While it was nice to visit friends and family in the D.C. area, I was quickly reminded of why I left in the first place:
so when I saw a request for help sailing from Charleston, SC down to St Thomas, I jumped on it pretty quickly.
Cue the gearing-up montage music:
and I was in Charleston not long after, looking at my home for the following two weeks, a 43 foot monohull:
The owner had already provisioned the vessel, which I wasn't too keen on, as I always like to be along for provisioning runs. Luckily, he had done a decent job and what he picked up was sufficient for the trip.
I did a once-over of the vessel, judged it good enough to make the crossing, and we prepped for leaving the next morning, along with one other crew.
When the next morning rolled around, we had a bit of a monkey wrench tossed into the works. The other crew had a family emergency and had to leave immediately. That was just a few hours before departure. This meant if we wanted to stay on target, we'd need to two-hand the vessel.
I've never been keen on two-handing, and wasn't really interested. The problem with two-handing is that you pretty much have to do 3 hours on, 3 hours off, which means you never sleep more than 3 hours at a time. This makes you fatigued pretty quickly, which is a safety issue. If something happens to the other guy, you're now out there by yourself single-handing. All bad news.
The owner cajoled and wheedled, and eventually convinced me to head out with him at least down to the next port along the coastline before finalizing my decision. I decided to do it just to get a little sailing in, with me being about 70/30 to get off at the next port.
Unfortunately, we weren't even out of Charleston harbor when the dolphins showed up. Dolphins being as awesome as they are, I immediately pitched my reservations and told him to change course for the Caribbean.
We passed a fishing boat on the way out and I got a photo that I've always meant to get and never timed quite right:
that's a cloud of seagulls above and behind the fishing boat, devouring any and every fish scrap they can get their greedy little beaks around.
The passage was mostly uneventful, but it did cement my lack of interest in ever doing more than 3-4 days at a time two-handed. We did 3 on / 3 off the entire time. That's the first time I've ever done something like that. I was good for the first 4 days, but right around day 5, I started to hit a fatigue wall. I did eventually get into the rhythm of only sleeping 2.5 hours at a time, but I was fairly zombified from day 5 onward. It wasn't really fun or enjoyable like it is when you are getting at least 6 hours of sleep at a time. When the dolphins show up, you just don't really care. You're too tired to fish. If you caught a fish, you don't want to deal with cleaning it. If you tried to clean it, you'd probably slice your hand open.
So no more of those long two-handed passages for me.
Our course was due SE almost the entire time:
until we got here:
where we ran out of fuel.
What!?
The owner was not an experienced passage sailor, and unfortunately he dumped in the last five gallons of spare fuel when the fuel started getting low. You never, ever do this. The reason you never, ever do it is because when you run out of fuel and can't use your engine, that means you are down to just your sails. Trying to sail into a dock or anchorage is far more difficult than just motoring in on engine. I had no idea he did this because we were almost never awake at the same time, or I would have stopped him.
So of course the fuel ran out completely, and there we were 100+ miles north of Puerto Rico bobbing along in the water with no wind, right in the doldrums area. There are worse places to be stuck than on a sailboat in the Caribbean, of course. We were at the mercy of the winds, so we just sat there for a while, then made some headway when the winds picked up, then sat there a while again, repeat over and over again. When we eventually made it down to St Thomas, we went down around the south side of the island, which I know fairly well, the owner intending to sail into a marina. We arrived in the middle of the night, so we sailed around in circles until we were treated to a nice sunrise:
at which point I eventually convinced him to just call a tow boat instead, and we were tugged safely in:
The first thing we did onshore was drink some beers, and it was about 0930 in the morning. We needed them, it was a tiring couple of weeks.
The owner paid for my plane ticket back to DC, where I hung out for the December holidays and for a NYE party. We had a chili cookoff like every year for NYE, but I was washing my chili down with water for the most part, because on January 1st, I had an early morning flight to Vegas, baby: