July 25, 2014

Friday.  Hogs Cay.  Sailed over from Diamond Salt Works Harbour, Long Island.  About 45 miles.  Took us 9 hours.  Gorgeous water.  Light green.  Clear to the bottom.  Followed the coast most of the day until we broke over to the Hog Cay Cut.  Depth came up to 3.5 feet under the keel.  Beautiful anchorage here.  Pure sand.  Still no topping lift.  Will deal with that in Georgetown. 

Made the cross from Great Inagua to Long Island last night.  About 130 miles.  Left around noon.  Expected to arrive around 2pm today.  We arrived at 6am.  We were flying right out of the gates.  We hit 8 knots in the lee of Inagua.  Saw the Morton salt piles as we came around the north side.  Second largest salt manufacturing in the world.  We crossed through the Mira Por Vos Passage around 11pm.  Our top speed for the night was 10.4 knots from what I saw. 

That was easily the most boring sail.  104 hours.  4.5 days/4 nights, non-stop from Fajardo, Puerto Rico to Great Inagua, Bahamas.  We sailed completely past the island of Puerto Rico, across the Mona Passage, past the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Turks and Caico’s up to the Bahamas.  If anything had gone wrong, we would have drifted downwind until we hit Cuba.

We bid a bittersweet goodbye to our dear friends on Discovery and Daydreamer on Thursday.  Then we set off down wind for a night crossing from Marigot, St. Martin to the British Virgin Islands (BVI's).  We hoped for an uneventful crossing.  That's not what we got. Here are some excerpts from my journal.  

Okay, so I haven’t posted in a while.  That can only mean one thing: things are going well.  Honestly, we’ve been so busy sailing, hiking, snorkeling, scuba diving, etc. that there hasn’t much time to think about blogging.  I know, I know.  Life can be tough.  Plus we’ve had the luxury of being in a couple of fairly remote anchorages out of reach of civilization (wifi).  But in the spirit of sharing some good news (and hopefully not jinxing ourselves), I thought I’d give a few updates.  These skew toward tech/geeky, but they’re all part of life aboard Fezywig.  Here are a few things that have gone right recently:

Saving Mr. Banks.  I realize I’m a bit late to the party.  The movie has come and gone, so to speak.  But I just watched it, first with Emily and then again as a whole family.  Since I’ve got a head full of ideas about it and I haven’t been able to move on with my life, I figured I’d better write those ideas down.  Then I can, well, get on with my life.

I’ll start by saying that I was both inspired and frightened by this movie.  I should also say, that I think this is one of the great screenplays to come along in quite a while (giving Dan in Real Life a run for its money).  Every now and then I see or read something and think, “Dang, I wish I’d written that.”  This is one of those stories.

I won’t bore anyone with the details of our engine saga, but suffice it to say, I can now change a starter motor in eight minutes flat, and I’m getting the swing of lots of other stuff.  Our starboard engine runs like a champ.  After many swapped parts and mechanic hours, our port engine is adequate enough that we’re heading out for the weekend to test the waters.  We’re off to Anguilla with two other kid-boats Day Dreamer and Discovery.  It’s a short sail across the channel, but we think it will be good for all of us. 

Today was one of those “I think we should just sell the boat” kind of days.  Not because anything in particular had gone wrong with the boat, but you know, everything else did.

I replaced the battery in my laptop last night.  Simple enough.  Remove the back, remove the battery, put in the new one.  Boot up.  This is what I did last night.  This morning I realized the laptop was not charging, with or without the battery.  And why might this be a dangerous situation on a boat? If you can’t charge your laptop, then you can’t get on Facebook, and if you can’t get on Facebook you can’t post pictures, and if you can’t post pictures it’s like it never happened, and if it never happened, well, what’s the point?

Today was all about water.  It wasn’t supposed to be.  But it was.   A few fast facts about our boat as it relates to hydration:

• We are anchored in a salt water lagoon.  Nothing will crust you up quite as quickly as salt water.
• Our boat has two water tanks totaling 600 liters (about 180 gallons for us non-metrics).
• There are seven people (sometimes eight, with visiting guests) on board.
• Most importantly: we have no way to create fresh water

We’re still trying to figure out how we’re going to manage our water needs ‘long term’, but in the mean time we’ve been trying out a few options: