St. Maarten to Bermuda, and on to Newport

By Sailor Keddy -

St. Maarten was exactly what I had expected in an eastern Caribbean island; high-brow resorts sharing beachfront property with relative shacks the true locals live in. The scenery also as I had imagined, a tropical place where mountains meet the sea with the gentle trade winds rustling the palms.

We departed on Wednesday morning after Lisa, the owner, and Bill, the father of a friend of Grants, came aboard Tuesday afternoon. Funny aside about Bill's son, he worked on the boat owned by Rupert Murdoch, and apparently he's on it a lot. I won't editorialize on that fact. Anyway, we left with 10-12 knots of breeze out of the northeast and with this Swan 56 pointing 30 degrees off of the apparent wind, 20 degrees in the gusts. The picture below is a stitch of a bunch I took to capture that first day sailing. That's Lisa reading in the cockpit and Bill at the helm (click on it for a bigger image).




After a day of this blissful sailing the wind fell and we motor sailed for the next three. Since Grant allows the use of the autohelm when the motor is on, this left me to stargaze for a lot of the two night watches I had. I'm not sure why I hadn't done this more on previous deliveries, but the mood really struck me on this one. I found the planets Venus, Saturn, Mars and Pluto; the constellations Orion, Cannis Major (with its bright star Sirrus), Scorpio, Libra, both the Big and Little Dippers as well as the north star Polaris. I used Polaris when we started sailing again, as our course put it right between the mast and the starboard shroud, I didn't even have to look at the compass.

The video below shows the conditions sailing when the sun rose on my watch, about 20 miles out from Bermuda. It was gusting to 35 and the seas jacked up to about 10' as it started to get shallow near the island. We cleared customs that morning and put Amerigo on her anchor.


I am now in Bermuda and waiting for a weather window to get this boat to Newport. Looks like we can hope for a Monday departure.

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