understand why I was so hesitant to trust my crew alone at the helm anymore. Thank goodness I was on the helm when the rogue wave hit, my crew never reacts properly. No amount of training seems to stick with him, hard clay.

 

Puerto Real

WildChild arrived just before sunset and set her hook in the outer bay. The next day the man from the next boat over came over in his dinghy to say hello and invite us to a cruisers gathering later that evening on shore. I had met Dan Dan the neighbour man who was alone on the boat beside us. He seemed a nice guy in his 50’s maybe. He also really wanted us to come over to visit him later for beers on his boat.

 

 

We showed up a few hours later before we went into town. I can completely understand how lonely solo sailors can get and I can appreciate Dan’s need for company. The visit was a bit awkward though. As we left an hour later Vinay commented to me…  “yeah Lexi… it’s pretty clear Dan wanted you to show up alone to visit…” in his soft spoken way.

Later that evening things continued to degenerate. Sometimes I get all confused and think of myself as a human being and a person. Then there is always inevitably a man to treat me like a sex object and piece of meat they are hungry for. The dehumanizing treatment always comes for the girls eventually, we all live with it.

Sigh….

🙁

***

The exciting good news is though I met other wonderful sailors and we had a lovely time that evening. I have been to Puerto Real before and can attest that two of the nicest most cruiser friendly people in Puerto Rico are indeed still there. If you are ever there go to the marina Pescaderia and say hello to Jose in the office, and go next door to say hello to Dario.

***

This is completely random but I wanted to share it anyway. As I was wandering around the local neighbourhood that day I found something interesting I want to share.

I was wandering around exploring when this local man, kinda scruffy and wearing dirty clothes, comes whizzing past me on the road on his bicycle. The guy has wild messy hair and is shouting and ranting to nobody in particular. He goes down the road past me, then turns around and comes back towards me. I get a bit tense wondering if this is about to go bad fast.

The man rides 10 feet to my right and stops and stands his bike up beside a garbage pile and walks past me into a store to my left. What I found interesting about the scene was the spanish man had an old fashioned cassette tape deck player strapped to the handlebars of his dirt bike…!   Blaring loud music is so much a part of the latin culture even the crazy people need their tunes…!

 

 

ha ha ha…  sooo funny….

The world is an interesting place huh?

***

We had heard from other cruisers that when we sail into the DR we would NEED to have clearance papers proving our exit from PR. My crew spent 2 days unsuccessfully searching thru various American government websites to figure out how to achieve this. When we asked Jose he knew right away what we were talking about and for free got us the forms, helped us fill them out, and faxed them for us.

God bless Jose for just being wonderful and so cruiser friendly, he’s the man. Thank you so much Jose.

***

Also beside the marina is a small store called West Coast Sailing with Dario in there. I had met Dario 3 years ago and both blogged about him and made a video about him. Beautiful human being who is so sailor friendly and just an amazing person whom I wanted to find again and say hello.

 

 

Later in the evening us cruisers hung out and just made new friends and had a lovely time. The Canadian lady on the right in the picture above was renting a car the next day to go shopping and I managed to get an invitation to come along. That rogue wave had destroyed 3 of my electronic devices that I needed to replace.

Wal-Mart might be the living embodiment of the corporate evil empire but they seem to be a necessary evil now-a-days huh.

 

 

This hurt my feelings a lot. I don’t have any money. I have been trapped out here 2 years longer than my budget could stand. I take very good care of what little I do have because I cannot afford to replace them. Mother randomly washing my electronics with a freak rogue wave just felt mean. If I had money I would not worry so much about such things, but not having money makes life harder. The little tablet I lost to the salty ocean was the backup chartplotter for emergencies.

I suppose this is what credit cards are for? I found cheap crappy headphones and a cheap crappy Walmart brand little tablet and just charged it all to my whimpering credit card.

 

Making Miles

I have a terrible sense of time but I think it was like 6 days ago a weather window opened up to cross the Mona passage for the run to the Dominican Republic. This leg of my very long journey home would be a challenging one.

 

 

I have a crappy old engine inside WildChild and a two blade little folding prop, she does not motor anywhere fast. I don’t mind though, I am a sailing purist, even if I  had a new big engine I would not use it anymore than I have to. I get all annoyed if I ever have to motor a whole mile, it kinda annoys me. So when we left PR Saturday morning to catch the beginning of the weather window I was desperately hoping for some thermal winds to help lift us out of the lee of the mountains.

Mother did not oblige us for 2 long hours as we motored on a glassy calm ocean. I was bubbling with frustration begging mom to just give me some wind please. My ranting to the universe did not help much as I was kicking myself for making the mistake of leaving as early as I did. I had calculated that the forecast would be correct and I would get thermal winds around 9-10am to lift me out.

Bad bad Lexi

I was wrong on both accounts

 

 

Eventually though, as I kept motoring south to find the edge of the trade winds, mother did come around to helping me.  I perked up as I found ripples on the ocean in the distance. I stood with baited breath as I beckoned the winds closer. By noon we were sailing along happily with the motor finally silent. You can go check out my exact route on the Garmin tracker in the link on the home page if you are curious.

The other 2 boats that left just before us were way ahead of us by then as they continued to motor for hours and hours. The sailing was a bit technical and required a lot of mental calculations on my part. I always say that Captains make 50% of their mistakes before they ever lift their anchor. I had already made several calculation errors and was determined not to make anymore while sailing.

 

 

In the end, despite my small mistakes, we had a fantastic crossing and my crew can wonder aloud what all the fuss is about, I made it seem easy. We did have crossing seas from behind for a while as the trade winds and waves on the north shore of PR met up with the winds and waves blowing in from the south shore. The 2 meter crossing seas gave WildChild a very heavy side to side roll that worked the autopilot hard all night long.

By the time my crew came up to take the helm around midnight mother had calmed down enough conditions were okay.

I did have an electricity shortage though. It had been cloudy with very little wind for the last 4 days before we left with very little wind in the bay. WildChild is mostly fully off the grid and makes all her own electricity, but I need sun and wind to do that. The intense workout of the autopilot was pulling 8-12 amps all day and all night. By the next morning I actually decided to pull up the generator and run it for a few hours in the early morning under still cloudy skies.

 

 

Whale Sighting

After about 30 hours of sailing we began rounding the headland to get ourselves tucked into the protection of the Cabo Cabron mountains north of Samana. I could have chosen to continue on for another 20 hours to our destination like the other 2 boats did but chose not to.  I knew there was a little anchorage in the lee of the mountains called El Vale that would give us rolly protection to rest for a while.

I hardly get any sleep while night sailing, as I feel WildChild talking to me all night and mentally sense my crews decisions while alone at the helm for the night. I do not trust him very much to think or react properly while alone, he makes me nervous, and I remain alert.

I also know the thorny path, as the tricky north coast of the DR is infamously called. There is a local effect from the trade winds funneling along the Hispanola mountains over the very deep Dominican trench. Every afternoon the winds are double whatever the forecast says. I chose to relax for a while and wait out the rest of the Sunday afternoon winds and wait out the Monday afternoon winds and leave at 4pm to finish the jump in the calmer, safer, night winds.

We were sailing in the last few miles tucked in close to the mountains as we rounded them seeking the hidden bay. I am a very wise seasoned salty sailor with lots of sailing experience, enough to know that sailing this close to such huge steep mountains was risky. I was attentive and alert as we came in.

The chart plotter and the depth sounder said I was in 200 feet of water as I sailed a half mile from the shoreline. I suddenly got struck with panic as I looked out to my starboard side and saw a huge uncharted rock the size of my cockpit suddenly 100 meters beside me…!

Ohh shit….!   The charts must be wrong again…  I am suddenly spiked with adrenaline and on full alert double checking all my instruments and watching for the mysterious grey boulder to show again between swells. I see it 3 times in 3 separate wave troughs, it is definitely not an illusion, its something…  but it doesn’t seem right.

I keep staring and by the 4th swell trough, the big grey rounded smooth sleek and shiny boulder has disappeared…?

My brain is struggling to figure out what the hell is happening as it slowly dawns on me….   “… ohhhh…. it must have been a whale…!”  and I begin to relax. I know that it is whale migration season down here and the big goliaths are in the neighbourhood. I must have seen the back of a slowly rising huge whale as it briefly and softly surfaced for some air.

Well that was kinda cool.

 

Katabatic Winds

A katabatic wind is a drainage wind, a wind that carries high-density air from a higher elevation down a slope under the force of gravity. They are sudden and strong.

It was about 20 minutes later that we began to lose the winds as we rounded the cliffs. It is always tricky sailing in close to big steep mountains and I am wise enough to be cautious about it. I certainly did not want to have to motor the 2 remaining miles to the anchorage though. Slowly the winds shifted up and down and swirled sometimes 100 degrees in seconds. It is very tricky and technical sailing that requires a lot of attention.

When the winds began to drop down to 3-6 knots and settle in from the starboard bow, 180 deg opposite the prevailing trade winds above the mountains, I knew it was a bad sign. We were in happy sunshine when I told my crew we were going to put the genny away now, I didn’t trust mom.

 

 

With Auto alone at the helm to do the steering we were both in the center cockpit working to put away the genny, almost done, when we get hit hard. In the snap of your fingers the winds suddenly jump from 5 knots to 28 knots in 1 second and shifted to the beam.

With both of us in the middle cockpit working the lines the yacht suddenly lurches under the incredible strain and begins laying on her side. The alarm goes off as the autopilot cannot handle the steering and the boat begins to round up. I am scrambling to get back behind the helm and save the boat. WildChild rounds up in a hurry doing a 160 degree U-turn in 10 seconds in the sudden blast of Katabatic wind and rights herself.

Goodness I love this boat and her huge heavy keel…   🙂

As I am wrestling WildChild to fall off the winds and turn her course back my crew says   “…. wow that was unexpected…“. For him he could not fathom such an event but for me, I had a feeling mother might do this. Thank goodness I had begun putting my headsail away when I did and thank goodness I did not have my boom sheeted tight to center or it would have laid us over hard. But these things were not coincidence, they were the breath of experience, I knew it could come and was already preparing for it, ever the cautious captain.

 

Night Sailing

It was last Monday we left El Vale anchorage at 4pm to begin the last leg of this passage. I was aiming for Ocean World in Puerta Plata as it would be a good place for my crew to disembark and the new crew Daisy to join the boat. I changed my mind though as the sail progressed and just decided to finish the run to Luperon in perfect conditions Tuesday afternoon.

 

 

My crew had never caught and killed a fish before and had expressed interest in doing so. I only had the line trolling behind for an hour when we hooked a fair sized tuna. I let Vinay reel it in and do the killing, his first time ever doing so. I just hate killing things and it always makes me cry so I was happy to let him have the experience. He did pretty well, he handled himself like a man and I was proud of him for stepping up to the plate.

 

 

***

My plan to sail the evening winds was brilliant and worked out perfectly. As the sunset over the horizon we had a nice 15-20 knots of running winds from behind and the seas were beginning to calm down. I prefer sailing into calming seas rather than building seas.

I think I woke Vinay up at around 1am to take over the helm for me and let me try to get some sleep. I was beginning to get run down after a few days of continuous sailing and business. The ocean was calm and the moon almost full when I left my crew alone in the dark with clear instructions.

DO NOT FALL ASLEEP at the helm… it is an unforgivable crime that will get you kicked off the boat fast.

IF any vessel will have a CPA (Closest Point of Approach) of less than 2 miles wake up the captain. Don’t even risk getting run over out here by a big ship.

DO NOT LET THE WIND GET BEHIND THE MAIN SAIL…!   We were sailing downwind with a preventer on the boom but it is not intended to hold the full power of a completely backwinded mainsail, shit will break.

Well….

At around like 3am or something I wake up to Vinay shouting down to me  “… Lexi I need you…”  in his usual timid voice. I leap out of bed and grab for my lifejacket as I am scrambling to go up the steps. I am fighting my heart condition as my achy sore body wants to pass out but I am boosted by adrenaline. It’s not horror on deck but I quickly realize it’s not right.

 

 

I come around beside him at the helm to find him hand steering, somehow the heel of the boat seems all wrong. He got hit by a 90 degree wind shift and backwinded the main. This is not a disaster, it happened to me twice in the last few days, mother is moody like this and just does shit like this, it’s why we keep a watch posted at the helm at all times.

My fuzzy sleepy brain is struggling to figure out what is he doing…? He tells me we had a sudden wind shift, which I verify on the instruments. What I cannot figure out is why is he steering to windward…?   All he has to do when the wind shifts is just alter course away from the wind to get it back on the proper side, keep it behind.

In our case we were sailing broadreach starboard tac with the boom prevented on the port side. When the wind suddenly moved around to the port side it backwinded the main which was straining against the preventer line. The solution… which seems simple to me… and I have explained to him half a dozen times… is just steer away from the wind, go the opposite way to get the wind back behind the mainsail.

The logic seems simple to me

Keep wind behind boat

Steer away from wind

 

The logic escaped Vinay in the critical moment I needed him to think and react clearly. For whatever twisted reasoning I will never understand, he had the boat at a beam reach and was steering TOWARDS the wind to bring it to the bow…!

How stupid is that…?

I calmly nudge him aside as I take over the helm and just bring the wheel hard over the other way and gently bring the wind back behind us. I reset her on her course and set the autopilot to take over again. Everything calm and fine again.

I stare at him in the darkness unable to figure out what to think of him. I cannot understand why this was so hard for him? One of the few simple things I needed to trust him to do for me and when his moment comes… he fails again.  Perhaps the old dog will never learn new things. It’s not even technical or complicated, the logic is simple enough even a child could  grasp it, but somehow… my experienced seasoned crew could not do it when it really counted.

Later that morning I had the same situation with a 90 degree wind shift that I calmly and easily just corrected in about 40 seconds. Same seas same winds same conditions Vinay failed to deal with hours earlier.

My crew is a PHD… so we could safely put him at above average intelligence in the general scale of things. I am beginning to wonder though…  am I really a genius or is everyone else just really dumb?

My crew noticed that I am arrogant and sometimes rudely aggressive with him he says. I react to him like this because to me, he is so dumb sometimes I cannot understand him. It’s true I am condescending to him sometimes. When people say and do stupid things around me I do get condescending with their stupidity, its true, dumb people stupify me.

So much of what he says makes absolutely no sense to me, even he doesn’t know his own point most of the time when he speaks. Vinay has a circular way of speaking around his own points without ever using any of the words needed to express himself clearly, he communicates like a man.

Around Captain Lexi…

say what you mean

and mean what you say

be direct so I can try to understand you

Vinay is a lovely human being and one of the nicest crew I have ever had the pleasure of living with. He is just a delightful person to be around, I have enjoyed adventuring with him very much, but he didn’t do too well as a sailor. He still cannot tie on a preventer with a quick release knot. I have shown him dozens and dozens of times how to do it, we practiced over and over but in the 10 times I sent him on deck to tie on a preventer for me he only got it correct twice. It’s not that hard.

He seems unteachable.

I think there is a reason I do not prefer old people as crew, their clay is hard, their brains unable to learn new things or remember stuff. I am unsure if Vinay is leaving my boat any more skilled than when he came, it’s a shame really.

 

Moving Forward

Yesterday we arrived in Luperon and got ourselves checked into the country. For the record nobody ever asked for, or cared about, clearance exit papers from the USA. Another waste of time trying to follow fuzzy rules. I think I will make and release a video about the check in process here just for other sailors to know what to expect if they are ever coming here. Give me a few days though please, very busy.

 

 

We explored the town, I got a local working SIM card and got back online again… YAY…! I got Vinay his Covid test for his flight home this morning. I arranged transportation for him to the airport today. We hung out with other cruisers last night playing trivia at Las Palmas. It was fun. I got to see the newly renovated and rather spiffy Wendy’s bar. Luperon is like a classic place, famous among sailors on this side of the planet.

This morning I dinghied Vinay to shore at the Las Velas Marina for his ride to pick him up and bring him home. I hugged him goodbye with genuine affection. I am going to miss him, he is a delightful man and we had a lovely time together on the ocean for the last month.

 

 

I asked him if he would write something for you about his experience sailing with Captain Lexi, same rules as always… be open… unfiltered… direct… and honest…

You can    CLICK HERE     to see what he wrote

***

My next crew is Daisy from the UK. She was supposed to arrive today but had a paperwork mix up with America and was denied boarding her flight. That stupid ESTA even for a connecting flight in Miami caught her by surprise, she couldn’t imagine America having such stupid rules….  ha ha ha….

Anyway… today I washed all the bedding and have things ready for her arrival but I sit here alone now writing this. She was able to rebook everything for an arrival tomorrow… so fingers crossed this works out.

I will stay here for 7-10 days to train her, then we will begin sailing to the Bahamas soon.

I think it will be nice having more female energy on the boat again.

Fingers crossed this goes well… I do not have a great batting average weeding out bad crew before they get here… it’s always a 50/50 gamble for me… people lie… and people hide stuff.

 

cheers sailors and sailing fans…

 

Wild Captain Lexi

 

The peaceful and calm girl today