Atlantic cruising and crossing 2009

The 'slave yard' on James Island.

A typical African village along the Gambia river. Except, note the radio/cell tower in the background. Someone, somewhere is getting communication from these towers.

Jason with the throng of kids that attached themselves to him on one of our walks through Kuntaur, The Gambia. Everyone wanted to hold our hands.

Jim navigating us up the Bintang Bolong (Creek) to the Lamin Lodge. It was a narrow and shallow river that is navigable, but many boats run aground trying to get up the river to the lodge.

My water delivery from Lamin Lodge, The Gambia. We were up the creek and the water came from a village 2kilometers from the lodge. We thought it was to be delivered by donkey cart. But the man and his 2 sons delivered 240 liters of water to Vision Quest by dugout canoe in these big yellow jugs. I then had to pour the water into our tanks and water jugs.

Jim and I checking out the Lamin Lodge while enjoying a local beer, JulBrew. We later had a buffet lunch here that filled us all up.

The view of the yachts from Lamin Lodge. Vision Quest is the last one the farthest out.

The Lamin Lodge, a grass,stick and board structure that has been described as every man's dream treehouse.

A typical river village along The Gambia. The women and children still come to the river to pound clothes as their way of doing laundry.

A dugout canoe on The Gambia--the only way the locals travel.

Another local village on The Gambia.

On James Island in the middle of The River Gambia, not far upriver from the capital, Banjul. This island was supposedly used as a staging place for slaves before they were picked up and shipped to other parts of the world. It is famous because of Kunta Kinte of Roots fame; this is where he was picked up in the novel.

More of James Island ruins.

This is dirty Dakar, Senegal. You can see the mast of a sunken yacht sticking out at an angle right in the middle of the pic.

Karen swimming in the middle of the ocean.

Jason and Jim swimming in the ocean on a calm day on our crossing to Africa.

Jason in the Sailor's Club bar on Senegal. This was the only 'nice' place we saw in Dakar. It was clean and they had great beer.

These are pilot whales that we saw between Cape Verdes and Senegal.

Karen with a Gazelle lager beer at the Sailor's Club bar in Dakar, Senegal.

Jim at the fruit stand just outside the Sailor's Club. Once we ventured beyond here, it turned into dirty, dilapidated Dakar.

Vision Quest in Las Palmas, Canary Islands before we left to pick up Jim in Cape Verdes. Some folks thought the name of the boat was "York Me" and wondered what that meant! You can see how our buoy "3920" came in handy to keep the wind vane off the dock.

dolphins next to the boat in Cape Verdes

More dolphins in Cape Verdes. We also saw whales here! But no pics, sorry.

This is Mindelo, the port on Sao Vincent in Cape Verdes. It was MUCH nicer and more modern than the guide books led us to believe. It was a great port to use as a jumping off point and we came back here after doing The Gambia to get water and fresh veges/fruit before crossing back across the Atlantic to Grenada.

A valley on La Gomera, Canaries. There are cave hippies living along the beach in caves on either side of this shot. They remind me of the '70's.

A valley on La Gomera, The Canary Islands

Rows and rows of big tuna anchors in Conil, Spain

These are big anchors! That's Jason, Karen and James from Moleoba perched on them.

Near the end of the levada walk on Madeira.

Jason and Patty on the levada walk. You can see the path isn't always too wide. This was about average. The dropoff was hundreds of feet if we misstepped!

Sometimes the path went through cracks and tunnels. The stepping stones over the running water are slabs of rock.

Karen on the levada walk in Madeira. One of the places where folks have laid slabs as stepping stones across the water channel.

Jason and Karen near the end of their basket sledge ride from Monte to Funchal, Madeira.

Beautiful hydrangeas like these lined many roads on the island of Madeira.

Port of Funchal. The big boat to the right of center is now on land and is a restaurant. It is the Vagrant and once belonged to the Beatles! If you look closely (blow up the photo) just to the right of the back mast of the boat (between the mast and the lightpost) you can see the twin white towers of Monte, where the basket sledge ride began. The ride brought us to the outskirts of this port city.

Here is the bowl, made from the root of the thuya tree that I bought for my brother's wedding gift in Essouira, Morocco. The burls are gorgeous!

Me with an Atlantic bonito we caught and ate.

Antigua and Barbuda March 2009

Looking out nW from top of Bird Is., Antigua

The lagoon on Bird Is., Antigua where we landed our dinghy to climb to the top of the hill to see the holes in the rock below.

Looking down 100' thru a hole in the rock at the top of the hill on Bird Is. Antigua

Another 100' hole that anyone could literally step into: no signs or fence or warning at all. If we didn't know it was supposed to be there and hadn't seen other folks there before, we could easily have stepped into this freefall to the ocean below. Never in America!

The fishing complex at Parham, Antigua where we got water. We washed EVERYTHING in/on the boat and filled the water tanks to go!

Wild donkeys and horses on Barbuda. We could hear them braying all through the night but the donkeys never seemed to come to the beach. We did see the horses near the beach one afternoon. The locals used to race the horses on the beach on weekends. These were curious, but skittish, roaming the abandoned K-Club resort on a huge property with a huge beach. Never did hear why they closed down.

A Century plant. They bloom once and then the main stalk dies and hopefully, the little cacti land where they can grow. These stand out on the islands above most of the other vegetation.

Jason snorkeling to scrub the bottom of the boat to remove barnacles and slime. We gotta do it periodically.

You can see the bloom of disturbed sand behind this giant party cat that just noses itself onto the beach on Barbuda and disgorges passengers for a couple of hours of touring and playing on the beach. One reason the water is always so disturbed....

Barbuda Beach party

More beach party pics

Drinks on the beach at sunset in Barbuda

Barbuda Beach Party

Jason, Vytas, and Tracie at Low Bay, Barbuda

Feb 2009 our upwind slog

Jason, Vytas, and Tracie starting on the rum drinks in Barbuda.

YOLO anchored off Low Bay in Barbuda. We're at the beach party below drinking rum and cokes with the fellow cruisers we met that day.

One long beautiful beach at Low Bay, Barbuda. The dinghy in the foreground is the one we carried up over this beach to a lagoon on the other side to go clear into Customs and Immigration. 'Customs' was a room in some guys house, with cardboard boxes stacked haphazardly against the wall, representing the last 7 years of their records. We had to walk through his living room (with a new 27" tv sitting on a table) to get to the tiny office. The others waited on his front porch while we filled in paperwork. Gotta love the islands, mon!

The beach at Low Bay, Barbuda. Notice the sand fence they've put in to trap the blowing and drifting sand. Several hurricanes had cut through to the lagoon beyond and damaged the town, so they are trapping the sand and planting native vegetation to reestablish the sandbar for protection. They expect the fence to be covered within 2 years and to help give the dune structure. The sand is soft and warm and has a pink glow to it from some pink shells. The water is all stirred up but it is still pretty.

What's left of our Venezuela flag after whipping in the wind over 2-3 months. It's almost 1/2 gone as there are supposed to be 7 stars on the blue stripe. Unfortunately, our American flag didn't fare much better and we had to take it down out of respect for the flag.

Our anchorage at Los Testigos. YOLO is the 3rd boat if you start at the island and go clockwise. Jason took this pic from the lighthouse at the top of the 822' hill.

A sunken megayacht at Los Testigos, VZ. We never got the story behind this but it wasn't here a few months ago when we came through.

The village at Los Testigos with fishing boats.

Sunset from Tres Palmeras in Los Roques, Venezuela

Karen pulling the weather faxes from the SSB radio. I'm not that sad, really, just concentrating while trying to take my own picture!

Jason relaxing during our passage. I think he's on watch, too!

Tres Palmeras Island where we sat for 5 days to wait for a weather window. The turtle research facility is also nearby.

Its Valentine's Day and we are heading back to Margarita Island off the coast of Venezuela to refuel and reprovision before heading on to Grenada or points in the eastern Caribbean island chain. We had to wait 5 days in Tres Palmeras (3 Palms) for a break in the wind/waves. Guess how many palm trees there are on the island?? Exactly.

But the neighboring island of Dos Mosquises has a turtle research facility on it and we took the dinghy over yesterday and got to see turtles of all sizes and ages. We even got to hold the little 6-day old ones that were about the size of a silver dollar. Too bad I forgot my camera again. Tons of old conch shells make up the edges of both islands that tribes from Venezuela settled around 1300AD. They used the queen conch for food and lots of other things it is believed. Archeologists have excavated lots of little artifacts and figurines that are unique to the tribes and these islands by digging trenches and pits under all the conch shells. Pretty neat! It's amazing to see piles of conch shells so high.

The live conch crawl and hump along all over the grassy bottoms around here, If it weren't a park, I'd have to collect a few and make conch fritters again. I did collect a few small shells of bright colors to eventually make into earrings. Been so long since I wore jewelry on the boat that I'm afraid my ear holes will close up. And who needs earrings when you're naked sailing??

Feb 28
We finally made it all the way to Barbuda, just north of (and part of) Antigua. We stopped at Margarita Is but our timing was off and we got to the north coast near midnight and saw what looked like fireflies on the water all around. They were strobe lights attached to fishing nets from all the fishermen out at night. Exactly what we didn't need. And then the rain came and blacked out our view of much of the area, along with a fog (that was a first for us in the Carib.). So we just continued east until we were sure we'd miss them all and then turned south to make our way in between the rocky islets and the main island of Margarita. A power outage blackened much of the coast and at least one light beacon was not working, making navigation at night a challenge. My eyes still ache from looking thru the binoculars straining to see if there was anything in front of us we might hit or snag. We did make it to port when the sun rose and we could see again.

We topped off our water and fuel and cleaned out 2 liquor marts and a BP gas station of all the Superior rum they had. Ended up with about 6 cases of the stuff. At around $2 per bottle, we are set for this season and maybe the start of next year. Our friends on Jus'Now asked us to pick up a few cases for them and hope to see us again next year to collect it. If not, rum doesn't go bad and we'll find a way to dispose of it, I'm sure..... And of course, we had to get more Coke/Pepsi to deal with all that rum! So we added well over 1000 pounds to YOLO with all those liquids, and she sits a bit lower in the water now, making a fast run less likely.

We fought our way back to Los Testigos and stayed there 5 days to let another swell go by. Jason hiked to the lighthouse on the top of the island, but snorkeling was disturbed by the current and the water around the reef was all stirred up, so we lazed around and read mostly.

We came straight up from Los Testigos to Barbuda, bypassing all the islands in the chain and crossing in the straightest, shortest line to reach here in 3 days. We had 15-25 k winds and the seas were 5-9' most of the way, making the ride lumpy. The wind on the nose and the current still swooping up and around from South America pushing against us meant we still had to do some motor sailing but managed to get some true sailing in this leg. We had a fairly calm spell and decided to run the other engine for a while and found it had water in it. Thank goodness Jason is so diligent about learning how to deal with these things. We had to change the oil in the engine 2x to get all the water out before we could hand crank and start the motor. But we prevailed and dropped anchor in a very beautiful place with not a road in sight!

The water here looks like God poured himself a giant gin drink into a sandy bottomed glass and just left it while he went looking for olives. Unfortunately the water this time of year gets stirred up by the wave action and the sand makes the water turbid so snorkeling just now is not so good. But the beach here is awesome! And the water colors are still gorgeous. Met some other Americans here and we had an impromptu beach party last night with some Canadians and New Zealanders joining in for the fun. We had waved the Americans over as they were getting into their dinghy to head to the beach and hopped a ride with them to check into Customs/Immigration/Port Authority.

There is no dock here, so we had to surf the dinghy onto the beach and drag it up and over the sand spit to the lagoon on the other side where we could then dinghy over to the town. Landing a dinghy in the surf creates tension/anxiety or amusement, depending on whether you are doing it or just watching others try. Their dinghy and motor was easy to manhandle with the 4 of us and Jason and I later reckoned we couldn't have drug/carried our dinghy that far up and over the sand. The alternative was to call for a boat boy from town or a $60 taxi ride. Lucky we snagged that ride! Vytas and Tracie on Sunshine Daydream (he's a Dead Head and named the boat after one of their songs) were great company for the day.

We've heard of the stikes on the French islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique and heard some firsthand accounts of the troubles they are causing for cruisers. We'd hoped to stop in some of those ports, but with all the stores shut down and no food, water, fuel, or currency available, there doesn't seem to be much reason to do so. We visited them on the way down the first year, so we're going to be more picky about where we spend our time this season in the chain. So our next stop will be Antigua and then, who knows...???

This tiny sand outpost of Barbuda has free wifi we can pick up from the boat so we have an internet connection after so long without one! Send emails quickly so I can catch up with what's going on in your worlds of work and pleasure. We've had so little news of any sort lately. We know you're having a very bitter cold winter up north and the economy still sucks, but we'd love to hear your details and whatever else is happening in the 'real' world out there. Stay sane and healthy!