Marsh Harbour, Bahamas.
March,2001

After a hectic two weeks in New York I returned to Lisbon in mid-November. Bill had already returned to FIONA after a brief trip to Zimbabwe. A third crew member, Damian, had arranged to join the boat after crewing on a trip to the Canaries. In fact, he got on board just a few hours before I did. The next day we did the final shopping for fresh provisions in preparation for our transatlantic departure on the morrow. In the afternoon Damian checked his e-mail, I don't know what it said but he returned to the boat with a taxi, loaded his gear, and hightailed it to the airport. Bill and I looked at each other after his departure in some consternation. During my trip to New York I had had a hernia patched up and I had promised the doctor to take it easy. Bill was a very active 76 years old, but between us I was not too sanguine about a two-man 3000 mile transatlantic crossing. Nevertheless, the next day we sailed down the Tagus River past the Lisbon waterfront in mist and rain and set sail in light winds for Madeira. When we arrived the small inner harbor at Funchal was crowded but we managed to raft up to another boat tied to the wall. We enjoyed our brief stay and took the new teleferique to the top of the hill. A traditional way down, now enjoyed by tourists, is to shoot down the hill on a wicker toboggan, guided by two locals in straw hats. We took the cable car. We checked our e-mail, bought some Madeira wine, refuelled and left. Two days out a vast low pressure system over the English Channel gave us some heavy weather with gusts to 30 knots. We reefed in driving rain, later, on my watch , the cumbersome whisker pole came loose from its lashings and nearly went over the side. I managed to catch it and tie it down again. Somehow I wasn't having the kind of restful recuperation envisaged by my surgeon. Fortunately the weather moderated and we had fairly light winds as we plowed south and west to a point not too far from the Cape Verde Islands. Then the idea was to turn west and pick up the Trade Winds . We finally did get the Trades at 23 degrees north and we headed for St. Martin. Each evening at happy hour we listened to the tape of a book entitled "The Heart of the Sea " , the true story of the sinking of the whaleship " Essex " by a whale in 1821 and the subsequent survival of the crew in small boats as they sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific. Ultimately they were reduced to cannibalism. I eyed Bill, he looked like tough eating to me; I hoped we wouldn't meet any aggressive whales. During the trip I had almost daily radio contacts with my friend Mike on the 21 MHz ham band, he lives only a few hundred yards from my house in Brookhaven. As we approached the Caribbean the swells grew larger and FIONA began to surf down the slopes. This had the effect of momentarily backing the mainsail which filled with a crack as we lost speed on the next backslope. Finally, very early one morning the sail split from luff to leech from so much slatting and we doused it. As we were only a couple of days from St. Martin by then we sailed under the jib alone and dropped our anchor at the usual spot in Marigot bay without further difficulty. The trip from Lisbon had taken us 30 days, it was my tenth Atlantic crossing, ninth as captain.

Things started happening after our arrival; Bill flew home for a Christmas in California, my daughter Brenda flew in for a Christmas with me. We all had Christmas dinner with my old friend Kay and her daughter Victoria, who both live in St. Martin. A highlight of the holiday season was a visit to the Chinese circus. I was struck by the thought that Marco Polo probably saw a similar circus seven hundred years ago as the acrobats and jugglers used minimal props; mostly chairs and umbrellas. After Brenda flew home two new crew members joined the boat ; Teresa, an Italian lady living in Switzerland who sailed with me in Maine in 1999 and Theresa ( known as "Tee" ) who crossed the Atlantic on another boat at the same time as Bill and I. I have visited St. Martin on many occasions but this year I was a little disappointed. When Edith and I first came to Marigot in 1963 it was a village of typical West Indian shacks on the sea shore with a swamp behind. Now there is traffic gridlock, the swamp has been converted to Port Royale marina and the shacks have given way to boutiques and fancy shops. No doubt everyone is much more prosperous, but the price is dirt, noise and crime. Perhaps I am soured by the theft of items from the dinghy almost as soon as we arrived. After a month on the (mostly) quiet Atlantic I found the noise almost unbearable. Jetskis in the harbor, powerful motorbikes on the roads, blaring loudspeakers from the restaurants and bars and the jackhammers of endless construction. On the good side were morning coffee and croissants in the Port Royale complex and those wonderful French baguettes, not to mention cheap Mount Gay rum.

After a few minor repairs and refuelling we pushed off early in the New Year for a crossing of the Anegada Passage to the Britsh Virgin Islands. We cleared in at Virgin Gorda early in the morning and visited the Baths during the afternoon - a crowded anchorage. The next day we sailed to Anegada island. Located in the middle of a reef, it used to be considered dangerous to visit. But now, one advantage of the bare-boat chartering I guess, there is a buoyed channel to the anchorage. The miles of white sand beaches, the clear green water and a friendly bar on the shore make Anegada the epitome of the perfect tropical anchorage. The ladies were entranced and went for long walks collecting shells, driftwood and other flotsam. After a couple of days paradise was too much to take and we headed for St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Here we ran in to a bureaucratic problem : Teresa and Tee are Italian and British respectively, normally both would be given temporary visas on arrival in the U.S. When I took the ship's papers and our passports to the customs and immigration office in Cruz Bay they wanted to know where the visas were. "Don't you issue them ?" I said. " Oh no," was the reply, "that only applies to arrivals on a scheduled carrier, a foreigner on a private yacht must get a visa first." I must have looked dumbfounded for the officer quickly said, " But there is a loophole, you can take your boat back to the British Virgin Islands and return on the ferry, that counts a s a scheduled carrier and we can issue a visa.Then you can return with the yacht." So that is just what we did. We anchored at West End, Tortola and took the ferry - a beaten-up steel boat that got to Cruz Bay in twenty minutes. Actually I was quite pleased to see West End again. Edith and I often anchored there during IONA's 1968/69 cruise. It is , of course, greatly expanded with jazzy restaurants, a big marina and even a Pusser's Rum bar. From there we sailed to Jost van Dyke and had a drink a Foxy's beach bar before returning to St. John. No problem on entry this time, the ladies had the all-important green slip. We greatly enjoyed St. John, it was not crowded, with several free moorings in nice bays provided by the National Park Service The visit to the old sugar mill on Leinster bay was especially fascinating as the ruins are in quite good shape and it was possible to imagine what it was like in the hey-day of the slave-operated plantations. One day we took the ferry to St. Thomas, an act of nostalgia on my part as it was our base for several months during the 1968/69 cruise and it has been many years since my last visit. It is humming with cruise-ship tourists but the old Yachthaven marina is very run down. We anchored on the north side of St. Thomas for a night and then sailed to Culebra, a pleasant island about 15 miles east of Puerto Rico. From there we sailed to Vieques, an island mostly owned by the U.S. Navy, they use it as a weapons range and for amphibious training. The Puerto Ricans would like them to go away and there is considerable animosity on the issue. When we landed at a small village on the south shore we found dozens of signs hanging in the street demanding a " free" Vieques. The local paper carried stories of hotels in dire straits because the navy had restricted beach access.

It was getting time to return to the States - I had been asked to attend a meeting of the Cruising Club of America ( CCA ) in New York City at the end of January as I was about to receive an award. Teresa decided to visit New York at the same time. Unfortunately when it came to Tee we mutually decided it would be best if she signed off at this stage. She returned to England via New York and I managed to recruit a replacement, Chris, while I was home. While in New York I left FIONA at a sumptuous if expensive marina near Fajardo. Before we left I rented a car. We drove to San Juan for an interesting day in the old part of town. It was many years since I first visited El Morro, the massive fort guarding the entrance to San Juan harbor. On my first visit there was an old execution chair in the courtyard, in years past prisoners were garroted by a metal band attached to the back of the chair. Now it is gone - the National Park Service wants a family type experience. No mention either, as there used to be, of the thousands of slaves who died of exhaustion and disease building the massive structure for the Spanish. On the last day before departure for the mainland Teresa and I drove into the rain forest which covers the slopes of a high mountain called " El Junque" - the rain-maker. When we stopped to ask directions a lady invited us into her house which had a wonderful view of the valley below. After coffee I asked if I could take a shot of the panorama from her patio. Returning with a camera I petted a large dog and then, perhaps out of jealousy, a small dog, almost unnoticed in the corner, shot across and sank its teeth in my calf. Dogs hate me, I think. I popped in to see a doctor when I was back in New York with visions of rabies but she was reassuring ; don't worry. The week at home was as frantic as usual. Julie and Red Harting, my daughter Brenda and Teresa all went to the CCA ceremony at the New York Yacht Club, which is described separately on the website. Chris met us at JFK and we flew to San Juan, took a taxi to the marina and shoved off the next day. What a change - back to the peaceful cruising life. We jogged along the south coast of Puerto Rico, anchoring every night. One stopover was a spectacular modern development built to look like one of those vertical villages on the Mediterranean coast. The problem was - there were no people, it was like walking through an empty movie set. The Ponce yacht club used to be very exclusive, it is built on a small cay connected to the mainland by a man-made causeway, so access is very controlled. However, in recent years, a vast parking field has been built at the end of the causeway and a boardwalk along the shore sports dozens of bars, snack stands and even small dance halls. At weekends the whole of Ponce seems to come down for a good time so the exclusivity of the club is somewhat degraded by the loud Latin music emanating from the area and thousands of people milling about. The city of Ponce itself is located a few miles from the beach. It is quite a pleasant city with a very impressive municipal art gallery. The old Parque de Bomberos, a wonderful Victorian firehouse, has been moved to the center of the city for the benefit of tourists and converted into a museum.

We left Puerto Rico from Boqueron and crossed the Mona Passage to Samana in the Dominican Republic. I'm afraid the officials here, and the water taximan, are quite corrupt and avaricious. The place has a bad reputation for dinghy theft too. Nevertheless, after we got through the thicket of waterfront thieves, some uniformed and some not, we found it interesting. We had a very reasonably priced lunch at a " French" restaurant which featured linen napkins - a pleasant change. We took a ride in a motorized rickshaw to a waterfall which was a 15 minute walk from the road through a beautiful wood. An old man attached himself to our party and proceeded to name all the trees and bushes. He found us some grapefruit (full of seeds, it turned out) and gave us aniseed, oregano, cocoa, tamarind, pina de Colada, etc to taste or smell. The south end of the harbor at Samana has a solitary cay with nothing on it but it is connected to the mainland by an impressive bridge supported by a series of arches - a bridge to nowhere. We were told the story : when Trujillo was dictator he and some cronies bought the cay intending to build a fancy hotel and restaurant. Of course, people had to be able to get there and so the government built the bridge. The hotel was never built, residents can take a nice stroll to the cay on Sunday afternoons, but there is nothing to do except turn back. Our next in the Dominican Republic was Luperon, on the north coast. Luperon is a good example of the tendency of yachties to nucleate - there were over forty boats there when we arrived, despite the relatively small size of the bay. The officials were pleasant and not very corrupt, a small contribution was asked for, but it was purely voluntary, it was emphasized. Shortly after we arrived a familiar face looked up at us from a dinghy, a fellow boater from Weeks Yachtyard in Patchogue had spotted FIONA, he was on a long winter cruise to the Caribbean and had sailed as far as Luperon single-handed. Off to one side from the village is a small marina with a very active bar. In the village a new generation has discovered wheels, young men roar up and down on large motorbikes, mostly modified by removing the insides of the muffler. Many of the older buildings are typically West Iindian - weathered planks with corrugated iron roofs. Chickens scratch away in the debris, roosters crow their presence. Chris and I took the publico to Puerto Plata, there were seven of us squeezed into a medium-sized car. I sat on the transmission hump at the front, every time I eased my leg a little I inadvertently shifted gear and the driver patiently reselected. The ten mile ride cost about two dollars. We visited the old fort and the unique amber museum. For some reason there are extensive amber deposits in the Dominican Republic and it is mined. The most impressive pieces have an encapsulated insect inside. We saw a very rare piece with a captive 50 million year-old lizard trapped inside. When it came time to return we couldn't find out where to catch the proper publico. Suddenly a young man seemed to understand, gestured for us both to mount his motorbike and we careened off through the crowded streets. I had joked about the locals riding three to a bike (without crash-helmets) and now I was doing it. He dropped us off next to the Luperon publico, all for 65cents. Teresa actually took a bus to Santo Domingo on the south coast, she left at 6 am and got back rather exhausted at 10 pm. I asked her what she thought of Santo Domingo, "Dirty", was the short reply. Soon it was time to leave. Our destination was the forbidden worker's paradise of Cuba.

Perhaps I should explain that due to the U.S. embargo citizens are not allowed to spend dollars in Cuba, but nothing prevents them from visiting there if the trip is sponsored, i.e., someone else picks up the tab. In our case Teresa wanted to visit a professor she was acquainted with at the University of Santiago and she agreed to sponsor FIONA's trip. We left Luperon with a brisk easterly wind and enjoyed a great two day run past the coast of Haiti, across the Windward passage and along the north coast of Cuba to a port of entry called Puerto de Vita. It is a new marina built specifically to lure yachtsmen and foreign fishermen to Cuba. It was obviously laid out by some anonymous planning committee. There is a large parking lot, properly striped and signposted, but no cars. There are slips for about thirty boats, but very few yachts. During our stay the number varied between five and ten. The bathrooms for each sex are sparkling clean, each with five hot showers. It was all very luxurious compared to Luperon, where one rather dirty cold water shower at the marina served the needs of over forty yachts. The resident facilitator, Ernestina, worked in an air-conditioned office, spoke good English and was our point of contact. She greeted us on the dock when we arrived and told us not to leave the boat until cleared by customs, immigration, police and health authorities. She was horrified when Chris jumped on the dock to adjust the mooring lines. Quite literally, we had to stay on the boat. The relevant officials showed up shortly afterwards. Two customs officers roamed around the boat opening drawers and lockers, they even brought a sniffer dog. However, I have to say in their defense that although the search was quite intrusive by the standards of most ports I have visited, Cuba is, by and large, drug free. Throughout our stay I struck by the contradictory aims of the two branches of the Cuban government we encountered: on one hand the tourism people had provided an excellent marina, obviously at great expense, on the other hand the Guarda Frontera were very concerned at the freedom of yachties to move at will. The compromise was to restrict the yachts to selected marinas and to make it difficult to anchor anywhere else. On our first afternoon we took a walk down the road outside the marina. The entrance gate was guarded day and night to keep out the great unwashed. Cubans were obviously very poor but the fields were cultivated and neatly tended. There was absolutely no litter by the roadside, I'm afraid the average Cuban is too poor to buy goods packaged in plastic. Most people walked or pedalled. A few drove by on small mopeds, one even had a live pig tied on the back! Very few private cars passed us. There were quite a few buses, all crowded. Now and again vast trucks roared by crowded with workers standing in the back.

Cuba has a two-tier economic system, the peso is officially priced at one to `the dollar. They will solemnly give you a peso for a dollar at any bank, but don't expect to get a dollar for a peso. Outside, on the street, touts offer about 20 pesos to the dollar. However, pesos are not much use to tourists, as shopkeepers, restaurants, etc will only accept dollars. Most items are priced in dollars, even in shops patronized only by Cubans. We rented a car and drove it to Santiago de Cuba, the cost was $60/day. The drive to Santiago was quite an adventure as roads in Cuba are not numbered and signs of any kind are rare. We got hopelessly lost and wound up driving down rutted roads in the middle of extensive sugar cane fields, some were being harvested and the workers looked at this apparition emerging from the dust with amazement. Teresa's friend at the university had arranged a bed and breakfast place for us. Chris and I shared a room at $20/night. Many homeowners rent rooms in order to get some dollars. Most of the buildings in Santiago are very shabby with peeling paint and rotted timber. The Casa Granda Hotel is an exception and we greatly enjoyed our first evening in town there. We were entertained by an eclectic Cuban band and a magician wandering among the tables performed for the tourists.

The streets were crowded but fortunately cars with tourist plates get reserved parking places, they really want you money. Teresa's friend Lionel arranged a little party at his house the next night, we showed a sailing video and met several of his English students. Lionel said his pay as a professor was 500 pesos a month, which illustrates how important dollars are to every Cuban. At the unofficial exchange rate (but one on which prices are based) he is making $25 a month. Television is everywhere, but there aren't many channels. An old lady living at the B&B watched continuously, although much of the content seemed to be government controlled news. I was fascinated by the shower in the bathroom . Warm water is produced by flowing the water through a small electric heater next to the shower head. It is about the size of a large mug, to turn it on the 230 volt switch is conveniently placed next to it , on the wall, so you can reach it standing in the bathtub. Any building inspector in the States would have a fit at the set-up. There is no doubt that Cuba is a controlled society. In Santiago policemen were ubiquitous, frequently checking I.D.s of Cubans. On the open road control check points stop all civilian traffic - except tourists. We were able to use a computer terminal at a ritzy tourist hotel to check our e-mail. The average Cuban can send and receive e-mail but cannot plug into the net and would not be allowed to use terminals in tourist hotels. Political posters are the only ones in good shape, almost everything else needs a coat of paint. But I must say the Cubans I met are well educated, intelligent and very pleasant. Our landlady, for example, had written a book. As I said earlier, Cubans are very poor. The famous 1950's cars , acquired prior to the revolution, are fairly common in Santiago but were mostly in sad shape. My simple-minded impression of the U.S.embargo is that it is counterproductive. Posters urge unity at this special time The failures of the government can attributed to the embargo, not internal problems. The Cubans are a proud nation, I felt, and change will only come slowly, even if Castro steps down. There must have been some terrible diplomatic failures on both sides in the late fifties to produce this situation. My final thought on politics: Americans should be thankful the Mafia is still not running Cuba, as it did, the drug problem in Florida would be worse than it is.

Teresa decided to stay in Santiago for a few weeks to improve her Spanish. Chris and I drove back to the marina with the idea of heading to the Bahamas the next day. When we left we got the same going over by customs, except they kept the dog at home. What they were looking for remains a mystery. A curious incident occurred just before we shoved off - Chris took a video of the marina from the boat, it included a uniformed officer coming down to the dock. He came to the boat and got Chris to erase that section of the video, he didn't want his picture taken. We left as the sun set with a norther brewing up, much to the amazement of the more staid cruisers at the marina. Despite heavy weather we made it to the Jumentos Cays in the Bahamas by lunch the next day. These islands are some of the least visited in the Bahamas, in fact we encountered only two other cruisers in the three places we dropped our anchor. Our first stop was the south end of Ragged Island. A local entrepreneur, Percy, had salvaged a wrecked DC 3 and made it into a restaurant/bar right on the beach. It was closed when we were there, which isn't surprising as hardly anyone ever goes to Ragged Island, let alone the lonely south end. Our next stop was Raccoon Cay, it is, in Chris' opinion, the loveliest of all the anchorages he had encountered so far. A sheltered bay, white sand, crystal clear water - what else do you need? From there we went to Jamaica Cay, where we discovered two very lonely men slowly building a holiday resort for the ever enterprising Percy of Ragged Cay. When Chris and I showed up we got a royal welcome and a tour of the simple foundations they were making from coral blocks which would perhaps someday support small cottages. There is no runway on Jamaica Cay so Percy would be dependent on seaplanes to deliver his potential customers. He supports the workers by sending a boat twice a week with some fish and basic supplies. I went back to the boat to get them some smokes and rum to cheer them up. At Jamaica I studied the charts carefully and found there was no exit across the sand banks to the north for a boat of FIONA's draft. Consequently we sailed east overnight to the south cape of Long Island and anchored a day later at Clarence Town. Edith and I had sailed into the harbor in 1969, there seemed to be fewer residents now than then. A curious feature of Clarence Town are two magnificent churches. The first, St. Pauls, was built by a young Anglican missionary called Jerome Hawes, who had studied architecture. He then left, converted to Roman Catholicism, and returned as Father Jerome, determined to build a new church to outclass S. Pauls. The result was the impressive St. Peter and Pauls. Now Clarence Town has two great churches to save the few hundred souls that live there. We spent a couple of nights at George Town in the Exumas. This has become a major nucleation center for yachties. Several hundred boats were anchored there when we arrived. When Edith and I visited in 1969 there were two ; ourselves and a Canadian yacht. Most of the yachts stay there for weeks, snowbirds escaping winter but not willing to go too far. They hold regattas and play lots of volleyball on the beach at Stocking Island. We refuelled and moved up the Exuma chain. At Norman Cay there was another wrecked plane lying half -submerged in the anchorage, it looked like a C-46. During our visit there in 1969 we found a small hotel at the south end with a few yachts who stayed a couple of nights. A few years later a developer built some private homes towards the north end, mostly for wealthy Americans attracted by the lovely surroundings and the convenience of a 3000 ft runway not too far from Nassau. In the late '70's a gentleman with a Colombian mother and German father and connections to the Medellin drug cartel bought out the hotel, imported some heavily armed thugs who vandalized the private homes, shot at yachties (it is rumored some were killed but the bodies never found) and soon became the undisputed king of Norman Cay. His name was Carlos Lehder. For several years he ran a drug running operation centered on Norman Cay. Ultimately I believe he was jailed in the U.S. Now there is a very quaint bar/restaurant just north of the runway called MacDuffs. They have a few vacation cottages for rent at $200/night if you are interested. From Norman Cay we had a great sail to Rock Sound at the south end of Eleuthera. Chris called his parents from there and discovered they had booked him a ticket home from Marsh Harbour in the Abacos five days hence. From the weather forecast we learned a cold front was due to cross the area in a couple of days, thus the logical thing was to get to the Abacos ASAP. The next day we left bright and early aiming to be at a pass in northern Eleuthera called Current Cut by slack high tide in the late afternoon From there it would be an overnight sail to the Abacos. As we got within a few hundred yards of the cut we had a series of small rocks on our left and a shallow sand bank on the right. The depth of water under the keel slowly fell to a foot - whick way to turn? From the sketch chart in the cruising guide it appeared deeper water was on the right - so we turned that way. Wrong ! We bumped and were hard aground. I quickly rowed a kedge out in the dinghy but we couldn't get off. The tide fell and we were firmly stuck. That night the bad weather ahead of the front arrived. As poor FIONA creaked and groaned on her sandy bed the wind increased to 25 kts with driving rain and lightning. It was a long night. Just after 4 am there were signs she was coming free, the compass began to swing and soon we were able to kedge her off and stay in deeper water until it was light enough to traverse the cut. In full accordance with Murphy's law the wind fell and we had to power to the Abacos in heavy swells. We anchored behind the reef with little protection from the stiff NW'ly wind that sprang up behind the front.

To cap it all the anchor winch made loud noises when we shifted our anchor to just north of Little Harbour. Investigation showed a thrust bearing had fractured. Before we fixed it we were invited to a delicious lunch by two friends belonging to the CCA who had a charming cottage on Little Harbour. The next day we moved to Man of War Cay, 15 miles to the north, for a CCA cocktail party, part of their Abacos 2001 Cruise. The next day we shifted to Marsh Harbour, Chris flew to Tampa and there was a final CCA blow-out party at Mangoes Restaurant. I am now sitting at anchor doing a few repairs and waiting for the fresh crew, Chip and Al, who will sail with me to Bermuda and New York. Since leaving last June we have put 13,057 nautical miles on the log.

Best Wishes, Eric