Sailing and cruising around the US Virvin islands.

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February 8, 1990
We arrived in the Virgins just in time for the worst weather they’ve had in years (of course, excluding HUGO). The winds were blowing a constant 30-45 knots (some anchored boats swore they were suffering under 50-knot winds, and they were probably right), with commensurate seas, for two weeks. As cruisers, of course, we just hang on our anchor until the weather improves. But the bareb-oaters! These poor people down for their one week of sailing on a yacht in a tropical paradise want to sail no matter what. Considering the level of competence of too many of them, they get into trouble. We listened to May-days to the Coast Guard for days, chuckling at how silly some people are - like the fellow who was dragging anchor and wanted the Coast Guard to come “save” him. Having had our share of dragged anchors, we just don’t have a great deal of compassion for the average anchor-dragger who can’t get out of trouble by himself. I shouldn’t be so harsh, I know, but it’s becoming knee-jerk every time we are in the Virgins and watch some of these people make their terrible mistakes and just generally act clueless.

We weren’t about to sail the Anegada Passage in such lousy weather, so we were gone an extra week. The bad weather extended over the entire Caribbean so people in St. Martin understood why we weren’t back. When we did set sail the wind died completely, and so now we can say “The Anegada Passage? Piece of cake - it was so calm we had to motor across!”

It was good to go sailing again. I felt so much better physically, although it took about a week for my body to realize that it wasn’t going to be assaulted by automobiles, inflexible road surfaces, pollution or whatever,. and decided to feel good again. I have a pinched nerve in my neck which needs period attention by a chiropractor, of which there are none here. About the only time I’m free of pain is while we’re on the boat and I can swim regularly - no inflexible surfaces like concrete floors to jolt my spine. For three weeks I was in such a good mood that I thought that Peter would never agree to go back to St. Martin. The change in my disposition was phenomenal.

We were amazed at the damage from HUGO in St. Thomas. The Ramada Hotel in Yacht Haven (marina) still has unlivable rooms; sliding glass doors were blown out and haven’t been replaced yet four months later. I saw on one side at least eight rooms like that. There were houses still without roofs and the seas washed out one whole concrete pier and part of the breakwater in the marina, and sections of breakwater and sidewalk along the road are also gone. We saw two boats still sitting on the rocks; who knows, perhaps their owners don’t have the money to get them off. We saw many boats in the yards with damage, and spoke with many people whose boats had gone on the beach and suffered terrible damage. St. Thomas did not get a direct hit from HUGO either; perhaps a bit worse than St. Martin, but approximately the same forces. We heard that of 587 boats in Culebra before the hurricane, only 48 were still afloat when HUGO left. The Virgin Islands tourist industry seems to have put a great deal of pressure on the news media to minimize the tales of disruptions suffered after the hurricane. They recognize that the average tourist is not adventurous and won’t take a chance on any discomfort or inconvenience. To their credit, everyone pitched in and surprisingly little evidence remains of the hurricane’s havoc. There were not nearly as many charters in the Virgins as we have seen in other years; we heard that many people had cancelled their vacations. The Last Resort, a well known restaurant and favorite of the bareboaters, which is usually packed even in the low season, was only half full, and January should be their busiest time. I don’t wish the Virgins ill, and I’m sorry to see that they are suffering. We came back to a booming St. Martin - who had their own share of bad publicity. Right after the hurricane American Airlines put out a travel advisory saying that people planning to come to Sint Maarten/St. Martin should make other plans. You can imagine how incensed people here were; after all, we suffered almost no disruptions at all in tourist services.

Poor WATERMELON, she hasn’t been sailed seriously for so long, we had a real shake-down. As we were coming into St. Thomas, I went below for a minute before we started into Charlotte Amalie and heard a strange noise from the engine compartment. I opened the companionway steps and saw the engine half-submerged and water just gushing in. The prop shaft had come loose and slid out of the stuffing box, leaving a 1-1/8 inch hole for water to pour into. Peter stuffed a rag into the hole and started pumping the water out while I sailed in to anchor. Once anchored he went over the side to push the shaft back into the hole. The shaft zinc stopped the shaft before the prop hit the rudder, so we had no warning that something had happened until we heard and saw the water. Re-securing the shaft, we sailed into Charlotte Amalie, anchored, and spent the rest of the day cleaning up the mess. We wound up going to a marina so damage could be fixed. Burned out an alternator, the fresh-water pump, fried some wires, corroded some others, had water in the most irritating places requiring hand pumping and washing lots of stuff with fresh water, etc. We were lucky that it happened just outside a convenient anchorage, which made the initial cleanup much easier. Although it could have been done at sea, the work then would have been more uncomfortable to accomplish. A friend had sailed up with us and he jokingly asked us how much it was worth to us for him not to mention to our insurance company that we’d almost sunk the boat. Not having much of a sense of humor at the time, my reply was pompous and idiotic and best not recorded. As a result, Peter moved the shaft zinc closer to the prop strut so that if the screw came loose again the shaft would not be able to slide out of the stuffing box, and Peter finally installed the bilge alarm he had been “gonna do” for months. Of course, such precautions after the fact insure that the particular problem one has just taken measures to prevent will never reoccur. The next crisis will be some other peculiar failure for which we have not anticipated. It is times like this when I fully realize how far I’ve come in the past three years.

We were never in any danger, and although the cleanup was time-consuming and messy it was not a disastrous or stressful situation. I’ve been joking about it for three weeks now - “Peter tried to sink the Watermelon so he could get his motor-sailer”. In cleaning up we also finally figured out the cause of some chronic irritations on the ‘Melon and wound up fixing them as well, so our mess had some good come out of it.