by Jim Nisbet
TWENTY-FIVE
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/16 0430 0 165°C NE 10-15 23°39’2”N.Lat.
1005 mb 74°51’6” W. Long.
Fair (Cotton Field Point Light)
Remarks
Note: Mag Var. 8°44’W
Stood out of Port Nelson before dawn. Set a course of 157° True, which I expect to hold for some 68 miles, with corrections for set and drift, until we close with the Albert Town Light on Long Cay. At five knots that’s about 13-1/2 hours, which should get us there in plenty of daylight. Current hereabouts, according to Reed’s, looks to be about 0.6 knots SE, going our way.
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/16 1830 72 At Anchor Clear 22°35”N.Lat.
Long Cay 1008 mb 74°22’5” W. Long. (Windsor Point)
Remarks
Actually, we’re maybe one mile NNE of Windsor Point, but I’m beat and feel a fit of introspection coming on. I’ll do the exact position in the morning.
Anchored in a shoal west-facing inlet within spitting distance SSW of a pretty wreck. She’s been stripped, of course, no doubt within days of her stranding, but what a fair-weather example of a saloon deck whorehouse she once must have been. Only her steel hull has allowed her to resist the depredations of the natives and the sea for as long as she has. One good hurricane bearing NW will be the end of her, and the beginning of yet another uncharted maritime hazard teeming with edible sea life—good fishing, of which there is already plenty around here. Cedric and I once fouled an anchor on a reef not too far north of here, and dove it only to find two more anchors, both of them better gear than the one we were trying to save. Wound up spending a week within a three or four mile radius diving shoals and inlets for fouled anchors. We found a dozen. Some of them were too big, of course. We used fenders and gallon jugs to buoy the ones we thought we could handle, then came back about two weeks later with tools aboard For Tuna, Cedric’s boat at the time. (His current one’s called Tunacity. Get the drift?) Oh for an acetylene torch!—in spite of the lack of which we wound up with nine dandy examples of modern and ancient anchor theory, and so much barnacle-encrusted rode we had to leave most of it behind. Ever optimistic, we sank a lot of chain way up a tidal creek, just as far as we could push the dinghy under the load, gunnels awash even with us over the side, on the
theory that some day we’d come back for it. There are excellent directions to the trove in one of my old log books—don’t forget to allow for something like ten years’ migration of magnetic variation. Tonight, from this anchorage, I can see the mouth of the creek. Oddly enough, Vellela is anchored on the exact back bearing of the vector from the creek to the middle of the entrance to Man of War Channel—277° True. Anyway, whether it’s been silted over or not, anybody close aboard the trove will know it, for the iron there will box his compass. I can just see the expressions on the treasure hunters’ faces when they realize they’re excavating something like 1,352 pounds of 5/8” BBB chain!
Intervening hurricanes, economic circumstances superior and otherwise, a bad back, these and more have precluded recovery—by me, anyway. As for Cedric, I haven’t the slightest idea where he is these days. I had to put a few cables between me and his substance abuse, and now we’ve drifted apart. I mean to ask after him in Key West.
We weighed our nine anchors and made straight for Man-O-War Cay, about ninety miles and almost due west of here, just north of the channel, the gateway to the Great Bahama Banks, where the fishin’ is bitchin’. Sold every hook to D-Ray’s Vintage Marine for two thousand bucks Bahamian. Cedric took two hundred off the top for gas and we split the rest—voilà, a $900 jolt to the kitty. Kitty likes being jolted!
I know it’s considered déclassé that is to say unsalty to commit personal ramblings to a ship’s log. On the other hand, who’s watching? Besides, I’ve been alone for so long I need someone to talk to, I can’t afford a shrink, I’m too mean and old and ugly for a girlfriend, the bosun is a figment of my imagination (you’ve never met the bosun but don’t worry, nobody else has met him either) and—well. Did you know that Albert Town has been officially declared a ghost town? “American Loyalists” first settled this islet in 1783, bringing with them slaves and cotton seed. The enterprise ultimately failed. Man-O-War Cay has similar Tory antecedents. I’ll bet that when the wind blows just so, Albert Town has quite a tale to tell. Ours are not the only chains buried around here.…
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/19 0620 72 285°C Cloudy 22°33’ 55”N.Lat.
1001 mb 74°25’ 20” W. Long. (Albert Town Light bearing 191°M. Long Kay Light bearing 98°M.)
Remarks
Mag. Var. 8°44’W
Okay. Note Position correction, derived above.
A couple nights of sleep. Excellent. Proper dawn breakfast of fresh snapper, beer-bread, black tea. Replaced bowl with chart, fork with pencil, knife with dividers. Kept teacup, plotted course. Weighed anchor, departed in good order. Set a course of 277° True, straight for Man of War Channel, some 85 miles distant, though I have no intention of going there.
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/19 0735 76.5 231°C Scattered 22° 35’ 40”N.Lat.
small 74°26’ 20”W.Long.
cumulus (Albert Cay Light
1003 mb bearing 105°M; Long Cay Light bearing 97°M —which is the reciprocal of the Man of War Channel bearing, 285°M less 8° var = 277°T!] (Note: Logging course notes because on-board chart almost obliterated by previous plots, erasures, prickings, and rum rings.)
Remarks
223° True is an 87-1/2 mile rhumb line that gets us across Crooked Passage, Mira por Vos Passage—how I love that name!—and West Channel, not quite at right angles but in daylight and short order.
(Note: At approx. 22°7’ N. Lat 74°W. Long we cross mag var curve after which mag var will be an even 8°W.)
Beaucoup shipping, fishing, and cruising, which is good on the one hand, as it provides a cloak of anonymity, and bad on the athwartship paw, as maintaining vigilant watch means the skipper and crew of Vellela Vellela are going to see damn little rest between now and Boca Chica Key, maybe a week’s time hence, weather permitting, touch the wood.
Haven’t been voyaging down this way in a long time and I’ll tell you what, it’s beautiful. If I weren’t working I’d take a month to get to Florida. Maybe six months. Maybe never get there.
When the light on Santo Domingo Cay bears 312° Magnetic we’ll come up to 287-1/2° True, which should put us on a dead run up Old Bahama Channel. The most visible Cuban light charted is at Cabo Lucrecia, visible for 25 miles, 29 miles off which we’ll make the turn. If the night is as clear as it is now, we should be able to navigate by its loom and the Santo Domingo vector. But there’s the usual ominous Notice to Mariners on my chart. “CAUTION: Many lights on the Cuban coast have been reported to be irregular or extinguished.” Your embargo at work, my gringo compatriots, and doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy? Too bad the Cubans can’t sell a little sugar, some rum, and a few cigars on the American market. It might give them the extra bucks to be maintaining their aids to navigation, not to mention medicine for their children, felts for their pianos, not to mention a taste for capitalism.
Sticking one’s nose into Reed’s Nautical Almanac and looking up the lovely Bahía de Banes, whose entrance is about fifteen miles east around a half a circle south of Cabo Lucrecia, one reads the following.
This pocket bay is currently being developed as a tourist center. If arriving from the Bahamas, this is an excellent place to clear in. Entrance is straight-forward, deep, and all-weather. Line up the conspicuous white building until it bears 115°, and steer straight for it until you reach the new marina. Much of the bay has been designed as a national park. … A new aquarium is accessible with a good dinghy; nearby is a new deluxe hotel that is open to visiting sailors for excellent meals.
An excellent place to clear in, that is, if your haling
port is almost anywhere in the world except the United States.
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/19 1630 165 281-1/2°C Lucid 21°33’ N. Lat. 75°30’ W. Long. Santo Domingo Cay Light bearing 312°M Loom of Cabo Lucretia light bearings 196°-207°; Average=201.5° Depth 8730 ft., 1430 fathoms charted.
Remarks
Made good the WNW turn around S. Domingo Cay at 0700 hrs. Not too shabby for dead reckoning. Plenty of shipping. Hauled down the radar reflector, polished it, sent it back aloft. Looking forward to little or no sleep all the way to Key West, which is about 450 miles from here. As goes single-handed passage-making, that’s not a lot of time to go short on sleep. As go 54-year-old sailors, well … If there weren’t all this political bullshit going on with Cuba, there would be a dozen snug little ports to put into along its north coast and get some sleep, along with beer and empanadas. Then, too, I don’t want this vessel searched no matter who’s searching it, do I.
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/19 1930 182 281-1/2°C Still Lucid 21°36’ N. Lat.
75°47’ W. Long. Santo Domingo Cay Light bearing 20°M; Loom of Cabo Lucrecia light bearings 164°M to 177°M. Average = 170-1/2°M. Depth Sounding 8782 ft., 1470 fathoms plotted.
Remarks
If there’s salt water in your veins, this is fun. This time tomorrow we won’t be eight miles from Cuba, which should be showing the light on Cayo Paredon Grande, halfway up the Old Bahama Channel. I think that means Big Wall Cay. My Spanish dictionary only has pared—wall—which seems pretty close. Eight miles is well within the twelve mile limit of course, where the Cubans will have every right to board Vellela Vellela.
Man, would it be fun to visit Cuba. What a place. I haven’t been there since the late eighties. It’s big, you know, like about 700 miles long. There are hundreds if not thousands of islands, bays, inlets, and harbors. The chart shows railway lines that start and stop, bays large and small, barrier islands, cays, reefs, rocks—an entire world, in short, which, so far as I can tell, has barely made it into the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. Navigation around the island is probably of the ancient mariner ilk—hand-held compass, lead line, water color, dead reckoning, local knowledge, and luck. GPS cartridges or cards for Cuba exist, but all the gringo ones claim to be about someplace else. Maybe the French have a good one? Maybe nobody does—in other words, just Vellela Vellela’s cup of tea-laced-with-rum, a perfect place for an anachronism like me, who sails a boat with no engine.
Anyway, I can’t be thinking about Cuba now. It’s the hour to adhere to Red’s First Postulate, which is, never break more than one law at a time. It’s engraved on a brass plaque over the door to his engine room. Yes … would that things were so simple. …
Anyway, it’s you, dear logbook, to whom I confide the plan. We should make landfall in Boca Chica within a week. On board we have a significant stash of Bahamian t-shirts. Each and every one them sports a caricature of Old Helios, with sunglasses and dreadlocks, surmounting the invocation that you Don’t Forget To Inhale, Mon! S, M, L, XL, XXL. They could have been made anywhere, of course, but in fact they come from a little silkscreen outfit on Rum Cay. It’s one of Red’s laundry operations. Get it? Ah ha, as Cedric would say, ah hahahahaha … We’ve got a license to unload these things into the hands of a wholesaler of shirts to tourist shops and kiosks headquartered on Boca Chica Key, yet another of Red’s laundry operations.
Looked up late this afternoon to see a very large shark fin not twenty-five yards abeam. Close aboard! These waters are famous for their sharks, as well as their fishing. But it always amazes me that the creature can find a little vessel like Vellela Vellela atop 1,300 fathoms. I mean, don’t they hunt in three dimensions, or what? That’s a lot of room.
It’s also why it’s hard to find a life jacket on a boat in these waters. People would rather drown than be eaten alive.
Hey. I got nothing else to do, so let’s see here. Say Vellela Vellela is 28 feet. (Note: She started out 37 feet and nine inches, bumpkin to bowsprit. But you’ll recall she was a wreck when I took receipt; and what, you might well ask, would be the first things to go in a wreck?) Way out here, you would probably think 28 feet to be cutting things a mite fine by way of modesty. To wit, charted depth hereabouts is 1,300 fathoms; times six feet per fathom makes 7,800 feet. Call Vellela Vellela’s overall length the diameter of a cylinder, with the charted depth the cylinder’s height, you get—it’s a simple formula—area of the cross-section (which is a circle) times the height. … That’s it: Pi times the radius squared times the height equals (the calculator battery died awhile back so I’m doing this longhand, in the margin, at the helm, and not without consulting my
trusty Mechanical Engineer’s Handbook), 4,802,867 cubic feet of water. Which means that a shark has
of brine merely straight under the keel in which to look for food. That’s if he happens to intersect the “keel cylinder” at all.
Wow. That’s what you might call sharkly acumen.
But not to worry, dear logbook. Vellela Vellela is as seaworthy as hard work can make her—to which labor your earlier installments can attest.
Still, one ponders, as one sees the occasional fin streaking through the water, how in the world do they find anything?
Earlier today, I saw a yellow fin tuna chase a flying fish straight up out of the water. The latter lived to fly another day.
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/20 0045 213 292°T Clear 21°42-1/2’N.Lat.
1003 mb 76°21’6” W. Long.
NE 10-15
Remarks
(Note: position coincident with charted mag var curve; magnetic variation now 7°W.)
Mild dogleg around shoal vaguely charted at 21°48’ 20” N. Lat 76°18’5” W. Long last reported in 1978. Can’t be too careful.
Spectacular shooting star. I’m writing by headlamp. I can’t help myself. It’s just too beautiful. Not my writing, but the night. Pronoun reference. Sailing at night is just too beautiful. What’s that line from Baudelaire, about a heart seeded with stars?
Course bearing on Cayo Confites Light, 76 n.m. distant, which is the SE corner of the entrance to Old Bahama Channel, with Labaderas Reef on the NE corner and not 10 navigable nautical miles between, plus all the two-way traffic. Sailing directions predict one knot of current setting NW. Going our way.
According to the charts there’s a navigable parallel channel by which Vellela could skirt this bottleneck, some 20 n.m. NE. All the shallow-draft smugglers, fishermen, and a very few cruisers use it. But the navigation is intense, what with uncharted shoals, rocks, etc. abundant. And at night? Forget it. Cedric used to call freighters and container ships and the like “inverted reefs” with the added caveat that not only are they uncharted, but they move. But at least you can see them, even at night—most of the time, anyway. On the other hand, they can’t see us at all, most of the time, which is probably why they universally refer to small shipping as “speed bumps.”
Hm. Paging back, I see I’ve been inconsistent in recording course bearings.
Magnetic, Compass, and True all mixed up. Tsk. Have to go back and set my house in order. …
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/20 2300 287 318°C NE 15 22°6’N.Lat.
1005 mb 77°24’ W. Long.
Vivid
Remarks
Light on Cay Lobos bearing 33° Magnetic off the starboard bow, and light Cayo Confites bearing 297° Magnetic almost dead ahead. Changed course to 320° True. There’s only twelve miles across the Old Bahamas Channel here, between a dark and shoal stretch of islands and reefs and cays, off the north coast of Cuba, and more of the same along the southern edge of the Great Bahama Bank. It’s the middle of the night and I’m wearing a t-shirt. It’s balmy, mon! In most choke points around the world lately you could expect pirates. I guess Cuba doesn’t have any. I’ve never heard of them here, anyway. Lots of shipping going the other way for some
reason. Where to? Haiti? For what? Arms smuggling? Rum? Lots of small fishing boats.
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/21 0915 325 297°M NE 10-15 22°35’30”N.Lat.
1003 mb 77°59’ W. Long.
Hallucinatory
Remarks
Maintained this course for 37-1/2 NM. Log read 33 NM, but the Shadow knows! Raised Cayo Paredon Grande light to port about 2/3rds of the way, at 0320 hours. Tired. Washed down a Dexamil with a cup of hot green tea. Stomach agrowl, naturally. Steady on, with Cay Lobos light rising and dipping off the stern quarter just to make me nervous, until latter bore 120°C astern and Cayo Paredon Grande bore 268°M, almost dead west.
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/21 1120 340 297°M NE 10-12 22°35’N. Lat.
1005 mb 78°8’ W. Long.
Vivid
Remarks
Magnetic Variation now 6°West.
Fell off to 297°M at 1120 hrs. Lots of shipping. Chop making a pain in the ass of taking accurate bearings or sights. But this is the last general course change for something like 146 miles. That will make better than a full day, something like 29 hours. Flying the genoa, poled out.
DATE TIME LOG COURSE WEATHER POSITION
3/22 0530 381 277°M NE 15 22°56-1/2’ N.Lat.
1006 mb 79°8’ W. Long.
