Anything else? Why, yes, of course, there was lots more. We owned a boat now.
Energize Me
A constant source of consternation for us and amusement for you will be learning how to track your energy usage, or amp hours. I have to get a little technical here, but stick with me—it’s important.
Some things work on 12 volts (remember car cigarette lighters?), such as your lights, electric anchor windlass (it brings your anchor up and down), navigation electronics, bilge pump (it sucks water out of your boat if you spring a leak), anchor light, refrigeration, and VHF/radio.
You’ll likely want some things that work only on 110 or 220 volts, such as your laptop, hair dryer, and blender. Although you can get 12-volt versions of these, we found that those products lacked oomph.
For 110- and 220-volt appliances, you’ll need an inverter. It converts the voltage as needed when you plug your gadgets into the boat’s electrical sockets. An inverter is a clunky, heavy thing (kind of like a large car battery) that is usually located near your house batteries. Your house batteries (basically the same as those in your car or golf cart) store any energy you collect via solar panel, wind generator, or alternator (a device that makes energy when you run your engines). We had six house batteries (interconnected to combine their capacities), two solar panels, two wind generators, and two alternators.
Note: Inverters are notoriously hard on rechargeable batteries (such as laptop batteries, digital cameras, handheld VHFs, and rechargeable spotlights). Voltage fluctuates, which shortens the life of the battery. So have a few extra rechargeable batteries on hand, too, or use a generator set (genset) instead.
So let’s recap: You’ll need something (or several somethings) to power all your electronic must-haves (you absolutely must have them, right?). You’ll need things like a solar panel, a wind generator, an alternator, and/or a genset. The trick is to know how much energy/amps you’re using regularly and then match your energy-making doodads to keep up with that usage.
If you know you’re going to want a microwave, washer/dryer, TV, several laptops, ice maker, and so on, you’ll need to think about how to power those items before you leave the dock. We didn’t do that.
If you understood anything I said above, you might be wondering how we knew how much energy we had used and still had left over. Well, this is where some of our daily entertainment came in. We spent countless hours turning things on and then watching the battery monitor display (located in the navigation center) show the number of amps being used. A hair dryer used an amazing amount of electricity and was retired immediately. That same display told us when our batteries were low and even when they were too high (yes, you can overcharge your batteries, which is why you need a controller/regulator). We spent an inordinate amount of time talking to other boaters about their amperage use and bragging about who had the better power-generating/saving systems. You will too; trust me.
Okay, so enough of that technical stuff. Let’s get to the point. There was one. We hadn’t had wind in a while to allow our wind generators to charge our house batteries, so we had been running the engines (with an alternator on each) in neutral for an hour every day to do the job. We did have two solar panels, but they were tiny. It turned out they weren’t working either, but we didn’t know that yet.
According to the battery monitoring display, something wasn’t right. The batteries didn’t appear to be charging. Off to get an electronic amp/voltage meter reader (which we should have had anyway). That gadget gave us the bad news that there was something wrong with one of the alternators. So we raced around trying to find someone to rebuild the alternator for us. Found him. Done. Whew.
You have to be wondering how two inexperienced people like us were figuring out all this. Well, we called fellow Island Spirit owners Stephen and Estelle—a lot. We were also thankful for all the boat equipment-specific manuals and notes left on board by prior owners. They were quite dog-eared by the end of our travels.
Most boat manufacturers have some form of “fan” club out there, from blogs to chat groups. You might want to join one that represents your boat make. Even with their help, we were overwhelmed at times. What had we gotten ourselves into? It would not be the last time we asked ourselves that question.
Are we finally ready to leave Florida? Yes, as a matter of fact, we are, and we better leave before we get a bill for $18,000.
7
Bahamas Here We Come!
November 8, 2006: Off we go! Onto a sandbar. I kid you not. We got about 10 minutes from where we were anchored and came to a sudden halt. Oops! How incredibly embarrassing!! Didn’t we have charts? Well, not exactly. Note the name of this book (instances like these are where blonde jokes come from). We had charts from the Bahamas down the Caribbean chain. Charts are expensive. We didn’t want to buy charts of Florida; we were leaving Florida with no plans to come back. So we figured that once we got past Miami and into the ocean, we’d be home free. We also ASSumed that the captain would either have charts or know the area. Nope. Okay, then, we were counting on the chartplotter. Here comes another lesson.
LESSON 19: IS IT YOU? Probably. Chartplotters are only as good as the people who use them. Ours was a tiny Raymarine that I could barely get my bearings on and was set with the north arrow up instead of Course Up. If I was going south, it looked as though I was going north, and I had to maneuver as if looking at a mirror (doing the opposite of what I thought I should do). I got very confused and had taken us on the opposite side of where we should have been—hence the sandbar. Had I looked up (and hadn’t been hyperventilating about taking the wheel for the first time), I likely would have noticed the different-color waters, and maybe even a buoy.
Once we were under way again, I remedied this by changing to the Course Up option, adding more waypoints (route markers provided by paper charts and/or marine books that you add to your chartplotter), and looking up more often.
Where was the captain, you ask? Standing right there. Although Captain Tim was a really nice guy, he didn’t know the area well and he eschewed all electronics (other than his basic handheld GPS), so he didn’t understand the chartplotter to help me with it. Alrighty then.
We waited a few minutes for the tide to come back in (luck was on our side here) and for a motorboat’s wake to kick us off, and then we were off for real this time!
Tacking
Wahoo! We had 3- to 4-foot seas with about 20 knots of wind. This would have been great except that the waves were on the nose (dead-on, in our face, right in the direction we were trying to go). Typically, when the winds are coming directly at you, so are the waves. Such conditions can be choppy and very wet. It also means you can’t sail a straight line. We had a choice to tack or motorsail, and we chose to do a little of each.
LESSON 20: NEPTUNE HAS A STRANGE SENSE OF HUMOR You will have conditions on the nose so often (sailing close-hauled) that you’ll wonder if it’s some cruel joke by the sea gods, who always seem to know what direction you’re headed. I can see them up (or down) there laughing now as we all get sprayed in the face and tossed around for their entertainment.
Why use the engines? Well, here’s a quick lesson on tacking. There are plenty of books to teach you the basics of sailing (such as The Complete Sailor). If you already know this stuff, read it anyway, because it explains why we didn’t do it.
You go through the trouble of tacking when the winds are coming straight at you, which makes it impossible to fill the sails. To try to catch some wind, you zigzag. Some basics here: you have to sail at an angle to the wind. The exact angle depends on the design of your boat. A racing monohull can sail as close as 35 degrees off the wind; other boats, such as catamarans and some cruising mono-hulls, need to sail at a wider angle, say 50 to 60 degrees off the wind. You’ll zig going about 60 degrees to the west of your destination, and then zag going about 60 degrees to the east of your destination. The trick is to zig and zag at just the right times, and with just enough forward movement (the maximum allow
ed before you lose the wind in your sails again) so that at some point you end up at your destination. It can add up to a lot of extra miles. You better go a lot faster when sailing off the wind than going straight into the wind (with your engines on), because you have to make up the distance you’ve just added by all those jags you’ve made.
Sometimes you don’t make up that speed and, although you save fuel, you lose time. This is not a problem if you have lots of time to spare. But if you’re pushing to get somewhere by nightfall or stay ahead of a storm, adding hours to a trip can be tiring, frustrating, and even dangerous.
More often than not, many of us keep our sails up, turn on our engines, and try to plow as straight as possible to our destination. This is called motorsailing. And that’s what we did, because we were on a schedule and had lost time because of the grounding.
We also weren’t sure how much speed we’d lose or gain in the Gulf Stream, a current that can hinder or help. The Gulf Stream goes north, and we wanted to go east. Currents can run anywhere from 3 to 6 knots throughout. The only factors within your control are the smarts to wait another day if there are northerly winds (north winds and a northerly current will make for a very slow, choppy trip, not to mention dangerous if those northerly winds are much over 15 knots), and plotting a course that takes you a bit more south than you plan to go so you can ride the current back up. We didn’t apply the second part (we headed northeast), but at least the winds started out in the right direction. They didn’t turn on us until we had crossed the Gulf Stream, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This leads me to …
LESSON 21: BIGGER IS BETTER Have decent-size engines for your boat. You will be motoring more than you can imagine, sometimes in harsh conditions. You may have bought a sailboat, but excruciatingly often the sails will simply help you motor faster. Too often there was just enough wind to push us along at about 4 knots (or less), which is good only for a leisurely day sail. If we needed to get somewhere, we would turn on one engine (alternating with the other to save fuel) or both of them to move at a pretty good clip. Our diesels were 18 horsepower (hp), which, on a catamaran, was pathetic. They weren’t unsafe and they got us where we wanted to go, but the next size up, 26 hp, would have been much better.
LESSON 22: NO, YOU DO NOT LIKE IT ROUGH Try not to go out in rough seas. There are so many reasons: stress on your boat structure and stress on the sailors. Even your fuel will be affected; all that sloshing around mixes up sediment from the bottom of the tank, clogs your fuel filters, and kills your engines (consider using dual fuel filters).
Back on Track
Sailing … motorsailing. Who cared? We were on our way to the Bahamas!
We were like little kids oohing and ahhing over the flying fish skimming across the water like Frisbees. We were enthralled to be surrounded by nothing but ocean. We were in awe of the fact that we had actually pulled it off. We also got a little seasick, including Shaka, mainly because of the diesel fumes blowing around us all day. It’s never perfect.
We had lots of time to take it all in because our late start and the headwinds kept us from reaching our destination before nightfall. Looking back on it, I’m not sure how our trusty captain thought we’d get there during daylight hours in the best of conditions without leaving in the wee hours of the morning. This was a 98-mile crossing. Even at a respectable 7 knots, it would have taken 14 hours to reach our destination, but what did we know? I can’t speak for Captain Tim.
Watching the sun set was both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. You do not sail in the Bahamas at night (very shallow, very reefy), regardless of your experience. During the evening, the winds increased to 30 knots, slowing us down further (we sure didn’t tack in the dark), and the moon didn’t come up to help until much later. We dropped the luffing front sail, tightened the mainsail, and relied on the engines to keep us moving.
Upon our arrival, we looked like a bunch of idiots as we tried to lower the mainsail in the wind and choppy seas, but down it came eventually.
Captain Tim didn’t want to deal with anchoring a “strange” boat with two amateurs in the dark, so he took us into Old Bahama Bay, West End marina. This was rather unnerving with Michael and me on the bow (front of the boat) shining a spotlight to direct Captain Tim around the reefs (in waters that were thankfully clear, even in the dark) as we maneuvered our way inside the narrow entrance. In this case, I think anchoring would have been easier, but hindsight and all that … We got tied off to the main dock and high-fived one another. Yay! We did it! Our first motorsail and we were still alive and the boat was still afloat! Not much beats that feeling. We would discover that every time we completed a crossing successfully, we would feel so good to be anchored/moored/slipped and secure in a new (to us) spot.
Turns out we were lucky we left Florida when we did. Waves were building up in the Gulf Stream, and small-craft advisories (that’s us!) went into effect. (Small-craft advisories [SCAs] are issued by NOAA to warn of sea and wave conditions that could potentially put small boats in jeopardy.) It couldn’t have been calmer where we were.
My favorite part of the crossing was using the chartplotter (the computer geek in me). I started understanding what I was looking at—after changing the map view—and began adjusting other settings and comparing the electronic maps to our paper charts. Once the chartplotter was just the way we (well, I) liked it, I just watched our little boat marker move across the screen heading along the blue line, aiming for the small anchor symbol by West End, Grand Bahama Island. Of course, there was always the danger that something could happen to the chartplotter, which could be catastrophic because of our lack of paper-chart reading and current-calculating abilities, but that’s why we had three backups (our laptop and two handheld GPS units). Did this method take away from the sailing experience? Well, maybe a little bit, but when you don’t have a clue what you’re doing, it’s a godsend to be able to understand something—anything at all.
Exploring the Islands
8
Welcome to the Bahamas!
Our maiden voyage was now complete. Boy, did we sleep well. Next up? Customs. Oooh, another first. The customs office opened at 9 a.m. and we were hoping to be sailing by 10. We didn’t want another nightfall arrival.
The customs officials were nowhere to be found. 10 a.m. Nobody. 10:30. Sigh. We were learning the meaning of “island time.” We also needed to get moving. At 10:45 we could wait no longer, threw off the dock lines, headed out the cove entrance, and just happened to notice the customs’ vehicle pull into the parking lot. Wave to the agents, everybody! We figured we’d just check in at the next island. Who’d know?
Great Sale Cay
We had a fantastic sail. Not a motorsail but an outright both sails up and out sail. We even had a dolphin swim in our wake, just like in the movies.
We lost our mojo though when the winds died about three-quarters of the way there. We turned on the engines and were a bit alarmed when one immediately started spewing black smoke. Abandon ship! Just kidding. We did shut down the engine before the flames made much of an appearance. Since we didn’t have time to troubleshoot the problem, we just kept the engine off and limped along on one.
During the sail/motorsail, a couple of times I could see via the chartplotter that we were getting off course and went to ask our napping captain if we were on the right track. Remember, he didn’t care about the plotter and was confident in his calculations, so he blew me off. That is, until I more forcefully asked him to recalculate his bearings because I really thought something was wrong (this was my boat, right?).
Turns out he had entered the wrong coordinate and, now corrected, his GPS meshed with my chartplotter. Yep, both now confirmed that we were two hours off course.
I was too frustrated to gloat. Any hope of getting to Great Sale Cay before dark was long gone. Because of the miscalculation, a 40-mile jaunt turned into a 49-mile jaunt, costing us precious time. Motoring on one engine didn’t help either.
LESSON
23: TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS Look in the mirror and say, “I trust you.” This was one of the biggest lessons I learned on our trip. You’ll be amazed at how smart your inner voice is when you allow yourself to listen to it.
Here came another sunset, albeit a beautiful one. And then it was dark.
We arrived on Great Sale Cay at 8:30 p.m. This time we did anchor … with one engine. You know, there’s a reason why catamarans have two engines. One side counters the other. Put them both in the same gear at an equal speed and you go straight. Use only one engine and you go off in one direction and wind up turning in a large circle. There is a way to finesse this or you can simply drop your dinghy and use it as your other engine, but we didn’t know about any of those options yet, and apparently neither did Captain Tim. So we spun around trying to get the anchor set and hoped no one could see us in the dark (luckily we were alone). If you make a fool of yourself and no one sees, did it really happen?
Once anchored, all the worries of the day fell away. Sure we had a teensy engine fire and a slight detour, but we also had our first great sail and a dolphin visit to boot! We were in a place different from the day before and would be going to a new place the next day too. We were cruising!
Allans-Pensacola Cay
The next morning was incredibly calm. I’d never seen anything like it. This is the ocean! How deceptive it could be. Kind of like a sleeping baby! We tentatively turned on both engines, and all was well. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, we pretended that nothing had happened the day before and motored on. We got about 10 miles into the 38-mile trip when the “good” engine started belching the black stuff. What the …?!
A Sail of Two Idiots Page 6