Passage Trauma

Again, the real passage problems seem always to come at night.  In addition to the double-overnight crossing from Mexico to Honduras, when we handled our electrical system failure, last sailing season involved three additional overnight passages.  Each brought their own challenges.  

Emergency Dive

The first was the passage from Honduras to Costa Rica.  On night watch during that passage, Rob realized that the boat was slowing.  His tired brain began processing, but as he reached to shift to neutral, it was too late.  The transmission made a belligerent grinding sound, and the boat lurched to almost standstill.  Half in a dream and half awake, I recognized the noise from our passage down the U.S. west coast.  Mapache had wrapped her propeller.  I bolted to the cockpit, grabbing a dive mask, a knife, and a flashlight on the way.  While I confirmed that the prop shaft had not been pulled so hard as to allow water into the boat, Rob prepared to get wet.  

We were three miles offshore, the night was dark, and lapping waves at our hull was the only sound.  Rob dove under the boat and returned to the surface with the news that it was worse than expected.  He needed dive equipment to stay under water long enough to be effective.  As the boat drifted, we worked quickly to pull everything out of our cockpit settees and exhume the hookah gear.  After setting up the oxygen system, Rob returned to the water.  I stood watch for sharks and hookah malfunction.  As the minutes ticked by with the underwater flashlight casting erratic beams from beneath the boat, the hookah began an unusual cadence in its drone.  I eyed it, willing it to continue functioning.  Then, predictably, lightening joined the party.   

After almost 30 minutes of me begging the universe to cooperate, Rob came up, bloody from barnacle scrapes and holding his prize—a human-size bag full of plastic bottles attached to a rope.  It was a make-shift float from some sort of trap, which now lay on the ocean floor.  I thought about the creatures that will get pointlessly locked inside and the fishermen who lost a food source.  But there was nothing we could do to find and retrieve it.  So, we took the bag of bottles for later proper disposal, checked our transmission, packed up the cockpit, and carried on.

Improvised Anchoring

The second overnight passage was between Playa Cocoa and Puntarenas, Costa Rica.  The lightning storms in Costa Rica and Panama during the rainy season of April through November are magnificent, persistent, and impossible to avoid, despite our best efforts to read patterns into forecasts.  Lightning storms do not always follow rules.  On that first Costa Rican passage, we attempted to navigate around the storm but ended up in its center.  

The boom of thunder and brilliance of lightening is magnified in the void of the night ocean, especially when your lonely boat offers a metal pole (mast) to the sky.  A strike is not unlikely.  We personally know four boats that have been hit.  The result is loss of all electrical systems—most important of which are communication and navigation.  

Watching the radar, we could see that the storm engulfing us was growing, so we decided to turn off course and wait the storm out at anchor.  The problem was that the closest shoreline held a tricky entrance to its anchorable area, with a reef on one side and shallow rocks on the other.  We did our best to navigate in the dark with stars blending into land lights and land formations hiding amongst those merged lights.  We saw small fishing boats flashing lights at us, and the lightening reflecting off the wave break of the nearby reef.  We held our course until our grit expired.  Then we dropped anchor and went dark, hoping that shutting off our electrical systems would dissuade the lightning’s attraction to our rig.  After two hours of unsuccessful sleep attempts, the sound of thunder subsided as the sound of the reef waves amplified.  As we sailed out, we saw that we were living on the edge of that reef.  If we had steered or drifted a little more south, we could have been dealing with a sinking ship.

They Come on Ya Fast, and They Leave Ya Fast

Although not an overnight passage, we experienced our most intense gale when we weighed anchor in a beautiful, tropical cove to move into a nearby marina midway down Costa Rica.  The wisdom is that gales come on you fast and leave you fast.  This one came on at the moment we lifted anchor, and it left at the moment we safely docked in the marina.  We could not have timed it better for the full gale experience.  As we motored out of the little bay, the gale quickly engulfed us, making six-foot waves with 35-mile-per-hour wind and opaque sheets of rain.  Visibility was 15 feet, and we strained to make out silhouettes of anchored boats outside of the marina entrance.  Rain dripped through the cockpit cover and onto our navigation touchscreen, constantly switching the mode and rendering it useless.  Still, we carefully picked our way through the marina entrance, where dedicated marina staff, dressed in full rain gear, directed us to our slip and caught our lines.  We stepped off the boat, drenched through the shorts and t-shirts that had seemed reasonable before we began the passage. 

Bumps in the Night

The third overnight passage of last season brought debris-filled currents.  We worked to avoid tree-size logs in our path around Panama’s aptly named Punta Mala.  But a couple of alarming bangs in the night informed us that was not an option.  While the collisions induced moments of stress, nothing worse resulted.  And we successfully ran between a few more lightning storms to our final destination of the season, Buenaventura Marina, Panama. 

Almost all the night passages of last cruising season involved avoiding little pairs of lights that indicated fishing pangas and their long lines, and us exchanging flashlight signals with those midnight workers.  We also communicated with cargo ships, confirming by radio that they saw us and agreeing to passing courses.  The overnighters also brought the best starry skies.  Our nighttime ceiling appeared fuzzy due to the star density.  It was complimented by gorgeous sherbet-colored moon rises and the comforting breathes of dolphins chaperoning the boat through their watery neighborhoods.  The long passages brought encounters with whales, sea turtles, manta rays, water snakes, clouds of migrating swallowtail moths, and the occasional swallow bird, telling us land was just a few more miles away.  Despite their challenges, the night passages are still my favorite.