We sail on

So we sailed on to St. Thomas, USVI from Martinique and moored up in Redhook Bay. The voyage was one of the most intense sailing experiences of our lives which, as you know, is really saying something.

Double reefed leaving Martinique

We set off from St. Anne’s Bay shortly after a squall that pulled us along at a good clip all the way to sundown. The wind was fresh off the beam and the seas were kindly till well after sunset. As night set in and we took on the dog-watches we entered the Dominica Channel with all the bright eyed innocents of a couple of kids day sailing in a dinghy in Harness Creek. It didn’t take long to get schooled.

The best of Martinique

The Dominica Channel is 22 nautical miles wide, 7,000 feet deep and carries a 2,000 nautical mile fetch across the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a brutal body of water that on any given day can lay waste to most little boats and of course we had to do it at night. The only things that changed when we entered the channel were the wind velocity, the angle, size and shape of the waves, in other words, every(fucking)thing. The seas were not only angry, they were downright infuriated with screaming banshees in the rig and a 10 foot broadside slap every few seconds in sets of three. This went on for hours, so many hours, before we made the lee of the island of Dominica but we were about 30 nautical miles off the coast of that island so we saw very little reprieve throughout that second day at sea.

Missed us fucker

Even though we had marching storms throughout the day, we never actually got rained on and as we got north and east of the Windward Islands the weather settled into a more traditional Caribbean Winter feel. The wind was warm and fresh from just abaft of the beam and that second overnight was spent watching the radar and dodging storm systems the best we could. Ultimately we got rained on through one overnight watch each and the third day was spent dodging one hell of a cumulonimbus that periodically popped the surface of the sea with angry bolts of lighting. When you’re on an electric sailboat, one of the things you don’t do is sail into a charged electrical storm so we jibed, jibed and jibed again and ultimately dodged that big mean motherfucker.

The spiral of life

Our final night at sea was the very definition of Caribbean perfection. Orion tumbled across the sky endlessly drawing arrows as Ursa Major guarded the northern horizon well into the Virgin Island chain.

Night begins

Three days, twenty hours and forty-one minutes after sailing off the hook in Martinique, we were safely moored up in Red Hook Bay off the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean Sea.

Coming into St. Thomas

The whirlwind…We rowed…

Rowing man going home

Dena interviewed and of course blew them all away…

Resistance is futile!

…so now it looks like we’ll be here for a while fixing stuff, working and adding to the cruising kitty, readying ourselves and the boat for a shot at the Northwest Passage the next chance we get.