Wednesday 16 May: No alarm this morning, and all the blinds are closed, keeping out the light. We sleep for 10 hours, waking up to a lovely bright day surrounded by turquoise waters of Falmouth bay.
First job is to remove the vang again and take it into Antigua Rigging where they will re-service it, after our attempt to get a good job done in Martinique. The owner, Stan from New Zealand, says that the seal which blew out is only a wiper seal. Something else must have leaked inside if we had oil pressuring this wiper seal.
Next, we head back into English Harbour and Nelson’s Dockyard to clear customs. Its quite a long affair. We enter all our data on a PC first, then see customs, then immigration then the harbor authorities for payment, including a daily charge to be at anchor in the bay! There must be 10 people in the office to deal with all the bureaucracy. Antigua is clearly very British still!
We then take some more time in Nelson’s Dockyard. Its really very well done. The museum in the old Officers Quarters has lots of very good exhibits. Its interesting to read that most of the sailor or soldiers sent to a West Indies assignment considered it a death penalty. But this was not due to any fatalities in combat. Most of the deaths were due to tropical diseases, with malaria and yellow fever being primary.
After the museum we had across the harbor in a small ferry to the old gunpowder storage which has been made into a boutique hotel. We have a very nice coffee by the pool overlooking English Harbor and Nelson’s Dockyard along with amazing colours of bougainvillea and other flowers. Really very scenic and very peaceful. We can only imagine it with all the hustle and bustle of a regatta day.
Back on Cloudy Bay, we have lunch and decide to stay on board catching up on a few things. Oana does admin on the PC while Glen refits the hatch covers which tried to blow off while sailing yesterday. He also adds white plastic tubes to the lower shrouds to protect the main sail when off wind.
While up there we notice that several of the webbing strips that hold the mainsail clew to the clew sheave have worn through. Probably only 50% of the strength remains, at best. We have a similar issue on the genoa clew where 1 or 5 webbing strips has also worn through. This is something we will need to get repaired before embarking on any long passage to the USA. If we lose control of the clew on either sail, we will be in big trouble.
A sailmaker can easily repair such a thing, but the biggest challenge is to get the sails down, folded and delivered to the sail maker. They are huge and very heavy. Its also always windy here, so really tough to do, especially the mainsail because it needs all its vertical battens removed before is can be dropped. The longest ones are 5m longer than CB! We will have to find someone who can come and help us. Even on a windless day, it’s a mammoth task for the 2 of us to do. One of the downsides of sailing a 54footer: big yacht = big heavy sails.
In the early evening we get out the maps and weather patterns and start to look at how we should proceed to eastern USA, where we would like to be by July at the latest. There are 2 options:
- A 6 day (900mile) reach to Bermuda, then a 4 day (600miles) to Road Island or New York. 10 days out in the Atlantic could be painful, but will certainly get us there quickest. But it could be a challenge with just 2 of us.
- Getting to Florida or Carolinas in 3 legs of about 3 days (400 miles) each. First one to Turks and Caicos, second to Bahamas, third to Charlestown in South Carolina; then hopping up the coast for another 800 miles to Road Island. This one would take about a month.
Either way, we decide that we need to start next season in Guadeloupe heading westwards. Getting back from USA eastwards to the leeward islands will certainly mean heading out from Annapolis to Bermuda then directly south. Florida to the Leewards would be upwind all the way. Cruising folks don’t do upwind, especially against the Atlantic trades!
We park these ideas and Glen starts the generator. While in the engine room, he searches again for our mysterious leak …. And he believes he had found it. Well, it may not be THE leak, but certainly a leak. One of the manifold fittings under the generator is spraying a fine mist of seawater. It feels like it has a minor hole in the stainless steel welding. We say “feels like” because that is all he can do: reach his hand down under the generator through a small gap and feel where the spray is coming from. Fixing it will be a big job. We will have to lift the whole generator to get at the manifold that needs repair! Oh no, the To Do list just gained one very big item.
Later in the evening we do something that we have not done for a while, start to edit videos. We are soooo behind now (no production since Dominica), we have a lot of catch up to do.