Sailing

When a year comes to an end, we celebrate with fireworks and champagne. If a sailing season comes to an end, that’s also a reason to celebrate. After all, our boat is still afloat and neither Alex threw me nor I him overboard, even if we sometimes came close. We want to spend the rest of the hurricane season in the Rio Dulce, and so we are sailing from Mexico to Guatemala. However, we don’t feel like celebrating during the last days of our first sailing season. The blame lies with a sandbar, a tiny creature called Cyclospora cayetan, and our drone. In other words, our season is coming to an end with a crisis in several acts. To anticipate: We survived, so did Mabul, only the drone, it’s dead.

As we leave Cayo Largo and Cuba, we are not alone. El Russo, the employee of the turtle center, has given us twenty freshly hatched turtles. We pack them in a Tupperware and carry them back to Mabul. We cast off and finally we are sailing from Cuba to Mexico. One by one we drop the tiny ones into the sea near the coast. May they have an exciting, long life without shark encounters!

The time has come, our first night sail is coming up and we are both a bit nervous. What will await us? Will we be able to see enough to avoid possible dangers? Will the stars light our way? All week we have been waiting for the right weather window, but either too much or too little wind or too high waves were announced, now our app “PredictWind” predicts constant wind from the east and waves up to two meters. We are ready to go!

Only a few nautical miles separate Carriacou from Union Island, somewhere in between, in the middle of the sea, lies the national border of Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Early in the morning of November 9, we set sail on a beam reach course directly to Union.

From Carriacou to the south of Grenada and back again, then further north. That’s about the plan as we set off. We have to return to Grenada to pick up some boat parts that friends have kindly flown in from the UK, plus we can pick up five sacrificial anodes for our problem prop from another sailor.

The announced storm is here! Winds sweep across Tyrell Bay with up to 60 knots and make everything in and around the boat rattle and shake. So we batten down the hatches and retreat to the cabin. The morning after the first stormy night we are woken up by excited shouts.

After a busy few weeks, Mabul is in top form. Even the last big “thing” for the time being, the propeller, should be able to do its work again without vibration. So we can finally set off slowly towards the north in good spirits.

Set sail, sail into the great outdoors, and in the evening watch the sunset with a gin and tonic in hand while grilling the fish we caught ourselves over the fire. This is how I had imagined our sailing sabbatical, at least almost. However, the first three weeks on the boat had other things in store for us.