Finally! Leaving St. Martin to Virgin Gorda

After months in St. Martin, it was finally time to leave.  The boat was ready and the crew was more than ready.  The run from St. Martin to the next island, Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands, was an 80 mile jog across open water.  Eighty miles in a sailboat calculated out to approximately 15 hours of sailing, which is a long time at the helm.  This would be my first blue water experience leaving the site of land and I was a bit apprehensive but I had been checking the weather for several days and knew that I had chosen a good weather window in which to make the crossing. 

Many sailors undertake a night crossing to Virgin Gorda in order to arrive during daylight, which is always preferable as there are reefs and rocks and obstacles that aren’t visible at night surrounding most of the Caribbean islands.  I was worried that it would be difficult for us to maintain alertness on an overnight crossing so a 3:00 am departure was scheduled. Sunrise at approximately 6:00 am meant sailing for only three hours in the dark.  Access to the ocean from the lagoon where the boat was, is controlled by the schedule of a lift bridge which has limited hours when the bridge is opened; 3:00 am was not one of the times on the schedule.  We left the lagoon to catch the 5:00 PM bridge opening and sailed out into Simpson’s Bay to anchor and get some sleep before embarking on the first leg of the trip toward home.

 

Mega yacht sat marina near the bridge from the Lagoon to the Bay.  Goodbye to St. Martin!

It was a lovely evening with gentle breezes, the sound of the surf, the sun setting over the sea and soothing dinner music from a restaurant on shore.  I noticed that something was floating in the water near the boat. It looked, at first, like a small fender but as it drifted closer I could see it was a dead fish. Yuck.  I have no idea what kind of fish this was as I have never seen one like it before.  It had sharp spines all over its body and looked something like a blowfish, but I wasn’t sure. Here is a picture of it:

It was really ugly and I was happy to see it continue to float out to sea.

There were quite a few boats in the bay and I could see the island of Saba in the distance.  People call the islands in the Leeward chain, the ‘islands that brush the clouds’ which is easily visible in this photo of Saba:

Isn’t that a lovely three masted ship? You can see some people in their dinghy going ashore, I imagine for some dinner.

About sunset, the wind died down and the boat began rocking in the surf.  It would have been nice, as I prepared to get some sleep for a few hours, if it had been a gentle rocking but the boat was pitching side to side as if a demented nanny was rocking a baby cradle with all her might.  Ugh.  I don’t like to be below when the boat is rocking, so I bedded down in the cockpit.  Not much sleep was had as I was rocked back and forth to the point of almost falling off the cockpit seat and had to hold onto a cleat on one side and the steering wheel on the other as I was thrashed about. Needless to say, 3:00 AM arrived to see me hanging on to the ever rocking boat and having gotten no sleep whatsoever.  I threw off the covers, went below to make a pot of coffee and prepared to take off.  The anchor was lifted and we were underway by 3:02 AM, ghosting out of Simpsons Bay into the sea.

There was a full moon and little cloud cover, another reason I picked this day to leave, so we had nice light to see our way until the sun rose.  I was happy to see that we were not the only boat out on the ocean that night as the lights of several others were visible.  The sea was fairly calm and the sky full of stars as I helmed the boat out of the bay and on course for the BVIs.  I find it difficult to sleep when it is light out so once we were set on course, I decided to take advantage of the remaining night and catch a little, badly needed sleep.  I gave over helming, lay down in the cockpit and closed my eyes, waking up a few hours later when the sun had risen.

We were at sea!  I looked around and St. Martin was a dim outline on the horizon; ahead was open water. Now the long slog was underway and it was just a matter of sailing along hour after hour.  Occasionally another boat would appear, sometimes a sailboat, sometimes a freighter, but generally there was little traffic, just a lot of water.