We’ll it’s a new year soon and we’re preparing for a fun night with friends in the sun. Staying here in Bequia so far has been great. It’s a relaxt island whose main focus is on tourism, almost every day we’re accompanied in the bay by at least one cruise-ship and a couple of hundred yachts.

Champagne as we end our crossing. Just to give you a bit of Caribbean feeling.

This post will contain some pictures from our time here down in the south. After Bequia we’re heading south to Tobago Cays where there are some great snorkeling. They’ve turned a portion of the reef into a turtle sanctuary and it’s not frowned upon to swim with the turtles.

Now some pictures for you!

Yup it’s that color taken with my camera as well.

Jacks Bar, where we’ll have our dinner. Yeah, it’s on a beach!!

What we wake up to right now, not bad for a December Monday..

Fair Winds anchoring after a crossing from Cap Verde.

Since we’re using mobile internet right now the pictures are not hi-res but you can email us and request if you want them in full size. Have a great New Years eve now and we’ll catch you next year!!

We’re finally in my home island away from home. Bequia, where the sun shines, the water is warm and the beer is 18 norwegian crowns at a pub 50 cm from the water. That’s how I’ll spend my New Years eve.

Merry x-mass and Happy New Year!

Yes we have set foot on Caribbean soil witch was pretty nice. More updates coming soon.

Tomorrow we’re picking up extra crew and then it’s Christmas and after that we’ll head south for Bequia and New Years party with our friends on Fairwinds if they have finished their crossing. We’ll probably head out to Tobago Cays as well.

The sun is shining and the water is between 27 and 29 so we’re taking it slow and easy. We anchored quite far out in the anchorage but we’ll move in closer tomorrow just to make our dingy trips shorter and smoother.

We see land!! Martinique! Now let’s just hope that we don’t run out of diesel.

Let’s hope there are some good wifi there so we can upload some pictures.

There’s no I in teamwork as they say. Right now there’s no I on my keyboard. Well it is there but won’t work. Damn salty air and such things.. Good thing the screen keyboard works so I can write Ii and copy and then use witch of the I’s I want to use.

So what’s up then?
We’re 140 NM out from Martinique and we have about 30 hours left of motoring at this speed, we have about 50 something liters of diesel (damn how many i’s are there in the English language?) left and that might be enough… We’ll measure tonight and see if we need to stop and drift for a while.

I’ve finally figured out why the trade winds don’t want to play ball, no human sacrifice (last time we gave the Atlantic half a finger) so no good wind. The upside of this is that none of us have been seriously wounded the downside is that my toes have finally healed (toes bad from kitchen work) so cutting of one of them is no longer an option… Bummer..
I mean what more could the ocean want? We’ve given Mr Ocean candy, Cava, half a cupcake, some beer, potato-crisps and lot of already half-digested food. I mean, come on, what more do you want?

The sun has been out for a couple of days and I’m starting to see a problem with our choice of destination, I’m actually not that fond of heat.. It’s 35 in the air and 28 in the water and Trusty is a boat shaped sauna right now and with the small amounts of wind we get won’t give any relief. But I guess no one gives us any pity and I don’t blame you (buhu buhu we have a heat problem while sailing towards the Caribbean). Winter is not coming but already upon most of our readers. Btw it’s six days left to X-mass!!

Well I do hope we’ll be there then. It would be nice, some ice-cream would be nice..

Last night I heard a new sound, Trusty out at sea is a cacophony of different sounds and one learns the origin of most of them during a longer stay. As soon as one hear a new sound your mind starts working again, trying to find out what the hell is going on. It could be just a pencil on the floor witch is a none problem or delammination of the hull witch would be something a bit more serious. Mostly it’s just Trusty shifting shape a little because of a different sail-setting or something that has shaken lose of it’s towel wrapping.

This was a scraping sound witch was interesting, scraping sounds are not that common in our little world. I tried to pinpoint it at it came from where we have our closet and toilet area, right next to where the mast pass through. Moving silently toward the sound trying to find it it stopped. Hmm, must be something with the floor I thought and tried to focus my hearing as I moved around little. Nope, still silent..
Walking back toward the kitchen the scraping started again. Now my mind started making up reasons for a scraping sound, did we hit something that is scraping against the hull? Giant squids? Cockroaches? Kraken? I shifted my weight slowly not to disturb the floorboards and swiveled my head to pick up on the direction, looked down and saw a black blob just in front of my feet.

It was a small marine bird. Our floor is a bit slippery and I guess the claws couldn’t get enough traction for the bird to stand up. Also there’s kind of no room to fly in that part of Trusty, it’s small and a bit cramped (still good enough for us) not ideal for getting enough speed to get airborne. So I woke up the whole crew and slowly picked up the bird.

It was black and small and didn’t mind at first, I could feel the heartbeat slow down and as soon as it started to relax it begun picking at my fingers. After no response from me it calmed down again. I carried it out into the cockpit and sat it down on a big flat area. It just sat there for a while and then it flew away into the night.

The odds of finding a fish as well as a bird inside must be fun.
Right now we have 344 NM left until we’re anchored in Cul de Sac de Marin in the southern part of Martinique. The GPS thinks that it might be something between 100 to 85:34 hours to go. We’ll see. If we just get a little bit more wind so we can get at least 1.5 knots out of it the diesel will be enough to get us all the way. Yeeey!

Yeah we’re steaming.. you should be steaming too, we’re steaming, jah comes and we steam on.. woooihjooohooo!!!

We have our diesel running, our reggae on and the sun is shining, water is blue and the wind is erhm not blowing. I no longer believe in the trade-winds, they’re a lie. Probably invented by the new world order to make us believe in the early trades when we didn’t have any engines. Probably alien technology that drove the slave ships from Africa to the colonies and sugar and cotton back to us.

To be serious tough if we had more money and could stay out for two years we would have waited until January to cross, the trade-winds (if they actually exist) are stronger then but we want to celebrate new-years eve on a beach and not in a marina next to Uffes krog and the Irish Tavern (not that the Irish Tavern was that bad, the Guinness was ok). But we don’t have unlimited finances (maybe if I win that lottery) and we actually want to spend more time in the Caribbean than on the Canary Islands. If we’re going to fit The Carnival in Trinidad, The Baths in the BVI and Bermuda before we head back to reality we are going to need all the time we can get over on the west side of the pond.

Now we’re under 500 NM and we hope that our diesel tanks will be big enough to bring us all the way there. Worst case scenario we can use our dingy engine 🙂 or just tow Trusty with our little rubber boat, that would be fun.Well we’ll see what the future holds.

It’s slow right now. We have winds around 5 m/s from north east witch means we can sail toward Trinidad doing about 4 knots or we can try and reach for Martinique hoping to sail at least above 3. I’m being a bit careful right now, we could hoist all our sails and swosh away but since I can’t really rely on furling the genua I don’t want to use it because of the squalls passing every now and then. Same with our main, I don’t want to set it unreefed because it’s a hassle getting it down if a squall hits can easily become a popular youtube clipp called something in the lines of “Hahaha that idiot breaks his mast and then falls over the railing” and I don’t see a point of becoming a youtubeceleb.. So safety first right.. Well we have quite a lot of main up as it is and as the waves rock us it pump the little wind there is out of it in a loud BANG! We have lines to prevent the boom from moving but it doesn’t really matter when the sail throws it self in the wrong direction.

BANG, but it’s not all bad, today we’re 620 miles out from Martinique, it’s Lucia and we’re going to celebrate with Pepparkakor, glögg (sangria with raisins in) and BANG.. sorry, another cupcake since it’s now week number three!
My plan right now BANG! is to sail until we have something like BANG 400 NM left and then start up our trusted iron sail. The one that BANG! drinks diesel and spits out power and pollution. Yup, I’m going to motor-sail the last bit toward paradise, quite fitting as we started our trip with a lot of motor-sailing.

At least then I won’t have a power problem.
Good day to you sir and if I don’t catch you, good afternoon, good evening and good night!

Yup, I am!
The odds of me buying a winning lottery ticket are not worse than me making a joke about getting a fly-fish trough one of the ceiling windows while we keep open to ventilate Trusty. Guess what! It happened. So now I’m buying a lotto ticket.. 🙂

The Atlantic ocean is big! It’s really big.. We’re feeling like we’re getting closer now we’re down to 920 something and we like to pretend so but then I looked at the legs we’ve done before. Sweden to Inverness 500 something, Cork to Coruña 500 something, Porto to Porto Santo 550 something, you get the picture. We’re further out from Martinique than we were when we started the other big legs. But now we’re feeling like we’re getting close. During a normal summer vacation one might think that heading from Stockholm to Gotland is a big trip or Gothenburg to lets say Copenhagen. Now find a map and measure up those distances. Yup, not even close to what we right now are looking at as nearly there.

But to compare today could have been a daysail between Gothenburg and Læsø, the ocean was blue and the wind was not much to be happy for but there are some differences. For example, less traffic, 26.5 in the water, I was wearing swimtrunks all day and finally we’re not getting Tuborg tonight, no red sausage either.. Just another night-watch and six hours of sleep (gently rolled by the waves (yeah right..)), back up for another 3 hours of empty ocean and six hours downtime during the day and repeat. For at least 8-10 more days..
But time is shrinking, today was not much different from 3 days ago when I had the same watch schedule, sure there were some differences, like a fish inside of Trusty, but none that really mattered. I finished reading Thief of Time today (by Terry Pratchett) and I think they’re stealing our used time, giving it to someone who needs it more. Read the book and you’ll understand.

Until next time, smile and wave.. just smile and wave.

Ok not precisely but close. 1028 NM left or something like that.

Much have happened since last time, we’ve started sailing for real again. I could write miles about doing 6-7 knots underneath the stars in the moonlight, the ocean swirling past in a blur but I’m not that poetic so I’ll just tell you it’s great.
We have a problem tough… Seaweed, orange, looks like small bushes and floats around the surface all over the place. In the Sargasso sea (close to Bermuda I think) it’s usual but out here 1000 nautical miles away from land it feels kind of strange. Our problem is that we catch it, on our windsteer paddle and especially on the little propeller (can it be called a propeller even if it doesn’t really propel anything? hmm it propels the line that drives the generator maybe) at the end of the line from our generator. All of a sudden we stop charging even if we’re doing about 6 knots witch is strange. So we look back and the line is not turning anymore. Not that strange because at the end it’s a couple of kilos worth of seaweed completely covering the propeller. Fun.. Nope not if you have to drag up that line, untwist it and clean the mess and then drop it back in a couple of times a day.

Today as we were gybeing our genua furler got stuck and wouldn’t move at all. We tried everything we could figure out and since I’ve been up Trusty’s mast out on the Atlantic once before and probably still have some hidden bruises (12 years ago) on my arms we skipped that part and just secured the sail, hoisted our mainsail with a couple of reefs in it and called it a day. So now I don’t want any big wind changes.. Why? Because I’m not that thrilled of turning up against the wind and waves to reef right now, those things are as big as houses now. Not the small red with white details but rather the ones you find in rougher parts of town.

But hey! We’re doing fine, a little tired because of the wavepatterns but other than that just fine.
Our speed record so far on our GPS witch by the way is filtered quite hard (a must when you’re sailing out at sea with big waves) is now 8.8 knots at that point our generator line becomes airborne and flies in a cloud of spray, if the sun is in the right place it makes it own rainbow.

Rainbows, that is almost what I named this post when I started writing it in my mind at 2:35 local time (utc-2) staring into the moonlit scenery around Trusty. We kind of see them all the time. When we hit a wave surfing in the morning we get a rainbow next to us. When the rainclouds chase us in the afternoon, how do we know they’re rainclouds, rainbows..
It’s’ like we’re cruising in a bad My Little Pony video, sunsets, rainbows and ocean-spray. Sunsets by the way are spectacular in pink, gold and all the pastellish colors in the world, could almost be described as poetic as the moonlight. But hey, you have to get someone artsy out here to properly document it. Or… do the trip yourself and find out 😉

Until next time, Live long and prosper and may the force with you be..