In today’s world, one becomes extremely
dependant on electronics and computers to help you to ‘navigate’ (excuse the
pun), your way through life. We are forever checking our emails, downloading
information related to whatever topic we are interested in. It is the same when
sailing – yes, we have found it more of a challenge this time around to get free
Wi-Fi as there seems to be more and more ‘free’ mobile phone bundles available
for the Caribbean, particularly catering for the US sailors/market. When
sailing, one aspect you must always have in the back of your mind is to be as
prepared as possible for every eventuality, for example when your electronics
on the boat stop working.
When we left beautiful Bequia on Friday
16 March, we noticed that the auto pilot was low on power, so we hand steered
for a while until the sun was shining on the solar panels and charging the
batteries.
I need to go back a bit…… taking Passages
out of storage, Mel realised that we would need to buy a whole new bank of
batteries. He would love to get some lithium iron phosphate batteries;
however, they are quite expensive. Since we are having to put Passages back
into storage and on the hard again in a few months’ time, he thought we would
just get some “ordinary” batteries for this sailing season, which we purchased
in Trinidad. After a few weeks of sailing, we noticed that one of the five new
batteries was not charging to its full capacity, but we were confident that
this would eventually rectify itself.
Back to our sail…. Everything was going
well, we had planned to “yellow flag” in Rodney Bay, St Lucia for the Friday
night and then continue to sail the rest of the way to Le Marin, Martinique on
the Saturday morning. We were sailing along, reminiscing about the time we had
spent in St Lucia with Fata Morgana (Ivo, Mira and Maya) in 2014. As we were
passing the Pitons – this was about 3.30pm, Mel was downstairs when the auto
pilot went off and the boat was now going the wrong way. I was up on deck and
took the wheel, but we saw that the plot charter, depth, AIS, radio and wind
indictor were all off. We tried starting the engine to see if that would help –
no engine!
Mel went to the main switch board to see
what was happening, while I hand steered. We tried the engine again….
Thankfully it started. I continued to hand steer while Mel went downstairs to
check what was causing the lack of power and the electronics to work.
We still had approximately 16 nmiles/ 3
hours of sailing to go until we would be outside of Rodney Bay. The one
consolation was we knew Rodney Bay well, after spending over two weeks anchored
there in 2014, PLUS it’s over 1 nmiles wide and other than the ‘Barrel of Beef’
at the south entrance to the harbour, there wasn’t much to concern ourselves.
However, the light was fading fast and without any navigation instruments and
lights, we couldn’t see or be seen.
Thankfully we had paper charts, torches
and the dinghy starboard and port lights to indicate to other boats in which
direction we were heading.
Our main radio was not working either –
we had literally disappeared from the face of the earth. Luckily, we had our
hand held/mobile radio, so when we were at the entrance to Rodney Bay harbour,
Mel put out a radio call to anyone in Rodney Bay to come back to us. This was
about 7.30pm now and one aspect that is quite amazing and terrifying is how one
dimensional everything looks at night. Here we were in the middle of the
entrance to Rodney harbour, we could see lots of lights from the land/beach/
harbour area, plus the anchor lights of boats but it was tricky to judge the
distances.
A yacht called “Why Not” responded to our
call and gave us some advice on where to aim for or anchor. They could see us
approaching and directed us. Mel went onto the bow with our powerful torch and
directed me on where I should be steering the boat. We didn’t know the depth of
where we were as our depth sounder wasn’t working either, but from the paper
charts we knew the approximate depths of Rodney Bay. When we thought we were at
a reasonable depth and place to anchor and away from other boats, Mel had to
manually let the anchor out. It was such a relief to hear the clank, clank of
the anchor chain being let out. Phew!
We didn’t have our AIS with our anchor
watch on, so Mel let out a tremendous amount of chain. Thankfully the wind was
down and there were no boats behind us so IF, in the unlikely event of us
dragging, we would be dragged out to the wide, open ocean.
This was now after 8.00pm – we were
grateful to be safe and sound anchored in Rodney Bay AND I could eventually put
the kettle on to have a much-needed cup of tea (an electrical solenoid controls
the gas, so no power, no gas), although it was tempting to have something
stronger, we knew we still had to have our wits about us as everything was not
as secure as we would have liked to have been. Mel went to work trying to find
out what was going on with our power source.
By 9.30pm, we had power back on as Mel
had solved the problem or, so we thought.
We slept reasonably well after an
eventful day/evening – Mel checked the power – all good, so we contacted ‘Why
Not’ to say a HUGE ‘Thank you’ for assisting us and off we sailed to Le Marin,
Martinique, where we had a great sail averaging about 5 – 6 knots. There were
lots of boats heading south, while we were heading north.
At the entrance to the Le Marin channel,
with St Anne to our starboard, we tried to contact ‘Blue Moon’. I could see
them on our AIS but unfortunately, I didn’t notice that they were anchored in
St Anne, as I was fascinated by this HUGE yellow tanker type looking boat
called ‘Big Lift’. On board were all
yachts/boats for delivery to Europe!
Apparently this is what
some people do. They put their yacht on board a HUGE tanker/boat like ‘Big
Lift’ and Big Lift transports the yacht back to the Mediterranean, across the
Atlantic and the crew/owner picks it up in which ever port and then continues
sailing around the Med. The reverse
happens as well – Big Lift transports the yachts to the Caribbean, ready for
the sailing season (November to May) here.
Back to Le Marin….. the anchorage was
quite full, but we found a great spot on the north side of the anchorage, in a
similar position to where we were the last time. We contacted Blue Moon, who
according to their last WhatsApp message, were heading for Le Marin, however after
driving around the Le Marin anchorage they decided to head back to St Anne.
In Le Marin, we were relieved to be
anchored close to where we had access to lots of marine services that could
possibly help us with our power issue.
Fast forward 2 weeks – we are now in St
Anne after spending 5 days in Le Marin. It was becoming far too crowded, so we
headed for St Anne where we met up with Blue Moon again. St Anne is another HUGE anchorage, a bit more
exposed as we have had a few rollie nights since we have been here. The holding
is reasonable as there are sandy spots (as well as rocky and grass spots), plus
the depths are great! With an average depth of 5m for quite a distance out, so
many boats can anchor quite safely there and not feel on top of each other like
in Le Marin.
While we have been here, we have enjoyed
going for walks in and around the town – there is a climb to the top of the
hill where there are the 14 stations of the cross. We have caught the bus back
to Le Marin, enjoyed doing some shopping and some lunch there. We have done
some never ending maintenance and cleaning of the stainless steel, plus Mel has
also been monitoring the power.
The power problem revolved around the ‘cheap’
batteries having wingnuts for connecting the cables and one of the nuts had
worked itself slightly loose, probably through vibration. This resulted the
cables heating up (high resistance with large current supplied) instead of
charging the batteries. Although the other four battery connections were good,
the single poor connection starved all the batteries of energy.
Now that the power issue has been
resolved we will be sailing up north to St Pierre on Easter Saturday. We shall
miss St Anne as it is a lovely quaint town, with great patisseries and boulangeries
– the bakeries are so good! Life is easy here as there are grocery shops and
the morning fruit and veggie markets. We also found good Wi-Fi, always an added
bonus! However, we need to get going if we intend doing all that we hope to
achieve before heading back to our home base.
I have put some photos below of some of
the interesting sights we have seen while sitting in our cockpit, enjoying the
anchorage.
Until our next update – all about our
lovely island drive around Martinique - keep well and safe.
Mel and Caryn
sv Passages
If you want to see where we are – go to:
top right corner – search for Passages
with the Australian flag – that’s us!
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| Diamond Rock at sunset. |
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| A fisherman casting his net close to our boat. |
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| Windsurfers having a great time. |
