How To Read This Blog and Final Thoughts

Since the nature of blogs is to post/show the most recent entry first, let me explain an easy way to follow along with our trip blog/story/report, ect.

On the right side of this page you will see a series of "triangles and dates". It's best if you expand the tree to show all the dates as shown below:

Then from there click on the OLDEST date. May 18th to May 22nd for the Passport Debacle story or May 24th to June 3rd for the "Trip Report/Blog"

Once you have read a post/blog, the easiest way to the next blog in succession is to click the link at the bottom of the post in the lower left side. Like here:

Also, some of the blog was written while on 'ilon. Since returning, I added some text and photos to several of those posts. Text in blue italic was written after. Sometimes I had to blog days after and have since changed the date to keep continuity of the report.

After trip items of note.

1. 
   
   Loved Anegada once again. Might even do 3 days next time...still felt rushed even with 2 days.


2. 
   
   Have done 2 days in North Sound in 2000, 2005 and this time. Just don't see a need. Maybe if we rented a jeep to see VG, but other then that BEYC is turning into a "been there, done that" location. Saba Rock still has a place in my heart, but not sure I would overnight there or Leverick next time. Who knows.


3. 
   
   A boat with A/C is looking better and better every time. With NO wind at night it was really tough to sleep in the heat.


4. 
   
   I forgot how much I enjoy sailing until that last day with 25+ knot winds...whoo hoo!


5. 
   
   Bring 11 bathings suits next time.


6. 
   
   Taking a hardside cooler and 2 softsided was easy. Next time I'll go for the 5 day Coleman eXtreme cooler.


7. 
   
   Keeping ice as ice is a 24hr job.


8. 
   
   Because of #7, next time I'll do more can beer and less mix drinks. Mix drinks were not enjoyable when the ice melts within 3 minutes. We over provisioned on the "mixed drinks"


9. 
   
   Speaking of ice, we bought 43 bags of ice during our 10 days. At an average cost $4/bag thats $172 just in ice.


10. 
    
    We used roughly 22 gallons of diesel even with little to no wind in the first 5 days. I wrote the engine hours down at the start of our trip and at the time of writing this I can't find where I wrote down the final engine hours.


11. Stomach bugs suck.


12. Went ~150 miles with Kokomo.

~Bryan

Heavy Seas, Heavy Wind and Heavy Hangovers

Sunday, June 03 Norman to Conch Charters Base, Road Town, Tortola (8.9 miles)

Some of us get up early to pack and clean up the boat while others sleep off their "last hooorah"

There is a steady 20+ knots of wind in The Bight and this makes the chore of packing much more tolerable. Once we get to the docks we won't be pointing into the wind anymore and it gets very hot while in the boat.

Cindy wanted to snorkel The Caves one last time, so we dropped the ball around 9am and headed around the corner to The Caves. We snag a ball and jump in. Within minutes all 6 balls are taken. We snorkel for a good 40 minutes and see a lot of fish with good sunlight. The highlight was the seeing a Spotted Eagle Ray.

We quit snorkeling, drop the ball and raise the sails for some very brisk sailing. 10 days ago when we last crossed the Sir Frances Drake Channel, the winds we 4-7 knots. They are now at a nutty 25+ knots. The crew is either busy with the packing/cleaning or nursing a top-10 hangover, so I raise the main with 1 reef in place. Soon the boat is humming along at a nice steady 7 knots with no head sail. The wind and seas get real nutty when we get between Norman and Peter Island. I keep the diesels on, but not in gear until we safely passed east of Pelican Island. If we had a sudden stearage failuer or lost the main it would'nt take long to blow into rocks on our port. Once we are in the open channel, I kill the iron sails and unfurl the head sail. We are really cranking now (well, compared to prior week) and get Kokomo settled into a solid 8 knots while crashing through some pretty big seas. I only unfurled the head sail 3/4 since I was single handling the boat.

Unfortunalty, I could'nt keep the traveler in the center. The force on the main kept moving the traveler down wind and this caused a considerable amount of wind to be scrubbed off the main. But even so, we hit 10+ knots a few times.

About half way across the channel, I spot a guy zipping around in a dinghy and quicky realize it's one of the "yacht shots" people. I wake the crew up from their comas and put Kokomo on auto pilot. I tell everyone to go up front and "pose". As soon as he saw that we were on to him he zipped over and started snapping photos. It's amazing the photos they can get while bobbing up and down in 4ft seas. At one point Kokomo is bearing down on him while he clicks away, but he waves his hand in a gesture as to say "keep coming, don't worry about me". Sure enough, just as we are 'bout to run him down he zips out of the way. He gives us a thumbs up and hunts down the next boat. Those photos are here >> http://www.digiproofs.com/ecom/page_view.pl?p=Acry1Tn

I'll be definitely ordering some in the weeks to come. I sorta wish I had full sails up, but I had to be realistic. Being overpowered and single handed is not the smartest move.

We reach the Road Town channel entrance and call Conch Charters as instructed. A member of Conch comes out in a dinghy soon after and takes over Kokomo and brings her into the fuel dock. Again, remarkably we only take on 12 gallons of diesel.

We finish cleaning up Kokomo, pack and give some unused provisions (42 cans of soda) to an outgoing family.

We do the standard boat "check-in" and then take a taxi at 1pm for a 3:30pm flight.

On the way to the airport we make a stop at Pussers to get some last minute gifts and such.



EIS check in was quick and event free. Some of the crew was starving and had planned to eat at the airport until they saw the menu that included an $8 hotdog. We decided that since we had a decent layover in San Juan, we would wait. For some reason they had everyone on our flight leave this air conditioned room and stand outside for 35 minutes.

So we stare at our plane for 35 minutes then finally board and subsequently take off for San Juan.
We land in San Juan, eat, have our flight delayed, delayed some more and eventually take off for Tampa.


~Bryan

Is That The Sound Of 300' Of Anchor Chain Rushing Off The Boat??

Saturday June 2nd, Great Harbour to White Bay to Norman Island (13.2 miles)

Josh, Pam and Cindy went to breakfast at Corsairs at 8am while I stayed behind. I was still feeling like crap but better then the night before. I decided NOT to eat, as eating seemed to make matters worse.

The crew returned about 9:45am with 3 bags of ice and raved about their breakfast...fannntastic. I had a protein bar and warm glass of water.

Anyhow, while they were gorging themselves, I prepared the boat for anchor retrieval and our trip to White Bay. This consists of running the starboard (right) engine for a hour or so to charge the cold plate refrigeration system. Earlier in the trip we had lost a threaded pin that was used to connect the dinghy davits (lifting system) to the dinghy. We had to cannibalize some hardware that was part of our anchor bridle. While anchored in GH, we moved the pin back to the anchor bridle and now needed to remove the bridle so that we could raise the dinghy for the trip to White Bay. So I took care of that, and warmed up the port engine when I saw the crew in the dink returning.

Once the dink was up, we focused attention to bringing up 150 ft of anchor chain. The anchor windlass (the motorized devise that raises the anchor and chain) takes a ton of power/battery juice so it's important to keep the revs up on the starboard engine and steer towards the anchor as the chain comes up with the port. Josh does a good job of pointing in the direction of the anchor as we don't want to move the boat forward by pulling on the anchor. It's blowing near 15 knots and it's a bit tricky to keep the boat into the wind and toward the direction of the anchor. Eventually I get the anchors up hand signal, and begin to power forward when all of a sudden, I heard a "bang" followed by the unique sound of 300' of chain rushing out of the anchor locker to the ocean floor. I run up, look at Josh...the sound is deafening and ask the proverbial "what happened!?" He yells back, "dunno!". We look into the locker to be sure that the bitter end it as least tied to something...it seems to be. What was probably 90 seconds, seemed like forever. Eventually, there's another "bang" and then silence. I attempt to keep Kokomo into the wind with engines in gear just enough to keep her in one place. Meanwhile, Josh attends to the windlass. I'm fearing something went bad with the windlass and now we have to manually pull up the anchor and chain. We find out that the chain jumped off the windlass cog and that the windlass still works. So we repeat the process, and several minutes later we have the anchor up and are on our way. With a total trip picture count of 1800+, you'd think we would have had at least 1 of us scratching our temple as the chain rushes off the boat...but noooo.

We motor around the corner and take the right channel into White Bay. It's blowing like stink and there are 3 balls left. I eye one close to the beach. I look around, as I always do in a crowded area with winds blowing 15-20knots and notice a power cat bearing down on our stern close enough for me to read the model number on his anchor. Whatever, I keep my coarse and rotate Kokomo into the wind right as we came upon the ball....Josh scoops the pennant and hooked...high five!

We take a dip in the crystal clear water first thing. A couple rain showers blow through. Then we dink in to the beach. This is the first and only "populated" place without a dinghy dock. We grab some beers from the self-serve bar at Ivans.

We try to name the famous people pictured with Ivan that are framed all over the bar. I date myself by recognizing Walter Cronkite. Ivan tells us that "happiness" cures everything, so I ask him if it works on empty wallets and sick stomachs...he says, "yup", with a smile.

We get back in the dinghy and dink over to the other side of White Bay. We do the beach bar crawl, stopping at Soggy Dollar first to get our free Painkillers, drop ridiculas money in the store, play wall hooky and chill in the shade.

My stomach was feeling better, but not great and decided to hold off on the libations. A bummer, because my crew was entering Phase 7 out of 10 and I wanted to be with them. We continued the bar crawl down the beach, stopping at Jewels, One Love and I forget the 3rd. Even though I wasn't drinking I could so stay and chill in a beach chair or stand in the water for the next 4 hours, but unfortunately we still had to make a 13 mile journey (into the wind) to Norman Island before dark.

We drop the ball at 2:33pm and set course smack into a 20+ knot headwind. We motor along at about 4-5 knots, the seas aren't to bad, but once we round the West End it's armageddon. Josh is "napping" in the cockpit and the girls are reading/listening to iPods on the tramp as we round the point. The seas really begin kick up. I'm not a good judge of wave height, but lets say they were big enough to bring Kokomo's bow up out of the water then in return smash through the next wave. In an instant the girls were SOAKED. For the next hour, Kokomo chugged along at 3 knots riding up one wave and then burying the bow(s) under water on the next. It was a 'lill nutty.

We arrived at Norman at 4:47pm and there were plenty of balls left. If I remember correctly, i think I counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 90+ balls in The Bight....In the words of Forrest Gump, "That's olllot".

On our way into The Bight we watch with curiosity a 40ft monohull come into the mooring field under FULL sail. It was blowing a steady 20 with gusts hitting 25 knots. At first, I was giving the guy a thumbs up for coming in under full sail, but after a bit I'm thinking this guy is stupid nuts...why isn't he dropping the rags? I could see he had serious weather helm as he zig-zaged through the field. Eventually he sailed right over a moored boats pennant line dragging the moored boat around 90 degrees as the moored boats crew look on in bewilderment while relaxing off the stern on rafts. Obviously this guy is in trouble, and ends up hitting a large cat broadside, then bounces off and is pointed at the shoreline rocks about 20 yards away. Within seconds a powerboat sped over and seemed to try to pull up next to the boat to do god knows what, but the monohull fortunately missed the rocks when the captain brought her around into the wind. About this same time I could see thick black smoke coming from the mono stern as if they were trying to start it or were over revving the engines to get out of the precarious position. I don't know the story, wish I did, but I'd assume the captain decided to be a big man and sail into the mooring field without first starting the engine. I got a feeling the engine wouldn't start when he wanted to, for whatever reason (can it be hard to start the diesel when the rails are in the water?? -don't know) and he quickly found himself in a serious situation. I only saw 2 people on deck including the "captain". Why didn't he furl the head sail to get the boat under control?? Don't know. I had my own 25 knot winds to deal with while pulling up to the ball, so I couldn't pay much attention after I noticed he missed the rocks....Gotta love the entertainment in the anchorage/mooring fields.

My stomach was feeling pretty good during our 2.5 hour crossing, so I consumed several adult beverages, while the rest of my crew slept off theirs. This however, would soon change.

We grab a ball between Pirates and The Willy-T, then dink in to Pirates for dinner. Unfortunately, dinner isn't until 7, so all they have are appetizers. Once again against my better judgment, I eat.

We stick around for a while, while the crew drinks I hang out by the water in a lounge chair feeling like death.

We return to Kokomo around 7 pm. I retire to the "tramp", while the rest of the crew eat boat food and clean up. I'm really trying to get it together so that I can go out for our "last hooora". I just can't do it as I feel worse then before. Cindy decides to hang back with me, so we chill on the "tramp" until the gusting gets to annoying. Josh and Pam head out to Pirates and Willy-T in the dinghy. I actually get a little concerned because the dink's fuel tank is 'bout empty.

I wake around 3am, pop my head out of the hatch to see if the dinghy returned, but see Josh sleeping in a pretzel formation in the cockpit...apparently they made it back ok.

~Bryan

Nice sail, crappy stomach flu

Friday June 1st, Cane Garden Bay to Great Harbour, Jost Van Dyke (6.8 miles)

In the morning we got some provisioning (mostly snacks) and of course more ice.

After which we dropped the ball around 11am and have a nice brisk sail over to Great Harbour, Jost Van Dyke. The trip is just 6.8 miles and we arrive around 12:10 (didn't write it down). We drop the anchor in about 25ft of water. It was overcast with 10-15 knot winds which made it hard to see the anchor. We let the boat settle in after letting out a decent amount of rode. (Anchor line and chain for you land-lubbers) We decide to snorkel the anchor and find that the anchor is NOT snubbed in the sand but rather just hooked on a large rock. This does not make me feel comfortable, so we pull up the anchor and motor over to another location. We find 20ft of water with sand and let out what we believe to be 150ft of chain. Again we snorkel the anchor and can clearly see it is dug in and have a decent amount of chain snaked about on the sea bed.

After feeling comfortable about the anchor, we clean up and head in to Great Harbour for lunch. I'm still not feeling well, but decide to try to eat anyhow. We had no set plan once we dinked in, but ended up walking left from the dinghy dock and shortly found ourselves sitting at Corsairs. We sit at the bar and meet the owner, Vinny. He talks us into getting a "Margarita Bucket" and it ends up being pretty good and a great deal. I think the bucket and bottle of tequila came to $15. It outputs like 7 -10 glasses of margaritas. Unfortunately I was having trouble getting the drinks down, but not to bad. I have been popping "antacids, Pepto and Pepcid" like they fell out of a pinata, but nothing is really helping.



Vinny is from NY and bought the bar back in '02 i think....we chat with him for some time, a great guy and a great salesman. He talks us into having lunch there and well, we do. He was right about the margarita bucket and he was also right about the lunch. Everyone's meal was really good.



We sit at the bar again and have a lengthy discussion about Absinthe. It's what van Gogh, Picasso and Hemingway used to drink and has a bit of allure to it since you can't get it in the USA.


Do you think Vinny likes the Absinthe?.... We head out for Foxy's and tell Vinny we promise to be back later. He tries to get us eat dinner there as well, but we already made plans to eat on the boat.



We walk down to Foxy's, do a little shopping and drink from our bucket of margaritas.

We head back to Kokomo at 3:50pm. Later on Josh and I make a trash run and pick up 2 more bags of ice.

My stomach is feeling like hell by now and wish I hadn't eaten lunch. Eating seems to make it worse.

The rest of the crew prepare dinner and eat aboard Kokomo, while I try to chill on the "tramp".

Around 8:15pm we all dink back in and head over to Corsairs. I felt ok when I left the boat but as soon as I got off the dinghy, I started to feel pretty sick. Cin, Pam and Josh head over to Corsairs and I tell them that I'm going to go for a walk. Walking seemed to make things a little better.

After a while of roaming around I head back to Corsairs and find my crew. I sip on some ginger ale and watch everyone else get nutty. Vinny talks Josh into a $10 shot of the "red" Absinthe. The "green" was like $5 and the "black" was $30 I think.

We decided to head down to Foxy's to check out the scene. It too was rather quiet there. My crew was in party mode while I sipped on my ginger ale, so I decided to go back to Corsairs, chill and watch Pirates of the Caribbean that was playing on the television. I was felling like death.

At 11pm the movie was over and Corsairs closed up ( I was the only one there). I went to the dinghy dock, sat and waited for Cindy, Pam and Josh. They arrived about an hour later.

Got back to Kokomo, they made Nachos.....I curled up in the fetal position on the "tramp".

~Bryan

Bubbly Pool to Bomba's

Thursday May 31st, Little Harbour to Sandy Spit to Diamond Cay to Cane Garden Bay, Tortola (9.2 miles)

Because we got some decent sleep, we were all up and moving about by 6:30am. We dropped the ball by 7:15am and was anchored off Sandy Spit by 7:55am. It was fairly overcast and even rained a bit while at Sandy Spit.

At about 9:10am we pull up the anchor and motor over to Diamond Cay and pick up one of the 9 mooring balls. We head in to Foxy's Taboo about 9:30.

We are greeted by the mayor who in turn directs us to the bubbly pool. However, every now and then he is distracted by something behind the thick vegetation and disappears for a bit but always comes back.









The "hike" to the Bubbly Pool last about 15 minutes and takes us through some moderate terrain. Along the way we catch up to a group of 8 frat guys. They ask if we know how to get to the Bubbly Pool ( I do), but I say "No, but the dog does".....





We reach the pool but unfortunately the north seas aren't high enough to cause a good constant flow over the rocks.

We head back to Foxy's Taboo. We decide to sit down and grab a bite to eat. We get 2 orders of their chips and salsa, which was fantastic....this was homemade, fresh salsa and fresh pita chips. Damn good. We scarf that down, grab 2 bags of ice and head back to Kokomo. At 12:32pm we drop the ball, raise the rags and head for Cane Garden Bay.

We arrive at CGB at 1:45pm and pick up a ball. We hang out, swim off the boat....dive, flip, ect for about an 30 minutes then head in for some drinks and appetizers.

First place we stop is Quitos. We have a couple of their specialty drinks (all I remember was that they were blue), show the bartender our bar tricks and eat some fried whatever.

We walk around the beach for awhile...hit a few other bars, then had back to Kokomo for another swim.

We eventually get ready for Bomba's Full Moon Party and head to Quito's first for dinner and to hear him play at 8:30.

After dinner we took a crazy taxi ride to Bomb's Shack for his "Full Moon Party". Cindy and I have been down 2 times before but always miss the FMP. We are excited to finally check it out.

We get there and find out you have to buy tickets to get drinks. $1/ticket and 4 tickets for a beer. It's already 9:30 and there are a lot of people here. The party spreads from the original "shack" to across the street to a large band stage and grass/sand area. This is the most people we have seen in one place in many days. We walk around, get spotted by Bill and Lyne(smthsaln) and Laura and Mark (lilmabes) from TTOL.

Unfortunately for me, Bomba's was the start of my "stomach flu". Cin and I left Josh and Pam there at about 12:30am and told them I'd wait for them at the dingy dock.

And there I was at 1:54am..

~Bryan