December 20, 2006, Anguilla

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Anguilla’s regulations require that all boats purchase a cruising permit (to the tune of $100 a day) if they wish to anchor or moor anywhere other than Road Bay. And supposedly, these restrictions apply to dinghies and yacht tenders as well as the mother ships. As much as I want to be charmed by this island, that is putting a damper on it.

Sten and I have very different responses to rules and regulations. He obeys them. I’ve never met one the boundaries of which I didn’t want to test. So we looked at the cruising rules of this island in very different ways - he as a limitation, me as a challenge. We know that there is beautiful stuff here, we just have to find a way to get to it that we both can live with. I know that if I wait long enough, Sten will get sick enough of toeing the line to take a risk. This morning, our third in Road Bay, his patience expired and we set off in the dinghy to see how strictly these rules were enforced.

We dinked over to Little Bay to do some snorkeling and have a picnic lunch of pb&j - my specialty (and certainly safer than quiche). Pale cliffs filled with nesting migratory birds, Bermuda birds, tropic birds, and pelicans embrace a picture perfect turquoise bay. We picked up a mooring and I was in the water before Sten had put on his fins. Just below the surface were schools of thousands of silversides (small bait fish) that seem to move as if they were one organism, shimmering like so many diamonds as the school smoothly pulses below the surface. Occasionally, a predator would swim below them, forcing them to the surface, where they hang, suspended briefly just above the water, before plunging back below. Silver rain.

As I headed toward the submerged base of the cliff, I passed over a puffer fish with the cutest startled expression on its wide-eyed countenance. As I checked out the smaller tropical fish feeding among the coral, I was startled by what appeared to be divers crashing into the water around me. The first clue that they weren’t divers was that their fins were awfully small. The next was when they dipped their beaks below the surface to swallow great mouthfuls of bait fish. Once I realized that I was being dive bombed by pelicans, I couldn’t stop laughing.

Meanwhile, Sten had been exploring a cave, filled with bats, which he declared was pretty cool. As we returned to the dinghy for lunch, several local daytrip boats pulled into our perfect bay. They all ignored the sign that declared that there was “Absolutely No Anchoring Permitted” and promptly dropped their anchors. One took care to anchor in the sand, the others went ahead and anchored in the sea grass. Perhaps the Anguilla Fisheries Department should shift their focus from trying to prevent (or at least profit from) cruisers from visiting, and pay more attention to how the local boats treat the natural resources.

We headed back to Road Bay, but weren’t quite ready to climb aboard, so we grabbed the computer and headed to Roy’s to catch up on the rest of the world. While we were surfing the net we noticed that one of the couples near us (with the greatest age disparity between them) was receiving a delivery from the captain of their yacht. He maneuvered their tender into the light shore break to drop off a laptop and a bottle of wine. I turned to Sten to ask where our captain was with our bottle of wine, only to be befuddled about which of us was the captain. I sign our clearance paperwork as the captain. We tend to reach agreement upon all decisions (sail changes, anchoring, heading changes, etc) before acting on them. However, when we get in a jam, Sten takes the command position and I follow his instructions and heed his requests. There are just times when it makes sense for one person to be calling the shots. Still, I couldn’t convince him that with great power comes great responsibility, so we returned to the boat to have our wine.

With our tanks wicked low, and the transom riding high, Sten fired up the water maker to see if his installation worked. With a small hick-up (had to briefly stop production to remove the wrapper from the filter), it was a success. At 5:23pm Sten shouted “Woo Hoo - We’re making water!” It is fantastic to see his joy and pride in having worked through the challenges of the installation.

December 19, 2006 - 63.06W, 18.12N - Anguilla

On Sunday, December 17th, we cleared out of St. Maarten and sailed north to Anguilla. It was such a short sail that we didn’t bother to remove the mainsail cover, so we reached up to the island under jib alone. With the wind around 15 kts, we were making about 6 knots over the ground, but if it dropped below 12, our boat speed hovered around 4 kts. Rounding the western corner of the island, we found ourselves close reaching under steep cliffs. We tacked back and forth for an hour or so, enjoying watching birds diving for fish, but if we kept sailing, customs was going to close before we could make it to the anchorage. So, we turned on the engine, and pulled in just in time to clear in.

We anchored as close to the beach as possible so that we would have a short dingy ride to customs. After clearing in, we wondered down the strip of beachfront bars to figure out which one would be our source of internet access. Roy’s is the place. Here is a link to the webcam that shows the anchorage.

http://www.mycaribbean.com/panos/webcam_bg.html

What the cam doesn’t show is the commercial pier just in front of Roy‘s. Joan, the bartender, warned us that the barge docked at the pier would be unloading for much of the night so that it could be gone before the containership that was due to arrive the next morning pulled into the harbor. We returned to the boat for dinner and sat in the cockpit watching truckloads of dirt being removed from the barge. The racket kept up until 10pm, when the barge left, coming quite close to us. We were both on deck as it departed, to make sure that we didn’t need to pull in some anchor chain.

The following morning we awoke to repetitive series of horn blasts. The containership was loudly announcing its arrival. It took a few sets of blasts before we realized that they wanted us, and the rest of the boats anchored near the pier to move. Groggily, we upped anchor and moved as far from the pier as possible.

This rude awakening was the start of one of those days where nothing seems to go right. During the course of the day we lost several items off of the swim platform - my mask and snorkel, a cleaning cloth and a suction cup that we use to hold ourselves against the hull as we clean it. So far, we’ve found everything but the suction cup.

Sten was cooking up a storm down below - coleslaw, babyback ribs, corn bread and chocolate cake - working around the fact that we had run out of regular sugar, regular flour and unsalted butter. I came down to clean myself up from the hull cleaning, only to shoot myself in the eye with liquid soap.

When perched on the seat in our tub, the shampoo, conditioner and soap dispenser is at eye level. I yelled and stomped my foot in pain, but I couldn’t get out the words to tell Sten, who had come running, what had happened or how he could help. I was blindly digging in my eye, trying to remove the contact that had trapped the soap against it, and groping for the handheld shower nozzle, trying to flush my eye out. But the force of the stream was too much, so I asked for a cup. He dashed off, but was quickly back, bearing one of our plastic wine glasses from the galley, sloshing water all the way.

After tearing out my contact, and 15 minutes of flushing, I reemerged into the salon, looking for something to fill the wine glass other than water. Now blind in one eye, I offered to help him with the coleslaw. Knowing we were out of regular sugar, I reached into the deep storage to pull out some raw sugar. Too late did I realize that I had just added wheat bulgar to the dressing for the slaw. Sten brilliantly suggested that we strain the bulgar out of the dressing, which rectified the situation.

After a day cooking in the heat, Sten went to take a refreshing shower, only to have the shower drain in the aft head stop working again. We’ve had problems with it a few times now. The issue seems to be the on the discharge side of the pump.

After Sten put the ribs on the grill, he came back below to help clean up a bit from the cooking. We were both below when we heard a noise. Sten quickly realized what had happened. The grill, which is mounted on our stern rail, had rotated, dumping some of the ribs, and two of the four grill grates into the water.

Just another day in paradise.

After last night’s debacles, neither of us was really in the mood for the chocolate cake that Sten had worked so hard on. So today we had it for breakfast. It was like a scene out of a Bill Cosby comedy sketch. Flour, eggs, milk - yup, it’s a breakfast food.


If this trip has taught me anything so far it would be that I'm a total klutz. The fun continued today as I fried a strip of skin off of my arm while attempting to remove the quiche that I’d made for lunch from our oven. Our friend Sonya refers to her oven as the “easy bake oven”. The reference is brilliant. These boat ovens look like a real oven, but they are tiny, have hotspots, and you can only cook on the top rack or risk burning the bottom of whatever is in the pan.