Wow Fred, That's a chilling tale of what can go wrong. They were trapped in the trades. Obviously no one onboard knew what they were doing or how to manage the boat.
A similar situation turned out differently for a Vietnamese sailor who lived in Southern Calif. He was sailing his boat from LA to one of the Catalina islands and something went wrong. His mast broke and he evidently lost his rudder control as well. The mast he kept and eventually he started burning it in pieces to make fires for cooking and he caught several cormorants that he used for catching fish. Several months later he was rescued by a US Coast Guard vessel somewhere down near Costa Rica. What the USCG was doing down there I haven't a clue. His boat was lost in the process of his rescuing. He eventually made it back to LA and has another boat.
I have wanted to see Barbados. It is in my mental plan for next sailing season. Most who do the Caribbean skip Barbados because it is an upwind island just East of the start of the Grenadines by about 100 miles. Most every boat that makes it that far south, will want to go through the Grenadines on the way to Grenada and Trinidad. But for me, punching upwind to Barbados is an important dogleg in my journey.
My boat friends left the Virgins recently and arrived at St. Kitts (St. Christopher) yesterday. Last night or early on Sunday they left for Monserrat. I hope they steer well clear of the volcano as its gases can be poisonous and it has been erupting again. They are heading down to Trinidad hoping to get there ahead of the bulk of hurricane season.
Trinidad is considered a safe harbor. But one storm back in 2001 called Isabel or something like that tracked across it as a named storm at the time, later to become a hurricane. Just north of Trinidad, Granada used to be considered a safe island but it got destroyed by Ivan or some such storm a couple years back.
I flew to Florida in anticipation of Ivan, although it was a scary storm and I remember thinking what was I going to do to get away from it as it was coursing upwards, then it moved to the Western side of Florida bypassing us in Miami.
Last summer, I just went down and prepped ahead of the action and got the hell out. Good thing too because 5 days later Katrina strolled right on through Miami although no one even knew her name or had heard about her by the time that I left. It just suddenly popped up in the Bahamas a day or two before reaching Miami. Also I was in no shape to be doing battle with a 'cane as I was trying to recover from my heart attack and stroke at the time.
This summer I am more confident, as I think Puerto Rico is much less of a target area for hurricanes though it is in the alley. Also there are more options for us, in the way of haul out possibilities and mangroves and I am not constrained by my insurance policy as I fired them in March. Also the Sea Surface Temps are comparatively cooler than last year. I don't know why, perhaps because there was a lot of cool air that came off the East coast this spring.
I am going back to PR in late June, I'll be doing some boat work, including adding a wind powered generator to help the solar panels charge the house bank of batteries. I just bought it on Ebay this morning. |
