I don't really consider myself much of a control freak, although April rolls her eyes somewhat at this proposition. Being on this boat has made any latent control tendencies on my part come to the forefront.
The first week aboard I did not sleep well even though normally the gentle rocking of the boat is very soothing. I woke up frequently and rose early with a knot in my gut. Wait a second, this is vacation. This is supposed to be
fun. Well, it is fun. It's just not relaxing at all times. The first week, we were still learning the idiosyncrasies of the boat. Things like how quickly the engine consumed diesel fuel. This is critical since we discovered that the fuel gauge is busted and always reads "full". We can tolerate a lot of technical issues with the boat, but running out of fuel is a show-stopper. No fuel means no engine. No engine means no recharging the batteries. Dead batteries means no refrigeration, no lights, no radio, no fans and no electronics. Most importantly, no engine means extreme difficulty getting into a fuel dock so we can get more fuel. This
is a sail boat, which means we don't absolutely need an engine to get around, but in close quarters an engine is nearly essential. Uncertainty around fuel consumption was greatly relieved the first time we topped up the fuel tanks (in Roadtown). Ever since we've been on boats, April and I have always kept an engine log - recording exactly how long we've run the engine every day. This showed that our engine was only consuming about a third of a gallon an hour. Since our tank holds 200 liters of fuel (about 52 gallons), this means we can run our engine 75 hours (even with a 1/2 gallon per hour of consumption) before refueling becomes a priority - it's bad to run a tank to nearly empty due to all the crud that sits at the bottom of it. We have to run the engine 4 hours a day to keep the food cold, so that gives us over two weeks between having to visit the fuel dock. OK, one worry down.
The next worry is the water tanks. The boat holds 300 liters (79 gallons) of fresh water. This isn't water that is safe to drink, but it allows us to wash dishes and rinse off hair after swimming or snorkeling. As it turns out, the gauge that reads the water level is worse than broken. It's a random number generator. Fortunately, running out of fresh water isn't the crisis that running out of fuel is. Very fortunately, since we actually ran out last weekend. We survived by washing dishes with seawater and rinsing with our precious drinking water. Currently we have 40-some gallons of drinking water stowed beneath the settee. Using drinking water to rinse isn't ideal, so we only spent one day like this before we came into port to re-provision and re-water. It looks like we can can go 7 to 8 days between filling our water tank, depending on how stingy we are with it's use. The last tankful included washing some clothes, which uses a lot of water, based on our misplaced trust in a water gauge that read 3/4 full. So, all in all, not a huge worry anymore.
Except at port, a boat runs it's electrical system exclusively off of 12 volts, like the cigarette lighter on a car. When the engine isn't running, all the power comes from a 12 volt marine battery. There are actually two batteries on this boat, one for starting the engine, the other, called the "house" battery, for running the refrigerator, cabin lights, fans, water pressure pumps, mooring lights, and other doodads. Completely discharging the starting battery will leave the engine as dead as if it was out of fuel. Running the house battery down is an inconvenience whereas running the starting batter down is Very Bad. The systems are separated for this reason - it's impossible to run the starting battery down by using too many lights, for instance. However, the batteries only charge when the engine is running. With boats we've been on in the past, we were required to actively manage which battery was being charged by the engine - only one could be charged at a time. Forgetting to charge the starting battery is Very Bad. It turns out that this boat has a battery isolator, which means that both batteries will charge automatically and simultaneously as long as the engine is running. Yea for us. We still have to manage electrical load on the house battery, since running out of power for the fridge will lead to spoiled food and an unhappy crew. When we picked up the boat, we were told to run the engine two hours in the morning and two in the evening. This seems to keep the house battery maintained enough to run the fridge all day long. When the engine isn't running however, some of our electronics aren't happy with the voltage their car adapters are seeing and refuse to charge. The laptop I'm typing on now is one of the those, although I'm pretty sure it's due to the el cheapo generic car adapter I bought for it. After a few nights, I became convinced that the house battery wasn't shot and would actually last without running the engine constantly.
My next worry was our propane tanks. Not that the propane would cause the boat to blow up, although in theory that's possible albeit extremely unlikely given the safety systems in place, but merely that we would run out. The propane runs our two burner stove and oven in the galley. The propane cylinders used on boats are midget aluminum one that don't look like they'd hold enough gas to make one grilled cheese sandwich. The boat came stocked with two. We begged for an extra two from the charter base before we left and they begrudgingly gave us one. My worry was that we'd run out and would have to find someone to refill them - not something most fuel docks could do. This worry, too, was needless since we've been out over two weeks now and haven't used up the first cylinder. It looks like the three we have aboard will be more than sufficient.
Everyone knows that the Virgin Islands have constant trade winds and that as long as you're out of hurricane season, you are in sailing heaven. Well, not exactly. The trade winds blow pretty constantly from the east at 15 to 18 knots from April to November. Starting in the winter, however, low pressure systems roll through from the east, causing north east winds that can be 20 to 25 knots and bringing unsettled weather. This tapers off by April. Unfortunately, this isn't April. It's February and the north east winds come and go. When they are here, the sailing is exciting, especially when trying to sail upwind. We've discovered that the boat handles much better with one or two reefs in the sails. A "reef" is a way of reducing sail area. I felt much better about the winds once we'd sailed with the sails reefed. During these north east winds, the waves build up and swing around to the north. When this happens, many anchorages become uncomfortable if they have much exposure to the north. So we've been keeping a pretty close eye on the weather. Here in the US Virgin Islands, getting accurate weather forecasts is pretty easy given the Internet. It's more difficult in the BVIs. In theory there is radio broadcasts of weather forecasts, but we haven't had much luck picking them up in the BVIs. Part of the BVIs actually see cell phone signals from the USVIs, however. I'm still getting comfortable with the winds, waves and the weather in general.
When we are away from the noisy and busy docks, our only choices to spend a night out with the boat is to anchor or to moor. Many bays in the islands here have moorings. This is a buoy attached to a large concrete block in the sea floor, with a line leading off of it ending with a eye and another small float. To moor you motor downwind from the mooring, stop the boat, pick up the eye with a boat hook, and run a line from your boat through the eye and back again to your boat. Our first night out was on a mooring. We actually ran two lines through the eye to be safe. Later, on a different mooring on a very winding an rolly night, I could hear our mooring lines beginning to chafe on the mooring eye. I didn't sleep well. The next morning I looked around and realized that when the other boats tied up to mooring with two lines, they lead each line back to the same side of the boat. One line was looped on the port and the other on the starboard. The next night I slept much better. Usually anchoring is the best way to lose sleep, but I've been managing to lose sleep on a mooring.
I'm still nervous about anchoring. We've only spent two nights at anchor so far, but it looks like we will be doing more in the Spanish Virgins. We know how to anchor, but there are times the anchor will drag. The type of bottom can affect how well the anchor digs in. A wind shift can cause the anchor to pop out of the bottom. All this means setting an anchor watch - someone has to wake up in the middle of the night to check the position of the boat. Usually me because I'm so very good about worrying about these things.
I'm probably leaving the impression that I'm not enjoying our trip. I actually am. It's just that I have an incredible ability to worry about just about anything. As April points out, this is a pretty reasonable survival trait. I just happen to be very good at it.
