ANDREW: Cruising with Andrew

We finish stowing and preparing and, on Monday in the early afternoon, we motor out of Boca Chica on the way to Isla Parida about ten miles away. The Golfo de Chiriqui is littered with tropical islands. Unfortunately, a great number of them are underwater islands, aka hazards to navigation. And a lot of them are not marked on the charts. If you are lucky you can see the long Pacific swells breaking over them and therefore avoid them. Near the coast you get used to reading the underwater hazards but you can never be totally sure until you get local knowledge. Drive slowly! (I am reminded here of the traffic sign at the entrance to a village in the Vogelsberg district north of Frankfurt. Under a sign ;picturing playing children was the admonition, “Fahrt langsam! Es koennte auch Dein Kind sein!” [“Drive slowly! It might even be your child!”])

Once clear of the mile-long entry channel from Boca Chica, we continued to motor for a while before finally, at long last, putting up the new sails and setting a course for Parida. As we approached Isla Gámez, a smaller island just off Isla Parida where we intended to drop anchor, we spotted a fishing panga about a quarter mile away. It suddenly started towards us at speed. I immediately thought that the island must be private and they would want to chase us away. As it turned out it was my friend Doug of S/V Luna. He has been out in the islands for the last week or so. He and the guys in the boat with him had come over to this particular spot, not to fish, as I suspected, but because they could get a connection with their cellphones! He recommended not anchoring at Isla Gámez. He himself was anchored about two miles away in an all-weather cove. He would return with us and pilot us in.

Forty-five minutes later we were anchored near him. It was certainly protected from the wind. But there was a gap in the reef about 300 yards across to the south between Isla Parida and Isla Paradita through which very large Pacific swells were rolling into the bay at long intervals, washing white and frothing up onto the rocky points at the entrance and carrying on ponderously to spread out inside the anchorage. There was a strong and circular tidal current flowing from the other entrance to the bay, the one by which we had entered. The result was that Vilisar was turned at such an angle that we were constantly rolling around like a bottle at sea. The anchorage was protected from wind, but the swells were going to make our life a little more than just uncomfortable.

ANDREW: Working at the masthead on Isla Parida

This rolling was not just a question of comfort. While our new red sails were perfectly fine, the jib halyard had somehow jammed in the block at the top of the mast and, once hoisted to nearly full height, the jibsail could not now be got down. After a lot of futile pulling and twisting, it was finally decided that the only way to deal with it was to go up to the masthead in the boson’s chair. This promised to be exciting given the rolling of the boat. The arc, after all, at the top of the mast was going to be much greater even than the deck, which at this point was rolling badly and making footing difficult. But, of course, that is why one’s children come to visit one, isn’t it? To exchange their youthful vigour for episodes of raw experience.

Immediately after the question, “Who’s going up?” is posed aloud, Doug and I turn to look wordlessly at Andrew. He goes slightly pale, his eyebrows shoot up nearly to his hairline, his eyes widen like locomotive lights and his nostrils flare. It’s a picture, isn’t it? He said later his re-solve nearly dis-solved as we were digging out the bag with the boson’s chair and line, carrying it on deck, shaking out the gear and attaching it to the mainsail halyard. We never gave him a chance to discuss it, really. Up he goes, hanging onto the swaying mast for dear life, the pockets of the boson’s chair filled with various hand tools. Once past the sticky bit around the spreaders, there are no more reachable shrouds to hang onto to. Only the mast itself. “OK! Tie it off!” he calls down. “I’m at the top.” His voice has a perceptible nervous quality about it, and he seemed to be a little short of breath.

“The jib halyard is jammed hard between the sheave and the frame of the block. There’s no way I can get it free. I also cannot loosen the shackle from its fastening to the masthead corona.” The boson’s chair works fine with its four-part purchase system of blocks and line. But, even fully hoisted to the mainsail sheave, the occupant of the chair cannot quite reach over the masthead to, say, the masthead light. All work has to be done at the full extension of only one arm while he grasps and wraps his legs around the mast to prevent himself from being swung out as the boat rolls, the masthead arcs and, on the return swing, smashes him against the rig. Even a safety belt did little to help here. We finally decide to send up a hacksaw to see if he could cut the block open from its side. This proves futile and it is finally decided to cut the halyard and rig a new block and new halyard the next day. As it turns out, this was probably unnecessary. Andrew was just unfamiliar with the cotter ring that held the block cum shackle to the corona; he didn’t realise that the ring could be removed and the pin simply withdrawn. But you win a few and you lose a few.

Doug was rowed back to his sailboat, Luna, which was rolling around about 100 yards from us. We tidy up a bit on deck and then get busy fixing a “Caribbean stew” (black beans, tomatoes, bell peppers, okra, ginger, red pepper flakes over white rice). Our meals have been rather skimpy over the day and by now we were ravenous. Andrew deserves to sit in the cockpit with a whisky in his hand and contemplate his fate for the next morning. We finally turn in, worn out by eight o’clock, everything alow and aloft secured against the night and the rolling. Uninterrupted sleep is difficult despite the beauty of the deep blue night sky, the Milky Way almost solid light, the Big Dipper rising to the north (the polar star just barely visible near the horizon) and the Southern Cross above the entrance to the bay to the south.

In the bright morning sunlight, Doug calls over that he wasn’t about to spend another night in these swells. He is going to move his boat around to another bay, which he thinks might be calmer. He promises once there to let us know by radio if this is in fact the case. We would then follow him to begin our masthead work. Off he motors. But after several hours and repeated attempts to reach him on vhf radio, we have more or less given up. The rolling seems however to have abated somewhat by early noon, mainly because the currents are not turning us broadside to the swells. We are pitching a bit, but that is much easier to deal with on a boat since that is what her hull is designed for. We decide we should forget about moving the boat to an unknown anchorage, and take advantage of whatever calm we can get right here.

We also rig a pair of rope stirrups to the boson’s chair so that Andrew can stand up once he is aloft. He takes a stout safety belt with him, as well. Once he has learned that it is possible to pull the cotter ring on the jib-block’s shackle, it is relatively easy, standing up in his stirrups, to remove the whole block. Down it comes in a heap, unfortunately with a pair of snub-nosed pliers that barely missed me where I was working directly beneath him.

Doug had found an old block in his bilge before he left. It is missing various parts for attaching it to anything. But Andrew seizes a galvanised shackle to it and, taking the new halyard up with him, he ascends now for the third time, attaches the block and shackle and ‘mouses’ it to prevent it vibrating free sometime at sea, runs the new halyard through the sheave and brings the tail end down with him as I let him down. The rolling continues light and, with the stirrups and lineman’s safety belt, it has been possible if not easy for Andrew to reach everything aloft. The work is all done in about 90 minutes. It’s midday and the sun is directly overhead. But there is at least a cooling breeze that comes in from the south along with the swells. We gave silent thanks to Liam, a sailor cum musician from Kingston, Washington, whom we had met in Port Townsend years ago. He lives on an engineless wooden cutter. Around 2002 he gave us about 500 feet of three-ply 3/8-inch line, much of which ended up in our boson’s chair hauling rig. Now a smaller though significant portion is our new jib halyard. For the moment we simply tie the halyard to the peak of the headsail with a bowline ready to sail out in the morning. We never do hear from Doug again, so perhaps his radio is not working. But we spot him the next day in the distance as we motor-sail past the head of his new cove.