Saturday 14 Mar, passage Jamaica to Cayman, day 2: Our passage just got 100nm longer, and a lot more uncomfortable.
At midnight we are 50nm SE of Cayman Brac, gently sailing at 7kts in 7kts of wind on beam reach. Apparent wind is at 50deg. The moon is up making the water sparkle and the white sails glow in the darkness. Just a perfect night time sailing. Temperature in the cockpit is also just right. I’m in shorts and no shirt, and only just starting to feel a little cool, with the breeze coming through the open windscreen window.
Oana is up on shift at 1am and during her 3 hours the wind picks up to 18-19kts. When I come up on shift she has Cloudy flying along at top speed over relatively flat water. Lovely. But that soon all changes as we get further into the Cuban katabatic wind zone. The waves significantly steepen to 2-3m and they are very short, maybe only a boat length between them, and we are getting seriously tossed about as they relentlessly hit us beam on. Occasionally, a breaking wave slams into the hull sending spray over the deck. One put a sizable splosh into the dinghy on the davits. Not good. I check if Oana is ok in bed. She’s sleeping across our double berth jammed head and feet. But she is still rolling around all over the place. Surely she cannot be asleep? (Later, she tells me she couldn’t sleep).
As the sun rises I easily see the NE end of Cayman Brac by its 140ft limestone cliffs which are riddled with caves. Both Cayman Brac and Little Cayman are cigar shaped islands, elongated in a NE-SW direction, each about 10nm long by 2nm wide. This wind and waves are from the NE, so it’s really hard to understand where we would find any shelter with this sea state. There are no harbours and no bays. As we round the NE end of Cayman Brac, the waves are crashing strongly at the cliff base. The Caymans are basically peaks of a 6000m undersea mountain. From the shoreline it quickly drops off to thousands of metres. Hence the waves have nothing to slow them down.
Sailing off wind, down the north side of Brac we pass the cargo port area at The Creek. Not a chance of stopping there. Although the waves are slightly less, they are still breaking over the concrete dock! Further along we spot a catamaran. It seems to be on a mooring, so there is hope. But then we see it is being tossed all over the place in the 2m waves running down the coast. So stopping there is out of the question too.
At 8:30 we call the customs on VHF for advice. As I suspected, the advice is not to stop. The mooring buoys are untenable in this weather and even if we took one, there is no way to get ashore, let alone launch the dinghy safely. Little Cayman does have a small shallow bay sheltered behind a reef but it seems too shallow for us, plus the customs confirms we can only check in on Cayman Brac.
So with heavy hearts we have to submit to the fact that we can’t stop at these two interesting islands. We’ll have to carry on to Grand Cayman, 100nm to the SW. We had kind of looked forward to rest from this horrible sea condition, but it looks like we’ll have to endure it for another 12-14 hours at least 🙁 Maybe we fly here from Grand Cayman.
While we are in the very slightly calmer conditions between the 2 islands, we set the genoa on the pole and hold the main out with gybe preventer. It’s going to be a dead-downwind run to Grand Cayman. At first, in the slight lee of the islands, the waves are tolerable. But once a few miles downwind the big ones arrive again and we are rolling like a dog, as we sail fast downwind in 20kts. Did we really endure 17 days like this crossing the Atlantic? Can’t remember it being this bad.
And 1/3 the way to Grand Cayman I realise we are on the wrong gybe. So in the rolling sea we gybe main and poled genoa onto port tack. It’s very tricky maneuvering that big pole on the foredeck in these conditions, even with two of us. Once fully gybed we are sailing a little more comfortably now running dead square to the waves. And our afternoon continues like this with the wind gradually decreasing. And as usual when running in waves, the slower we go the more we roll. All afternoon we look at the “time to go till next waypoint” and for hour after hour it seems stuck at “4 hours to go” due to our ever decreasing speed. Very frustrating.
We have lunch gripping on and our speed drops to just 4kts. Suddenly we declare: “enough is enough!” The genoa goes away, the mainsail gets pinned in centrally and the engine goes on. It seems a waste of 11-12kts of good wind, but we have a 1kt current against us and the sails are flogging themselves to death up there, each time we roll.
Motoring, our SOG is 7kts and the motion a whole world better. And time to next waypoint (at the SE end of the island) is suddenly less than 2 hours. It feels like a reward! And we continue motoring like this all the way along the 20nm of the south coast. But by now it’s dark, and we can’t see anything other than street lights and car headlamps.
With 2 hours to go we call port security on VHF. Like all UK islands (Gibraltar, Bermuda, here) they are very polite and extremely thorough in their process. He takes details, gives us exact coordinates of a buoy to pick up, and says we must call in again in the morning when the authorities come to work. Oh, and it’s a US$70 overtime charge to check in on a Sunday. Bummer! We should have thought of that and left Jamaica a day later 🙁
Finally we round the SW corner and head north to George Town. We search around for the orange bouys but see nothing. Odd, because the coordinates he gave were very exact. Maybe we took them down wrong? Then Oana spots a white one and we pick it up. Not sure how she managed to lift the painter, it was 50mm diameter wet rope, good enough to moor a ship with! Once safely tied up we call in again as instructed. He notes our position without comment (we were expecting: “you are in the wrong place”) and tells us to call at 10am tomorrow for next instructions.
It felt like a lot longer passage than just one overnight, for some reason. Maybe the disappointment at not seeing the other 2 Cayman Islands, maybe the awful sea state.
It’s Saturday night and from the shore we can hear music and frivolities. The boat is rocking a bit too, but nothing will stop us sleeping tonight. So we go do just that. Zzzzz just 20 minutes after arrival.
