More sailing!
Sarah Grace goes to sea
Chris Yerbury and Sophy White
Sun 4 Feb 2007 00:59
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February 3rd, somewhere
between Les Aves and Curacao
We are anchored off a patch
of sand otherwise known as Klein Caracao, which shelves from hundreds of metres
deep to twelve metres, in yards. It has been a surreal day sailing,
starting with a whale blowing to port, followed mysteriously by three flamingoes
flapping south, astern, the nearest land in that direction being Venezuela over
fify miles away. On watch on our 70 mile passage I then saw what I
thought was a dolphin to starboard, which on it's second leap I correctly
identified as a giant dorado pursuing a fleet and hapless flying
fish. I might add that the flip side of all of this was three hours
of seasickness, with me trying to feed the girls soup and crisps.
Klein Caracao is visible
because it is ringed with wrecks and has a lighthouse, but is otherwise as
flat as a pancake. Our depth sounder was mucking about as usual, and
coming around the reef at the end of the island it gave me another heart attack
by going from 'deep' (anything deeper than 100 metres) to 3 metres and sounding
the shallow alarm just as Chris said ' I can see a patch of sand, head
out!!!' As anchorages go it is poor, despite being bridled into the ocean
swell spilling around both ends of the island, Mimi is still seasick, and it
feels as though we are still sailing. The wind is howling over head
at 25 knots. Whilst checking the set of the anchor by diving, we saw
two turtles.
Last night we were invited
to supper on Jem, where we had yummy beef stroganoff and played
Perudo. Both boats were anchored off a tiny palm island which was
part of the Aves group. When time was called and we piled back into Bob the
dinghy, Mark noticed that Alfie, their tender, had
disappeared............. Much swearing later, and after use of the big torch
searchlight, it was spotted jammed into a reef,. astern. So Chris and Mark
went rowing down to the reef in Bob, and effected a rescue. Bob got
slightly injured (scratched) on the reef, but luckily Alfie, an inflatable, was
fine, with engine intact.
Tomorrow we will sail onto
Spanse water, a large enclosed bay in Curacao, which is an ex-Dutch colony,
which is about twenty miles away.
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