The past 9 months have been a learning experience. I started with no catamaran sailing experience, and Paul had done some, but minimal. We have now sailed approximately 800 miles with The Tintas, and the learning curve has been quick.
Originally, everything was new. Anchoring, mooring, steering, tacking, putting up our sails and taking them down again, stowing things away in new and inventive places so they don’t spill all over the galley, etc. But we are becoming “people who have a specific limited knowledge on a specific vessel”. That means that for some tasks, Paul and I are old hat. Anchoring, for instance, is a no-drama situation. So is mooring, tying certain knots, and sailing in conditions with 1-2 meter seas with winds up to 20 knots.
But now we are adding on more elements. We have added a guest on board for the month of November, which has actually been a fun way to “spread out the work”/tell someone else what to do, and we’ve begun doing overnight crossings in between islands.
Night sailing sounded very scary to me just a few months ago. For one I am, secretly, afraid of the dark. As a person who watches scary movies and reads scary stories, and has a spooky kind of sensibility, night time is the time for scary things to pop out. But for another thing, sailing at night is more difficult. You can’t see ships around you, you can’t see waves coming, you can’t see the land, or wind lines. Luckily we have excellent navigation and radar, but you have to trust them in order to use them. But with minimal light pollution, a full moon is actually an ideal way to see at night, so long as we keep all the other boat lights turned off.
Our first night crossing was slow. There was minimal wind, and we tried 2 hour shifts, 2 on, 4 off. All of us arrived in Martinique the next morning groggy and triumphant. It had been a nearly full moon so the sky was bright, and Paul had even seen whales around sunrise. But 2 hours on and 4 hours off was not quite enough of a break to get real sleep in.
Our second overnight crossing we tried three hour shifts, to allow 6 hour breaks for the people not on watch. However, the swell was much larger, the wind much faster, the moon had been blocked by clouds, and the adrenaline was much higher. I made a series of mistakes that I will remember for future passages-
My first mistake was cooking a hot dish on the stove top. I volunteered for dinner duty, and my shift was right after. However, with the heavy swell and wind, I had to stand next to the stove top for the entire hour it took to cook a coconut curry and rice, and keep both my hands on the actual pots to prevent them from sliding. I had sweat dripping down my forehead and back.
My second mistake was having a stomach bug before the journey. I don’t normally suffer from sea sickness, but almost everyone did last night, and I especially felt more nauseated after the past few days of indigestion and light fever and ear aches. Nothing makes you want to hork more than no visual references and extreme wave action on a boat.
Nevertheless, she persisted, and The Tintas arrived the morning shortly after sunrise in the Saints; Paul at the helm, and I groggily ready to put the sails away and moor the boat. We made it, again, proving that a bit of courage and bravery, a bit of practice and skill, can show you the unique and beautiful vistas in life. We are lucky, and although my stomach is still queasy, I’m grateful to Paul for making me brave enough to reap the rewards.
Fair seas yall,
L+P
TIBURON MARINO 