The Sailing Adventures of Lea Scotia

Looking at the date of our last post I can’t believe we’ve been in Honduras for over two weeks   We spent our first week on Guanaja waiting out an impressive cold front.  Not only was it cold it was really, really rainy. A lot of rain! Reminded us of summer in Seattle.  But once the cold front ran through, it was sunny and 80 again.

We arrived on Roatan last Thursday and picked up our friend Eowyn in French Harbor on Saturday.  Sunday night we were treated to the orbital re-entry of Space Shuttle Endeavor.  It was the most beautiful site. A bright orange jet stream ran across the sky, horizon to horizon, led by a really fast moving object.   It wasn’t until Monday monrning that we figured out what it was. 

This past Wednesday, in preparation for another cold front we moved to Port Royal.  Thank goodness we did.  This front brought wind gusts up to 50 knots.  We were glad to be on a stable mooring buoy. 

We went snorkeling on a little secluded atoll yesterday with friends we met ashore.  They have a two-year old little girl that Kiera is enjoying the company of.

This afternoon, ashore at the Mango Creek Resort, we have a birthday party planned for Kiera.  She’s pretty excited to be four years old.  And Trevor and I can’t believe we have a four year old!  Every parent has been right and the time just flies by.

While here in Port Royal we have internet so we’ll be updating the blog with photos shortly.  For now I gotta get ready for a little girl’s birthday party.

Well we did it. Not the most fun six days of our lives, but it’s now over. Having departed last Saturday it took us a total of 120 hours to travel the 736 miles passage – four full and two partial days at sea. Boy am I glad that’s over with.

The journey was definitely a challenge full of adventures and problems to solve. Our first challenge was overcoming seasickness. Unfortunately just 3 hours out of Bahia Cholon in Colombia, Kiera and I were both getting sick. And it didn’t let up until the following morning. As I mentioned in the previous post, that was a rough night for all three of us. We can be thankful that the seas calmed down a bit and Kiera and I both found our sea legs.

Just as seasickness was abating, the wind and seas picked up again and wreaked havoc on the inside of the boat. A cabinet with a large mirror on it, one which we’ve always struggled to keep closed when on a starboard tack (wind coming across the right side of the boat making us heel over on the port side) came slamming open and shattered glass everywhere. Then shortly after that we realized we had sea water covering the port side of our aft stateroom. This meant that a leaky thru-hull, that we thought we had fixed once and for all in Panama, was once again leaking. This particular thru-hull has, in our opinion, a design flaw. It’s a drain hole for the aft deck locker (we have one on each side) so that rain water can drain out off the deck. It sits above the waterline by about 12 inches and only becomes a problem on a starboard tack. As the boat heels over the thru-hull is submerged. And of course, they didn’t bother to install a ball-valve, so we could, like, actually close the thru hull, because well, it’s not always above the waterline. Duh. This might be an upgrade that is put on our list when we get home.

So with at least three days ahead of us and the fact that we were a few hundred miles off the Central American coast we were a little concerned. We stuffed Play-Doh (it’s gotta be good for something) up the thru-hull from the outside (not easy) which worked for about an hour, making us realize a more permanent solution was in order. So we did the logical thing and stuffed more Play-Doh in and hoped to buy ourselves a little time. The worry was that we needed a LOT of time.

I’m sure you’re asking why we weren’t trying to plug the thru-hull from the inside. Good question. Well we had tried to do just that when it had leaked in the past and water managed to still get past the plug. Not to mention you have to try and get the new hose that Trevor only recently beautifully installed (double clamped, even using a heat gun and silicone) while standing on your head in lumpy seas. Additionally the thru-hull is in one of the hardest places on the boat to reach (isn’t that how it always is?) and the angle was hard to get a plug in to begin with. Good thing Trevor wasn’t seasick. While trying to figure out a solution, we took turns pumping out the leaky locker and cleaning up the salt water. Finally we decided to try plugging the thru-hull from the outside of the boat with a wooden plug. After a little modification with a Leatherman saw (hey, it was handy) – Voila! It appeared to be working. We both assumed the plug would get knocked out by the water rushing by at over 8 knots at some point, but at least for now we were no longer technically sinking. And it was getting dark. Whew!

Just a couple hours into our journey we were able to turn off the engine and enjoyed 60 hours of beautiful Caribbean sailing. We had to run the generator a few times just to keep up with the power hungry autopilot, radar and nav computer but we mostly had a fantastic sail. And fast! So early Tuesday morning, before the sun rose, the wind finally shifted to our stern quarter and dropped to about 10 knots which wasn’t enough to keep the sails happy and the rocking seas from rolling us around like a cork. Time to run the iron genny again. You can imagine that we were a bit bummed to find our next “situation”: the alternator had stopped working. No alternator, no charge in the batteries. There’s nothing worse than having to run BOTH the engine and the generator simultaneously. Plus we had to be aware of our fuel consumption in order to make the mileage to actually get there. Trevor, who’s quite the Mr. fix-it these days (you have to be on a cruise like this; you eventually find your inner Mr. Goodwrench) figured it out in a couple hours time. Back on track, for now.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we were in a groove. The seas were relatively calm and I was actually able to go below and cook. Crazy! And it seemed that things breaking, crashing and leaking were on hiatus. Now we were able to enjoy the 360 degree view of the vibrant, turquoise blue ocean. The water color was amazing! And the stars at night…brilliant.

But just as were getting cocky and not stowing everything properly again, the wind and sea decided to mess with us early this morning, just after 1am. Our last 7 hours at sea were really rough, rolly and wet. About two hours before dawn our boom vang broke, again. This time is was the actual fancy, heavy duty Lewmar block and tackle that broke. It was only blowing 18-22! Trevor jury rigged something to work in the meantime. Just to bookend things nicely, the seas got rough enough to afford me the pleasure of getting sick again. I think those pregnancy hormones are really messing with my sea legs.

So here we sit, Thursday, February 11th, safely anchored in the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras. We pulled in a little after 9am with our odd looking wooden plug sticking out our stern quarter. Now we just need to figure out where the port captain is and get ourselves checked into the country. I think a good night’s sleep is in order tonight.

kjm

16 26.43 N
85 53.39 W

As the title suggests were are heading into our fourth day at sea and can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel. I would’ve posted about days 1, 2, and 3 at sea but, well, things were a little rough aboard Lea Scotia. Oh, not the weather, no, that was fine. It was the state of the passengers aboard that was the issue. But before I get ahead of myself, let’s recap the end of our time in Cartagena.

All told, we spent about six weeks in Cartagena. Parts of the city are absolutely beautiful. The walled city is a place you can spend many days in just strolling about from plaza to plaza, enjoying the local vibe and scenery. Or you can see another side of Cartagena and go down to the local market, called the Bazurto, to buy your fresh fish, fruits and vegetables in addition to other random sundries. Being pregnant and trying to walk to the market brought its own challenges as well. You see, you had to get past the fish vendors to get to the fruit/veg vendors and the smell was out of this world. Let’s not forget to mention that a pregnant woman’s nose is on turbo and so the smells are more smelly. I endured for the great deals to be had but, wow! It was a challenge to walk for the five minutes it took to get past ALLLLL the fish vendors with my nose buried in a tissue and breathing through my mouth, without tossing my cookies.

Once past the fish, the deals to be had were phenomenal. Tomatoes, shallots, onions, celery, potatoes are around 1500 pesos per kilo. That’s 75 cents USD with today’s exchange rate. Pineapples and huge papayas were also 1500 pesos. While stocking up for this trip I loaded down Kiera’s ever-versatile BOB stroller and I think I spent less than $10 US. We were sufficiently stocked up.

The anchorage in Cartagena is the dirties place we’ve ever had the boat. We had no idea until we had had it cleaned a few weeks ago while at the marina. We decided to get out of the city for a few days while we waited for my next doctor’s appointment. We sailed south from Cartagena about 28 miles to the Rosario Islands where we had a pleasant break from the city. It was nice to remember why we are cruising. (It’s so easy to get stuck in these cities and start living there, forgetting the reason you’re there to begin with.) We visited an “aquarium” where the employees put on an impressive show with a band of sharks, as well as a dolphin act. We also visited an aviary with an fantastic array of birds. When we get another internet connection we may be able to share some of the photos with you.

We returned to Cartagena on January 19th for my 16 week pregnancy appointment, a dentist appointment for us all, as well as supplies for our pending big passage to Honduras. We still needed to wait for our weather window which wasn’t predicted until Feb 6th at the earliest but we really wanted to get our boat out of the dirty city. (After returning to Cartagena we were in the anchorage for one week and noticed our boat was absolutely filthy again.) By asking nicely at the office we were able to get back into the marina, a private club, for another three nights. Once again we cleaned the boat with copious amounts of fresh water, charged up our batteries, and took advantage of showers, internet and the ability to just walk right off the boat. No pesky dinghy ride was necessary.

We departed Cartagena Saturday the 30th and headed back to the Rosarios, specifically Bahia Cholon. It was the perfect place to wait for our weather window as it’s a calm, cleanish (our rigging still acquired a layer of dirt after a week but at least cleaner than Cartagena) place to wait for your weather window. Every morning the water is calm and you can enjoy a swim in the 80 degree water. By mid-afternoon the winds pipe up and the water gets a little choppy like clockwork which is fine as it forces you to stay on the boat and get projects done. No city distractions here, not really a lot to do in this particular bay, except work on the boat. Oh, and dinghy sailing in Caribbean trade winds – wheeee!

After a week of patiently listening to the weather each morning and poring over various weather emails, it looked as though, Saturday the 6th, predicted back in early January as the time to go, was it. Our challenge was that when the wind is mellow (10-15 knots) and the seas are down (below 6 feet is good) near the Colombian coast, that’s not the case near Honduras where we are headed. The big weather in Honduras is the reason for the favorable conditions near Colombia. So we needed to time it so that the cold front in Honduras (that allows us to leave Cartagena) is through in three days time for us to reach Honduras. It really is a conundrum. But that’s why we leave the forecasting to the professionals. Is it safe to go? Good, let’s roll.

Now back to the title of this email and the present day. We departed at 1pm on Saturday with a potential seven day passage ahead of us. By 4:30pm Kiera and I were both yelling at our shoes – that is holding a bucket very close. And we both stayed that way for many, many hours. Apparently we had lost our sea legs while in Cartagena. Normally I’m not that sick but I think the pregnancy hormones are wreaking havoc on my system. After a long night of Kiera and I taking turns with the bucket, I finally felt better at 7:30am the next morning. Kiera didn’t get better until noon. But thank goodness she did. I was starting to really worry about her getting dehydrated and not being anywhere near land for close to a week. And let’s not forget the trials and tribulations Trevor had to endure. He had to run the boat for about 24 hours by himself in addition to nursing his two sick girls back to health. We tried not to be demanding but when getting up means you’re going to get sick again, you yell from the bed instead – I need my bucket cleaned, I need more water, etc, etc. Not fun for anyone involved.

But here I sit Tuesday morning just shy of 6am and I’m feeling much, much better. We all still do a lot of lying around – not much else to do – but at least we’re eating and drinking fluids and we honestly can see the light at then end of the tunnel. We expect to arrive at the Bay Islands of Honduras by sometime Thursday. We need to time our arrival during daylight, as those reefs are pretty unforgiving if you misjudge the entrance. If we arrive at night we’ll lay off until morning to enter anyway.

So far the weather forecast has been right on target. We’ve been sailing for the past 60 hours at over 7 knots with 10-15 knots of breeze either on a close reach or a broad reach. (The close reach brought a lot of challenges with it and we can elaborate in another entry.). The wind wrapped around to our stern a few hours ago making for an uncomfortable point of sail so we’re motoring until daybreak when we can rig the pole on our genoa. Plus motoring for a couple hours allows our battery bank to get caught back up. The autopilot and navigation computer take a lot of juice. (NEWSFLASH 10am: the alternator mysteriously stopped putting out juice – something else to fret about! Ah cruising…)

We’ll keep you posted as we go along – our adventures continue.

kjm

At 6am Tuesday morning -
Lat: 15 degrees 11.637 N
Long: 81 degrees 00.059 W

Having checked out of Colombia on Monday we are officially not supposed to be here.   Shhhhh!  We saw our agent the day after we had checked out and since he reminded me of Shultz from ‘Hogan’s Hero’s’ I could visualize him saying, “I know nothing!” in his affected German accent.  Yes, it helped that our agent was German and portly, which added to the whole visual.  He sorta looked the other way and said that cruisers always get him to rush their exit papers and then just laze around.  Well we’re not lazing.  The darn weather won’t cooperate.  It’s w-i-n-d-y.  So we wait.  We really did want to leave on Tuesday. Honest.

As the title suggests, we officially have a plan for returning home.  We previously had so many options we just couldn’t choose.  Plan A was to truck the boat home from Galveston, Texas as that was the closest (re: cheapest) port to put the boat on a truck and get it back to Seattle.  Texas being the closest state on the Gulf of Mexico to Seattle made this seem so.  Another option we were kicking around was to leave the boat in Guatamala, up the Rio Dulce, but then we would have to worry about the boat sitting out a hurricane season without us.  A third option was for Trevor to take the boat back through the Panama Canal and sail it home.  The trouble there is it would take a couple months and Kiera and I would miss him, not to mention the extra wear and tear on the boat. 

Just a little over a week ago we got an email from Yacht Path, a shipping company that moves boats around the world, which changed everything.  The real draw with shipping is that you don’t have to decommission your boat.  You just deliver it to the ship, they hoist it out of the water, block it up on their freighter, and three weeks later, voila!  The boat is home.  Well, almost.  The journey we were able to choose goes from Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 15th (give or take a few days) to Victoria, B.C.  Once it’s dropped off it’s just a mere 12 hours away from Seattle.  A piece of cake run given what we’ve been through the past 18 months.

Previously shipping the boat wasn’t an option simply because it was too expensive.  Apparently they’re looking for business as they offered us a quote that wasn’t much more than trucking.  If we’d trucked it we would’ve had to remove the mast, rigging, bow and stern pulpits and probably all the stanchions.  For those non-sailors out there – it would’ve been a LOT of work on both ends.  Not to mention the cost of boat yard time, crane rental for putting on and taking off the mast, etc.  You have to remove all the deck gear to comply with freeway height restrictions.  We have an almost 7 ft draft (depth of the boat below the water line) and combined with the height of the boat off the water (freeboard) we are close to that height restriction.  Therefore shipping via freighter is very attractive as the boat is delivered as-is.  Lea Scotia will retrace her steps that will have taken close to two years to make in just a mere three weeks.  We’ll have to try catching her on the Panama Canal cam going the other way!

So, you ask, why the hurry to get home?  Well, I’m pregnant.  4 1/2 months pregnant and due at the beginning of July.  Getting home mid-May really only leaves us 6 weeks to prepare for a new baby.  And we can’t move back into our house until August so we’ll be master moochers.  I might like to get home before Trevor drops the boat off to get with my doctor in Seattle.  I’ve managed to find doctors along the way and have had multiple ultrasounds seeing that everything is fine and the baby is growing right on schedule.  My doctor here in Cartagena didn’t speak great English which made for interesting appointments, but we got by.  Being able to see my own doctor will be very reassuring.

So we’re off to nearby Cholon (a nice anchorage out of the city) to wait for a weather window for the 400 mile crossing to Providenica.  It’s blowing like stink out there with 15′ seas – they’ll be right on the beam.  Nice.  Hopefully things will settle down in the next few days so we can make a run for it.

Going to a doctor´s appointment in Central and South America is very different from anything we experience in the states.  In the states you typically make an appointment for a specific time and you usually see the doctor around that time.    Or at least the nurse comes to get you and you do your waiting half naked in an exam room.   And when you do have to wait, someone can give you an idea of how long the wait might be.

Well not so south of Mexico, or so it seems.  The system we´ve encountered involves giving numerous people the same appointment time and then you are slottedfirst come first serve, based on when you arrive at the office.  My routine 3pm doctor´s appointment on Tuesday wasn´t really a 3pm appointment.  It was finally my turn at 5:45pm.  How do people with jobs make that work for them?   Once you figure out the system you relax and know that it may take two or three hours.  That´s ok though – this is all part of our cultural experience abroad.

******

Trevor and I are starting to get the boat ready to depart Cartagena.  We need to provision with food for the next month and make sure any major repairs are done.  We hope to depart in the middle of next week and head north toward Honduras.  We´re looking forward to getting out of the city and getting water moving under our keel again.  I hope to have an update of our past couple weeks up on the blog in the next few days. 

kjm

Upon arrival in Cartagena, we quickly threw the anchor down in the most crowded anchorage we’ve ever been in (made sure the boat wasn’t dragging) and met my parents who were patiently waiting on shore.  Of course we had to clear customs, which you can only do through an agent, but that didn’t take long.  Only a 10 minute taxi ride away from the boat, my parents were staying in Boca Grande, a neighborhood full of shops, restaurants and hotels.  And Boca Grande is where we spent the next 10 days luxuriating in two differnt air-conditioned hotels.  My parents, who had been waiting for us to arrive (we were four days late due to tranmission issue) were ready to have us here.

For one wonderful week we stayed in Hotel Caribe, one of the older (and nicer)  hotels in Cartagena, full of many amenities.  A fabulous breakfast buffet served next to the pool started each day.  Some days we’d come to breakfast in our suits allowing Kiera to play in the pool afterwards.  It also included putt-putt golf (a rickety all-cement course but fun nonetheless), a playground for Kiera, a rec room with pool table and ping-pong (my Dad’s still got it) and a plethora of exotic animals on the grounds.  We saw minature deer, were able to hold three-toed sloths, and saw the biggest iguana any of us had seen.  They also had monkeys and parrots in cages but that was just sad so we stayed away from that corner of the property.   It was a wonderful Christmas present from my folks. 

Old town, called Centro, is so beautiful.  Its streets are narrow so even mid-day the building cast big enough shadows that you can stay out of the direct sun no matter the time of day.   It’s full of commerce, wonderful restaurants and a ton of history.  We’re really enjoying this town.

We made the 36 hour crossing from the San Blas Islands of Panama to Cartagena, Colombia in a near perfect weather window.  With help from friends and family, we received the engine part (the fan in front of the gearbox mysteriously blew into several pieces) – the logistics of getting the part could be an entire blog post, but I’ll spare you the details.

Although we are still having ongoing alternator problems, we managed to sail much of the passage and are currently relaxing with the Lesters here in a luxurious hotel with Lea Scotia anchored nearby (hopefully safely). I’m checking the boat daily and all seems well.

We finally organized a few of our photos and were able to post them this morning.  See the below four posts for coverage of the past month and different chapters of our adventure.   There are a couple photo dupes (one post by Trevor and the other by Karisa) but we figured some of the photos are fun to see again.   Enjoy, and we hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas!

tdm

Truly a cruiser’s paradise, we finally made it to the fabled San Blas Islands, with their picture perfect islands, crystal clear water, and interesting native Kuna population.  If only we could have stayed longer…

We stopped for a couple days to allow Mac and Nat means to get back to Panama City and the airport so they could fly home to Seattle.  Portobelo is a small pueblo steeped in history.

tdm

We had the opportunity while the MacLachlans were aboard to explore the Chagres River – the Gatun dam created the lake that made the Panama Canal possible.  tdm