We sailed from Bahia Icacos on Vieques to Cayo Luis Peña just west of Culebra. Okay, it was only eleven miles, but we sailed! On a beam reach, yet! After hundreds of miles of motoring and motorsailing, it was lovely to have the wind somewhere other than in our faces.
We
went ashore, but the hiking trails mentioned in the guidebook were
either long overgrown or just wishful thinking. Instead we walked
along the beach and across the rocks to the next point to the west.
The incoming light north swell (goodness knows where it was coming
from, since the wind had been out of the east for days) built into
steep waves against this point, sending spray high onto the
cliff.
We shared the island with a family out for the weekend from Fajardo, who were camping on the beach and fishing out of their small open powerboat. José had been a commercial fisherman in the US, and had moved with his wife and son back to Puerto Rico in hopes of starting up a fishing business there. He was thinking about finding a damaged sailboat -- he'd also done fiberglass work on boats -- and setting it up on a mooring around Culebra, so they wouldn't have to camp on the beach on their fishing trips. His wife and son hadn't been on a big sailboat before, so we invited them all aboard Windom for a look-see before they bounced their way back to Fajardo.
José rhapsodized over the fishing in the area, and gave us a few suggestions, but we snorkeled around Cayo Luis Peña and the Las Hermanas rocks nearby, and didn't spear a single fish. The food fish don't seem to be very dense in this area, maybe because of overfishing. The only thing we found was a lobster practically right under our boat!
In the afternoon, we took the boat into Ensenada Honda in Isla de Culebra, up to the town of Dewey. Our appetites were whetted from the sailing the previous day, so as soon as we turned around Punto de Soldato we rolled out the sails again. The wind was light and flukey around this hilly island, and when we turned north into the channel it was right at our back. Well, we were sailing, anyway, even if at only 3.5 knots, so we continued at a stately pace through the gap in the reef and all the way up to the anchorage.
We were a little disappointed to see few cruising boats, none we knew or knew of. We've been getting somewhat lonely these days, because we haven't yet made the kind of close friends we did last year with people going in the same direction. The people we get along with the best seem to all be heading back north or going back to work. We've met a few people we'd like to get to know better, but they're all ahead of us. Our relationship seems to work best when we do a little socializing; islands seem more interesting and anchorages more appealing. Part of it, I think, is because as we travel, we slide in and out of communities, always visiting, never staying. Even when we meet the local people we still feel a sense of isolation, because we know we'll be moving on. Having friends who are also moving on gives us a "moving community" to be a part of. And of course part of it is that as wonderful as our spouses are, it's nice to talk to someone else occasionally!
The next morning we dinked in to the town and walked around, admiring the colorful flowers which seemed to be everywhere. After lunch out at the Dinghy Dock restaurant, where our tastebuds were thrilled to enjoy Bass Ale for the first time in four months, we returned to the boat and prepared to move on. We motored out into the light southeasterlies and put up the sails for the extremely brief run to Culebrita, where we temporarily anchored along the western shore so we could snorkel on Culebrita Reef. The reef was fairly interesting, with scattered but healthy individual formations, and it dropped off steeply to the west. This made stalking fish tricky, because they invariably would lead us slowly into deeper water, and we would descend almost without realizing it. We got a lot of breath-holding practice, but only one fish.
For our overnight anchorage, we scooted around Culebrita's reefy northwest arm and grabbed a mooring in its north-facing bay. Attempts to enjoy the sunset with drinks in the cockpit were thwarted by storms of mosquitos. The number of mosquitos on our boat, however, was dwarfed by the enormous hordes we found ashore the next day. We had to keep a very brisk pace on the trails as we hiked, first to the beach on the other side, where we found a wrecked powerboat, then to the lighthouse at the top of the highest hill. Even in the breeze on the lighthouse roof, the mosquitos still swarmed around us. DEET helped a little, but we couldn't hang out for very long.
We had noticed that there were still a few good stainless steel parts on the wrecked powerboat, and went back to Windom for tools, figuring that the breeze on the windward side would keep the skeeters at bay. As it turned out, those clever mosquitos simply rode the breeze in and then tucked down in the shelter of the wreckage. We were outnumbered and outgunned by these tiny, savage guardians; what had looked like free stuff would have to be paid for, literally, in blood. We didn't salvage a single bolt.
By the time we dinghied back, we were hot and itchy, so we took a swim around the boat. Britt had his mask and snorkel on, and spotted a line and bit of chain on the bottom. He went down to check it out, and quickly determined that it was attached to a good Danforth anchor. I went back to the boat and got a fender, which he tied to the line as a float, and when we dropped the mooring to leave, we pulled in the fender, cleated on the line, and broke the anchor free from the bottom. So even though we weren't able to scarf up those chocks and cleats from the wrecked powerboat, we ended up with a nice 25-pound anchor. And we can always use another anchor!
We'd been keeping an eye on the weatherfaxes, which for the past few days had been promising a south wind for the 16th and 17th. Here in the trades, the wind is usually out of the east. Sometimes it swings to the southeast, but a true south wind is extremely unusual. We'd seen anomalous longer-term forecasts before, but every time, as the actual date approached, the forecasts moderated, and the weather never lived up to its billing. This time, from the anchorage at Culebrita, we noticed that the wind was, indeed, almost southerly. Did we dare hope to actually sail east?
Our plan had been to head to St. Thomas, about twenty miles away, and anchor at Charlotte Amalie. We've been getting fed up with our Tasco binoculars, which seem to go out of alignment every time they are touched, and thought that we might find a better pair there at an American but duty-free price. But the south wind was too good to squander on such a short leg, especially since the forecasts indicated it would continue overnight and into the next day, so we set our course for St. Martin.
On a close reach in 10-15 knots of south wind, we sailed by the Virgin Islands, misty and indistinct in the humidity haze. The afternoon clouds had gathered, dark and ominous, and occasionally we saw a little bit of a funnel poke down below the cloud layer, but nothing got close to either the water surface or to us. The seas were barely 3 feet, probably as placid as the open Caribbean ever gets, and we skimmed along at a good clip.
In the late afternoon our portside reel went off, and I claimed fish duty. It was something big, and I fought it hard, reeling in for only thirty seconds at a time before the fish ran out whatever I'd reeled. Finally I got it close enough to see what it was -- a 4 or 5 foot-long wahoo! We'd never caught one before; unfortunately, we didn't catch this one, either, as it gave a mighty leap and broke free just as Britt was reaching for the gaff. I have a very bad fish record, having landed exactly zero fish this year. I lost a mahi in the Bahamas, a mackerel off the Puerto Rican coast, and just the other day, sailing from Vieques to Cayo Luis Peña, we got a strike I tried to reel in, and I lost that one too.
I was all depressed over losing that lovely wahoo, and muttering about beans for dinner, when we were saved by another strike. This one was on the starboard reel. I declined to take it on grounds of bad fish karma, so Britt reeled in what turned out to be a blackfin tuna. Yum! He handed the reel over to me so he could gaff it, then I went and grabbed the spray bottle of vodka to go for the kill. Lately, we've been trying to hold the fish upright while spraying the booze into its gills, based on a tip from another cruiser who said that it keeps them from thrashing and getting blood all over the cockpit. Well, we didn't get too much blood on the boat, but the tuna reacted to an overdose of vodka about the same way a college student would -- it barfed! Fortunately, tunas seem to eat their meals whole, because all that we ended up with was a mess of tiny little fish on our side deck, which was easily taken care of with a bucket of water.
Right now, it's just before 2 a.m. on Thursday morning, and we're about 40 miles out of St. Martin. The wind's dropped a bit, 7-10 knots, and we're making between 5 and 6 -- ought to get in by breakfast time. There's another sailboat a bit to our north, a ridiculously lit-up cruise ship four miles to the south, and somebody else slowly catching up to us from behind, still only a faint glow in the binoculars and a blip on the radar. I still can't believe we're sailing eastward. So comfortably, too, since we're not so hard into the wind that we're heeled like a drunkard. No pounding, no crashing, no stuff flying everywhere. I could get used to this.