Dear Family and Friends,
Sand Dollar is squared away, provisioned, and tugging at her dock lines, eager to cross the pond to the Caribbean. But we have been biding our time, waiting for a decent weather window. From what we have heard, this has been an unusually cold/gloomy/windy/wet January in the Canary Islands. Lucky us!
We’ve spent the two weeks since our return in staging our little ship for sea – her first long passage since her Pacific crossing from San Francisco to Hawaii and the Marshall Islands in 2008. Our coming passage is just shy of 2900 miles, with the wind behind us blowing us toward our destination. We anticipate about a four-week passage, but a speedier transit would certainly be welcome! We are headed towards Admiralty Bay, Bequia (“bek-way”) a little island just south of St. Vincent in the Grenadines, which is in the Windward Islands, in the southern portion of the Caribbean chain.
Our marina time has been spent on our seemingly endless “to-do” list. Ken has topped off the diesel, fresh water, and propane tanks, and we’ll carry additional jerry jugs of fuel and water. We’ve cleared the decks of all gear that any pesky Atlantic waves might try to strip away, and our trusty dinghy, Loose Change, is securely lashed down on the foredeck for her ride to warmer climates. Sails, rigging and navigational gear are all inspected and ready for sea. Sand Dollar is equipped with a small galley and a reluctant cook, but our local marina market carries an amazingly varied selection of heat-and-eat meals, several of which we’ve taste-tested and bought a bunch, to supplement our usual canned ham, tuna, baked beans, soups, single-serve pasta salads, granola, powdered milk, etc. Tangerines are fresh, sweet, easy to store, and long-lasting, as are apples and farm-fresh eggs, so we’ve stocked up on those. Pretzels and saltines are at hand for stomachs un-used to the roll of the ocean, but for calm seas, treats like licorice, granola bars, cookies, PB&J, and chocolate are tucked away in SD’s lockers. Coffee, instant soups, hot chocolate and assorted teas will keep us warm until we reach more southerly latitudes.
Our watch-standing is diligent but somewhat loosely structured, with Ken usually taking the late evening hours until around midnight, after which Katie, accustomed to night shifts in the ER, takes over until around dawn. Either crew member can request a relief from the off-watch if at any time drowsiness starts to set in. In addition, the captain is called on deck for any questionable situations or close-proximity ship traffic. During daylight hours, the watches are informally shared. Although we don’t as a rule hang out on deck during watches, unless we feel like it, a 360-degree check of the sea is done every 15-20 minutes.
To help pass the time on those long ocean miles, we carry a bunch of books, as well as an collection of movies and a set of DVD’s of “The Carol Burnett Show”. We sampled one of Carol’s shows one evening and almost fell off the bunks laughing. In addition, Ken has down-loaded an assortment of some of our favorite NPR shows. We’ve also got Ken’s ham radio friends to listen to on their regular “skeds” (scheduled on-air time).
Here in the marina, daily hot showers and the washers and dryers of a handy laundry room give us our last taste of the amenities that land-lubbers take for granted. But we look forward to new shores, new adventures, and new friends, as well as rum, mangoes, and steel-drum bands!
We will get underway from Puerto Calero, Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Sunday 25 January 2015. We probably won’t be posting many updates during our crossing, but we will file position reports each day via the Winlink Ham Radio volunteer system ( www.winlink.org ). If you would like to track us, click on the SHIPTRAK gadget. At SHIPTRAK, be sure to click on “Log Entries” in the bottom left corner of the map for snippets of how things are going for us.
Farewell, Ken and Katie
