July 6th
After we left Lagoonieville, we hoisted the sails in a strong breeze and headed for St. John. The sail took most of the day and the conditions were rather ”sporty,” which is a new term I started using to describe weather that is a little rougher than I would like to sail in! But it was fine, huge waves out there, and it was a successful sail.
We then spent a week in Hurricane Hole, St John. It’s a very well named spot, because it’s a “hole with a hurricane in it!” A hurricane hole typically refers to a spot, usually in the mangroves, that is good for securing a boat in a hurricane. Hurricane Hole, St John, however, would be a kind of bad place to be! It is a series of remote bays, some large and some small, surrounded by deserted and dusty hills with views to the highest peak on the island. It’s totally uninhabited, and the bays are enclosed by land on all sides.
This makes the waters very sheltered, you never see any waves, but… The wind comes funneling through notches in the hills with an extreme wind tunnel effect! Only in some spots, you can see the blasts of wind tearing across the water in millions of lively ripples and wavelets.
We happened to take a mooring in the middle of one of those wind tunnels, and spent a full week there, letting the wind hammer us as a tropical storm passed far to the south. Anything not secured on deck would soon blow away! There were high winds all week, but the forecast for the following week looked pretty good.
We came here for our staging ground, to wait for a weather window to sail off and leave the Virgin Islands. When the weather was right, we’d head out on a port tack from Hurricane Hole and Coral Bay, and sail 105 miles (as the crow flies) to Saba island. This long, open water crossing between the Virgin Islands and the rest of the Caribbean is known as the Anegada passage.
So we waited and relaxed in Hurricane Hole. What a beautiful, natural area, far from any roads. It’s a great place to be, because we could ride in the dinghy a long way to a lonely road in the national park, and then walk over two large hills to the town of Coral Bay. We ate at a few restaurants in town, and we carried groceries (and even ice in a cooler bag!) back from town in our backpacks. So we kept the boat stocked and ready for travel.
Back on the boat at night, during the new moon, the sky was full of stars. The phosphorescence glowed so brightly in the water that you could see fish, like luminous ghosts, lit up by the sparkling bacteria as they swam under the boat. It was amazing to touch that water and see the blue light shining from it.
We also hiked a few trails! Dad is training his hiking legs to get ready for the mountain on Saba island.
Saba is a spot that has been on both of our bucket lists to visit for many years! It is a really difficult spot to get to, it is very small, very remote and extremely rugged. We decided to go there instead of the more popular Anegada passage destination – St Martin. We would soon realize the challenge that Saba posed…
So the day finally came, Monday the 4th of July, we’d leave America! And the wind was still howling the night before. Of course it always howls down Hurricane Hole… It was forecasted to calm down on Monday and continue to improve on Tuesday. We expected the crossing to take 25-30 hours at sea! And I love sailing at night, we were looking forward to a serene, sublime night, sailing at sea. However… We did have to beat directly into the wind, and that’s usually a bit rough…
But we weren’t worried about it, although the howling wind at night always instills that fear, as I lay in my bed under the stars, knowing that in the morning I’m going out to sea
I can never sleep those nights too well. I was restless and awake at 4 or 5am. Before the sun rose I cooked us our food for the coming trip, rice and beans, 6 hardboiled eggs, and guacamole. We stored it on ice.
I did not rush, that’s a terrible idea to rush. We took the morning slowly, made sure everything was done, everything was stored well… Around 8:00AM we freed the mooring and left. We hoisted the sails and flew away from the spectacular peaks of Coral Bay harbor.
The waves grew slowly as we headed for the open blue. Soon we left the protected waters of St John, and there we were, beside Norman Island, looking down the chain of the rugged British Virgin Islands, out to the backsides of mountainous Norman, Peter, Salt, Cooper and Ginger islands. The Francis Drake channel, which runs passed Tortola, empties its water to the Caribbean right here. It carries along in a massive current which we could easily feel, and it made the sea extremely rough. The waves were probably 4 feet high, steep and jagged and steely blue in the morning light, coming distinctly from two different directions and crashing into each other.
The wind was strong, the waves were tricky and it was tough to sail our direct course for Saba. In fact we knew that it was impossible to sail that course of 117° South East, directly to our destination. Because the wind was blowing from 90°, due East, so we would have to tack, (make a zigzag pattern back and forth) to arrive at Saba. Although at 4pm, the wind was forecasted to switch to the North East for 12 hours, then switch back to east… If that happened it would help us immensely…
I assumed that after putting the British Virgin Islands far behind us in the distance, the sea and waves would even out. It surely did! The waves got calmer, the wind got steadier and we were sailing great for many hours!
Then when we came to an area far offshore of St Croix, we entered some shoal waters… To me this means, we’ve been sailing along somewhere that is 2000 feet deep or more, and then we arrive in an area that is more like 200 feet deep. Usually this effect makes the waves unpleasant! And It surely did.
There was tons of Sargasso weed, patches of bright yellow seaweed on the blue water that look like some kind of sickly rash. There are gargantuan amounts of it being carried in the currents, I imagine the beaches in Central America have this stuff piled up 5 miles out to sea by now!!
By afternoon we had sailed 40 miles at some point. We could no longer see land, although we glimpsed St Croix and Virgin Gorda here and there for a long time into the evening. Get outta here!!
The wind had actually been very strong all day, and now the sea state was getting troublesome. The waves were big and confused, like we were sailing in a big bird bath!! And surely there were lots of different sea birds, diving and swooping around the sargasso. Sometimes they’d follow us.
I had seen a few mountainous cumulous clouds in the distance all day. I had idly wondered if they hovered high above the distant lands of Saba and Statia… Well they didn’t! They were just storm clouds sitting in the ocean and soon we arrived dramatically at the foot of these behemoths. I said, oh jeez, is it gonna squall? I didn’t really want to have squalls on this trip, but that’s fine, that’s what it looks like I got!
So Dad and I sailed between the clouds, and we saw rain pouring from them here and there. Then they smacked us, mostly with wind. The waves grew monstrous, sloshy and steep.
Now, going through a squall can be great if you are going downwind. They really carry you along. But going into the wind… Fighting them… It is much harder. It’s a much more intense point of sail, called “beating” and it beats up the boat. It’s stressful on every aspect of the boat honestly, so it’s good to beat to windward in calm conditions, or at least try to sail her gently. We were doing our best to not pressure the rig too much, but with all that wind, the sailing was extreme.
We carried on, the squall passed but another one hit before long. At some point before sunset we tacked, to head north for two hours and create our zigzag. Well the starboard tack was rough. We actually hated it… But we needed to make ground. Now the sun was getting low and we had honestly been getting beaten up all day, with raucous, fast sailing and waves of spray washing over the boat. We knew we had some leaks down below that were starting to soak a lot of our stuff. And we kept slamming these huge waves, trying our best not to get splashed too much as the sun got low and the evening cooler, but that was impossible.
I had sailed all day for the most part, Dad sailed for short times here and there but mostly I let him rest. I just run on adrenaline out there I realize. I don’t eat, don’t sit down, don’t do anything but surf the waves and sail! I become like an autopilot machine!! Aside from my ragged straw hat I don’t wear a shirt, no shade or sunscreen, and let the tropical summer sun blister me to a crisp. My whole body seems to not be affected by the torturous sun, like my skin’s a long sleeve shirt, but my face does get wrecked out here now that it’s July! Dad is happy to sit and chill while sailing, but he’s often sitting in a puddle, and it doesn’t bother him. It’s really not so glamorous, beating into the wind anyway… It’s the salt life!!!
But we really wanted a calm night, and it looked like that wasn’t what we were getting. I saw one of these clouds, a billowing cumulonimbus thunderhead, with a column of rain pouring out the bottom. The sun was setting behind it and shafts of light like rays from heaven were shining out the top. This looked familiar… The last time I had seen a cloud like this was the scariest night at sea of my life.
So the night began. We were sailing very fast, and for the last two hours we had been sailing north and making no distance towards Saba. We were just sailing to windward, to get ground on the wind, so that when we tacked we could head a more direct course, closer to the 117 degrees we needed to travel. The wind had in fact shifted to northeast (which made this northward sailing that much more difficult), but when we tacked back and headed again on our course, we found we could now sail 117!
Wind shifts usually are a little more complicated than what they do to the wind alone. This was a north front hitting us, and you could feel gusts of cool air mixing with gusts of warm air. This brought with it the rain squalls we had been facing. The stars began to emerge as we sailed fast into the night, 60 miles left to Saba and now we were traveling right on course.
A peaceful night would have been great, but instead, those “sporty” conditions continued! Dad napped for a while, off and on. He tried to sleep down below in the boat, in what we call “the bouncy room”, but when we crest a wave and hit it imperfectly, the boat slams into the trough. The violent crashing noise it makes down below, in that poisonous echo chamber, sounds like the whole boat will crack apart and be destroyed. I tried not to think of how scary it would be, to ever look down below and see water rushing in. My greatest fear is getting in a life raft…
Around 9PM I was hyper focused, standing behind the wheel, balancing and surfing the massive waves in the light of the crescent moon. My foot was locked in it’s spot and holding me in place, I could do this all night. Then I saw the dark squall clouds before us. Adrenaline was pumping and I was even trembling with fear as I approached the cloud. You just never know what strength a squall can posses, they are very unpredictable. We passed under the cloud, dodged the rain, hit the accelerated wind, but at least we were sailing 117 and ticking the miles off our course. By now, everything had become soaked down below. Leaks that don’t usually bother us had been appearing as the hours of rough sailing continued.
Around 10, Dad insisted to relieve me so I let him. I had dawned my foul weather gear, and laid down to try and force myself to sleep for some hours. I slept outside next to Dad in the cockpit, on our soaked cushion in the puddle of water. I laid down and my view was just of Dad, and the dark water sloshing and crashing all around us. Right as he took over another squall was coming. This one gave us a couple lightning flashes… Another thing trying to instill fear. When I closed my eyes, I started to see lines and shapes, turning to faces and animals, all bizarre, adrenaline induced hallucinations behind my eyelids.
I did sleep, for 2 hours, and had vivid dreams that I couldn’t remember. I woke up in a daze, a happy daze, I was having happy dreams so far disconnected from the reality around us. I opened my eyes to sparkling curtains of stars, the moon had set, and the sky was alight with some of the most beautiful stars I’ve ever seen. We were moving along so fast, with dark, massive waves rolling by all around us. Splash, crash, spray would fly into the air as we kept rocketing along. I looked out of the boat to the waves and the phosphorescence were brighter than I’ve ever seen. All the foam that splashed from the boat was glimmering with millions of shining blue lights, competing for brightness with the stars all around us. The phosphorescent bacteria is so infinitely small while the stars are so infinitely huge, yet from our perspective here on earth, they look the same.
I sat with Dad for a while as he sailed through another squall, the wind lifting the boat and heeling her on her side, shooting us forward. He told me to sleep more, so I did. I laid there and watched the hallucinations behind my eyes. I realized how complicated they can become, I played a whole nonsensical TV program that my brain was spinning into existence. It’s like a universe inside that brain of ours. Then I just listened to that little voice in our heads. It’s always there, and I let it speak. It started talking to me, it said all kinds of things. It said not to be afraid of the ocean, it said the phosphorescence and the stars look the same because they are the same, everything is a great oneness… And then it said to me, “And don’t be afraid of whats going to happen next.” With that, I opened my eyes to a surge of adrenaline. I don’t want anything to happen out here!!
It was 2am now and I took the wheel, letting Dad go to sleep. According to the weather forecast, this northeast wind that had been helping us along so well was forecasted to shift back to east at 3am. I wondered what that would mean for us… But the sky was clear, I didn’t see any squalls! I sailed along and things were finally a little bit calmer. We were still going fast, and still right on course. This was great, look at all the stars. I could even see faint light pollution from St Martin in the distance, and even a faint glow of light coming from Saba!
The lovely clear skies only lasted until Dad was asleep and I was alone. Then slowly, dark clouds came. They materialized out of nowhere, coming in from the north, and soon the entire sky was dark. The water became dark. And then it got darker still. Every last star was blotted out, and the wind had calmed down. The waves were sloshy and strange. The wind always calms before the squall hits, like it sucks up all the wind and delivers it to you at once. And then I could see black curtains of rain.
It hit me with a sudden force, sending the boat heeling on its side in the most extreme way, and it took a while before I got a hang of the insane steering! The rain pelted down as I turned the wheel hard to port, hard to starboard! Dad woke up to coach me through it a bit, he had apparently gone through a few this bad, with lightning included, while I was asleep. The squalls only last 5 minutes or so, and then it passed.
Sure enough when it passed, the wind had shifted back to east and weakened! This was terrible! Now we could no longer sail 117 at all, we were sailing a course more like 145 degrees. And the clouds didn’t clear. The sky was dark, miserable and ominous. Dad was back asleep and I was struggling with these conditions, rather upset. I could see the faint light from Saba, but then a cloud came by and consumed it back to blackness.
So I sailed slowly, still 30 miles to go, under the cloud cover just wishing it would clear and let me see the stars again. The phosphorescence under the boat were brighter than ever, and it left a luminous trail in our wake. Then the wind died almost completely. The waves die along with that. I was alone, in the silence of the night. And then I saw coming, my black squall.
It was a line of pure black, a band across the entire sky. I knew behind that line was where the lights from Saba had disappeared. The cloud was so low to the ocean that it looked like it would scrape the top of the mast, and you could see in the various shades of darkness that curtains of rain were pouring from it. I sailed slowly in the feeble breeze, a terrible course of 165, parallel to the cloud. But going around it would not be possible at all, it was there for me to cross under it. That cloud was fear itself.
I felt a slight lift to the breeze and knew I had to do it. I corrected the course and headed straight for the cloud. It grew closer, like I was crossing under a black bridge in the faint glow of the dark sky around it. As it came above us, Dad woke up.
“How you doing,” he said.
“…Scared” I said. And I was.
Then it hit us like a punch in the gut! Boom! Tons of wind, the sheets pulled tight, the rigging creaked! Back to sailing 117! The insane steering and heeling of the boat came back in full force. Then the rain came down in buckets. The rain crashed into the ocean all around us and where the drops hit the sea they brightly phosphoresced in a million sparkles like an ocean of stars. The squall, like any other squall, only lasted 5 minutes, maybe 10, and then it passed.
So we continued, I sailed until about 5am, and then Dad took over. We passed another small squall with no rain. We realized we’d have to tack to head north again, and again gain ground on the wind. So we did that before sunrise, Dad took over steering and I went to sleep.
I woke up two hours later to golden clouds over the ocean. In the distance, there was Saba! It was a massive volcano obscured by haze, rising from the sea. We tacked again and headed for it, I took over steering again and let Dad sleep. We also both had some breakfast, and when I went down below, everything was wet and destroyed. It was tornado alley down there, my poor beautiful home.
The wind was out of the east now, as though blowing directly from that crazy little volcano. We couldn’t sail toward it, and the last several hours were extremely difficult. South of Saba is some shoal water called the Saba Bank, where the ocean depth rises abruptly from 8000 feet deep right up to 60 feet! A terrible place of confused waves, but probably a fisherman’s paradise! Well, we wound up sailing into the area eventually, and soon had the good sense to tack again and get out of there.
Saba was only 15 miles away now, it’s monolithic figure was right in front of us. But still we couldn’t sail directly for it, having to head north again for a while first. From it’s pointed volcano cone summit, a menacing dark cloud was spewing out. It was only water vapor, but it looked exactly like smoke of a volcanic eruption! The sunlight was bright now as dawn turned to day but a grim yellow haze was cast all around Saba, and over the next hour we watched as squall clouds materialized in a ring around the summit.
Then, like a volcanic eruption, Saba shot the ring of squall clouds outward in all directions! Boom! It struck us with the heavy squall wind, and we watched the mean, choppy waves of the Saba bank grow to angry little monsters. It passed and the haze slowly cleared around Saba, soon we could see St. Eustatius and St. Kitts in the distance. The breeze still stayed fresh.
We sailed north all the way until we could see St. Martin in the distance, and as Saba was inching closer we could make out the dramatic contours of the cliffs and densely forested land. We could see St. Eustatius and St. Kitts too, and I felt very happy! We had done it! Crossed the Anegada Passage and now we’re out of the Virgin Islands and to the rest of the Caribbean. From here the sailing should become much easier, and at some point we won’t have to beat into the wind at all! Soon we’ll be able to sail south on a great angle to the wind, and “reach” the whole way to Grenada. Which is good because we felt pretty beat up.
So we turned and finally headed right for Saba, watching as it grew closer and closer. It was huge! It was unbelievably amazing when we got close. I’ve never seen an island quite like this. Something about it felt so pristine, the deep green rainforest that covered it, with the summit again forming it’s own clouds to shroud it. It’s coastline was 300 foot high sea cliffs rising right out of the ocean. When we got close enough to turn and sail along the coast, I felt like I was in Canada’s rocky mountains or someplace like that. Zion National Park or something, with massive white rock cliff faces, jagged maroon rocks and spires along it’s shore. A neighborhood was built into the side of it, a beach of boulders and purple sand followed the coast, and we were totally awestruck by the awesome wonder of this place!
We saw a strange, derelict looking large yacht, and tour boat, and as we passed them and rounded the corner to a place called Fort Bay the wind and seas kicked up. We had already furled the sails and turned on the motor, it was time to take one of the free moorings I had heard about in this place.
The place to check into customs was at Fort Bay, but we didn’t want to get the mooring there! It was way too rough on that side of the island! We turned back to where that tour boat was, it seemed like that was the calmest, most protected part of the coast. So we grabbed a mooring ball there, directly in front of the most dramatic wall of rock we had seen. It was a badass spot!
So… Customs would have to wait until the morning, we were so exhausted that we were on the verge of collapse. We were in the Netherlands! This is the Dutch Antilles, and is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in fact the “highest point in the kingdom” at the summit of Mt Scenery on Saba. We would have to climb to the top!
The first thing I did was pull everything out to dry, and I mean everything! Water was everywhere, and how are you supposed to collapse to sleep if you’ve got nothing to sleep on! So we went full gypsy boat in front of the tourists and the big mysterious yacht which was making sounds like little hissing explosions (diver’s filling air tanks), and smelling strongly of diesel fuel. I cleaned for hours and restored order to our beautiful home. We had arrived at 2:30PM, so the sail took us 31 hours.
Before I collapsed I even went to the beach while Dad slept. I took a short walk and called my mom, with the blip of cell phone service I happened to find. But we had no service on the boat in this spot. The sand was a beautiful maroon-purple, maybe this a “black sand beach?” I’ve never been to one before. The volcanic cliffs towered high above me, and at one point a bunch of rocks fell down right nearby! What an intense place we’ve come to. I wonder what incredible things we will experience here…
The sun set grandly on the squall clouds in the distance and we slept for the next 12 hours
