Routing and Weather

As we get ready to (finally) leave, routing, charts, and weather are becoming our most important tasks. We have decided to take the route with the best chance of favorable weather and currents, a north-west sail across the Caribbean to the Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba, then west-north-west between the north coast of Cuba and the Bahamas to Key West, and finally north to Sarasota:

We have the option of anchoring for rest or to wait for weather at an island on the south-western tip of Haiti, Ile a Vache. This will be about half-way home. Once we get through the Windward Passage, we can pick up a favorable current called the Old Bahama Channel to help us along.

Right now, the wind is blowing in a fresh to strong breeze and will pick up mid-week, so we have time to stow more items that will become air-borne once we are underway, and make a last grocery store stop. Our last task, the day before we leave, will be to check out of customs and immigration. We still don't know when our weather window will be, and are relying on our weather router, Chris Parker for that information. Every day I look at the weather and it is still brisk with lumpy seas out on the open water.

Sea Trials

We've been pretty busy now, doing sea trials. What that means is we take the boat out for a short time to test out gear that we can't test at the dock and do shake-down sailing.

We first went out on April 16, and just tested the engine. We puttered around the inner harbor here in a fairly fresh breeze. The only weather we've been having are fresh to strong breezes. We came up with several small things to fix on the engine - a dirty air intake and a small diesel fuel drip out of the secondary fuel filter.

Then, last Monday April 20, we took the Debonair out into the open sea to raise sails. This was a strong breeze day, and we just raised the mainsail with two reefs in it (shortened sail area). We had 6 to 8 foot seas crashing over the bow on a beat, and wore ourselves out. We came up with some more things to fix and a *lot* of items to stow. Even with what we thought everything lashed down below decks, this really shook loose stuff that managed to crash onto the floor.

We decided that we needed a mainsail management system, known as a "lazy jack" system. This is a simple set of lines and blocks designed to keep the mainsail from being thrown all over the deck when we bring the sail down. We should have done this years ago, but it took going out into 25 knots of wind, gusting to 30 knots, to convince ourselves that we need one. Here's a picture of what the rigger will do for us:

This is as much a safety issue as ease of handling - when squalls come up, we can just go to the mast and dump the mainsail down without having to worry about it as the wind pipes up.

Almost ready!

SCUBA

Lest the reader think we are all work and no play, on Easter Sunday we celebrated by going for a SCUBA dive. It was a beach dive, over at Caribbean Sea Sports at the Marriott Hotel. My dive buddy was Tom from the dive shop.

Getting all my gear together

Suited up

The hardest part - walking to and from the water with 40 pounds of gear

Putting on my fins

The coral reefs on Curacao's leeward side are still quite healthy, with more colorful tropical fish than I could name. We even saw a large octopus!

The dive shop is quite a welcoming view

More Plumbing

Well, most of you think we should be ready to leave by now, and we are almost there. Our last issue was yet another plumbing job. With everything apart under the lazarette, half of our batteries out and on deck, the engine's exhaust apart, we took a good look at the mysterious underpinnings to see what else might break. We also had the boatyard's mechanic over to get professional eyes on this area. Klaus, our favorite mechanic, pointed to the large exhaust hose that exits from the engine, and said that needed replacing. OMG! Yes - it had a groove worn in it from chafe through the plywood partition covering the engine. To have that hose break or blow out underway would be catastrophic - no more motoring! This is a large, double-ply, heavy hose, but - see the groove:

Here's the old hose in place

The groove that is working on a break in the hose

We finally got the replacement installed by the mechanic, with a sleeve to protect it from chafe in the future.

The anti-siphon water lock that the hose connects to

The mountain of stuff out of our lazarette, under a tarp

 So, now we have a cockpit back - the batteries have been re-installed, the waterlock is back in place, and all of the stuff is stowed away again. Our engine purrs without any drips, in goes into gear, and now we are ready to do a sea trial in the next day or two!