Atlantic Passage

We had to move the ship closer to shore this morning so after breakfast it was hands to the windlass!

Once we were anchored again I went ashore on the first skiff and spent the day wandering around Falmouth and Nelson’s Dockyard at English bay.

Today was the start of the Antigua Classic yacht Regatta and there are an amazing number of beautiful classic yachts here. I have never seen so many schooners and ketches in one place before. There is even one massive three masted staysail schooner from France that is almost as long as the Picton Castle! There are also some very pretty smaller boats mostly ketches and cutters. The glare from the varnish was almost blinding in the bright Sun

Needless to say the place is swarming with people from all over the world. Most of whom are either very “well heeled” or the paid crew for said well heeled people. Several of our crew managed to get on as volunteer crew on several boats. There are a nice clutch of wooden sloops built on Carriacou some gaff rigged as well as bermudian sloop rigged. They are noticeable mostly because they are painted using ordinary paint. No fiberglass, varnish or brass anywhere. Doesn’t seem to hinder their sailing at all.

English Harbour and Nelson’s Dockyard (which is now an Antiguan National Park) was once the equivalent of Halifax for the Royal Navy. The dockyard has been restored fairly well and has a lot of plaques and information boards even though the buildings are now hotels, bars and concessions so you get a good idea of how the place worked when Nelson was in charge (hence the name).

Tomorrow our watch is on and then we get the next two days off.

Thanks for reading.
KJ

Here are some photos from my trip ashore in Antigua.

Sunday April 12,09

I hope Eostre’s Hare was good to you all and you didn’t overdose on chocolate

We had a busy day today.

This morning we cleaned up the ship, re-lashed all the stuff that had been unlashed over the last few days so the on watches could paint the topsides. We also stowed a lot of stuff preparatory to getting underway for Antigua.

We up anchored and motored away from Martinique at 3:30pm this afternoon. We kept motoring using the fore and aft sails until we passed out of the lee of the island then took in the sails and motored North East until around 6:00 when we set all sails.

The plan is to sail North towards Antigua on the Windward side of the islands. This will mean some tricky steering as we will have to steer really close to the wind to make the Northing we need.

We finally had some luck with the fishing lines. We caught a Barracuda and a pretty big Marlin within a half hour of each other.

Just as we were getting ready to go off watch at 8:00pm a big rain squall came in and thoroughly drenched us before hitting us with strong wind gusts that necessitated taking in the flying jib in the pitch dark and rain. A damp but effective way to get everyone back into sailor mode.

My tattoo looks good still, which is a relief frankly as I was afraid of a bout of “buyers remorse” this morning There were lot of tattoos done while we were in Martinique something like 20!

The trip to Antigua will take a couple of days so we should get some good if tricky sailing.

Thanks for reading.
KJ

Mon Apr 13,09

Just got off our very wet night watch.

I woke up around 3:00am to the sound of heavy rain beating on the deck over my head. Just before we came on watch the squall passed bringing with it a big wind shift. e came up on deck just as the order to brace the yards around came. Nothing like starting a watch off with a bang

A half hour later we braced them again as the winds returned to their pre squall direction.

About midway through our watch the skis opened up and I spent my lookout in the pouring rain.

By the time our watch ended the winds had dropped and shifted such that we were pointing directly at Dominica. So we fired up the main engine and took in all sails and are now motoring North off the eastern shore of Dominica. FWIW you can see the steam from the boiling lake, like a cloud stuck in the forest, cool.

My hands are a mess, even my “good” one is a bit torn up. Callouses and water don’t mix.

More later…

Just got off a very busy watch.
We tacked this evening at around 5:00pm ad it went very well.
Since then we have been sailing full and bye but in the wrong direction. That leads me to believe that we will be tacking again. Possibly even later tonight which mens we would be doing it in the dark. Fun fun that!

One of the islands we have been sailing slowly past is Marie Gallant (?!?) this island is NE of Dominica and is actually the edge of the Caribbean tectonic plate thrust up over the Atlantic plate. The volcanoes of Dominica are the molten remains of the Atlantic plate melting as it descends. This is the classic plate edge volcanic system but normally you can’t see the edge of the overriding plate so clearly.

Thanks for reading.
KJ

Tues April 14,09

Had a good night watch, pretty uneventful.

I had first lookout which was wonderful as the skies were pretty clear and the mostly full moon was bright.

Last night at the change of watches around midnight they tacked ship. It was nice that they didn’t have to wake us up When we went on watch this morning we were again sailing North towards Antigua.

Paul caught two more Baracudas this morning, one of which he threw back because it was small.

We may arrive in Antigua later this afternoon.

More later…

We arrived in Antigua and anchored next to a very large yacht in Falmouth harbour at 6:00pm.
I’ll be off tomorrow so will have a chance to check out the lay of the land.
Many of the crew are looking forward to crewing on some of the classic boats in the races here. I’m happy to be looking on I think

Thanks for reading.
KJ

So after much consideration I have decided to get a tattoo.

I know Biz, my daughter, thought I should get one to mark the trip but I couldn’t decide on a pattern I’d like to live with for the rest of my life

The primary reason we are here in Martinique is to visit a tattoo artist that does Polynesian style tattoos and is well known to the Picton Castle crew.

Many of the crew have got new tattoos, some small some very complex all beautiful and unique. Her style is very light, which I like, not heavy and blocky like most tattoos I’ve seen.

John got a nice one on his calf you can see it here.

This is the place then to get it done, after crossing both the Atlantic ocean and the Equator I’ve an idea that I think will work well, a combination of traditional and artistic. I’ll see what the artist thinks.

My appointment is at 2:00pm today and I’m sitting in the cafe drinking cafe ‘o lait listening to the buzz/wine of the tattoo gun…

More later…

It’s later and I have a nice tattoo on my left forearm.
At least all the pain and healing itching will be on the same side
Now the dilemma is to post pictures or surprise everyone when I get home?
What do you think?

Thanks for reading.
KJ

My galley day yesterday went by without a hitch.

Luckily Donald was cooking, boo yeah!, so we just had to stay ahead of the dishes. Keeping my freshly bandaged hand dry was a challenge but a bright yellow rubber glove managed that

This morning I came ashore on the first skiff run for a look around. Being Good Friday it was very quiet but the museum was open. There were lots of before and after photos of the city in 1908. The most powerful display to me was the huge bell from the cathedral. This inch thick bronze bell looks like a squashed beer can! The force of the blast and the extreme heat simply mashed it flat as it fell from the tower.

There are also examples of things found in the ruins as people began to build anew. Blocks of fused nails and screws from a hardware store, melted coins and smashed ships portholes plus many ordinary things made into macabre artifacts by the sheer power of the volcanoe.

Nicko and I wandered through the town and saw the ruins of the theater, a large church and the prison where one of the only two survivors was in solitary confinement in a small cell deep inside the prison.

The ruins show the power of this event. There are great blocks of masonry piled up like they were children’s blocks dumped out of a bucket.

The current town, built amongst the ruins, has made no attempt to hide it’s charred and blasted predecessor. Many of the houses incorporate the walls directly, they are usually blackened bare stone and mortar whereas the new walls are painted cinder block. The streets are the same as well, many with the original cobbled surfaces.

All in all St Pierre is a fascinating, if slightly macabre place to see. Rising above it, to the North, is the grey peaked Mt Pelee still rumbling a bit and being very carefully watched.

The crew has adopted a restaurant bar tattoo parlour called L’ Escapade which has WiFi even Unfortunately they closed at 3:00 this afternoon as did everything else in town. Apparently this weekend will be very quiet so not sure what we’ll end up doing tomorrow as we also have it off.

Thanks for reading.
KJ

Here are some pictures from my look around in St Pierre Martinique.

This morning after breakfast and domestics we began the process of heaving up our anchor and the three shots of chain hanging almost straight down from the hawse pipe. Pulling this up with the windlass was a lot harder than normal because we had to lift the whole kit ‘n kaboodle. Normally the chain is laying on the bottom and we drag it along only lifting the part that goes up to the ship.

Once the anchor was up we motored away from the shore and set all sails as we got out of the lee of Dominica. We were under sail by 11:20am.

We are now sailing along at about 5 knots headed south towards the French island of Martinique. I mostly know this island for the destruction of the city of St Pierre by the volcanoe there. Many of the crew are looking forward to this stop because they want to get a tattoo. I may do so as well but haven’t decided for sure yet

We will be in Martinique for at least 3 days probably 4.

More later…

Just finished cleaning up from dinner.

I had first helm on our afternoon watch. We were motorsailing towards Martinique and ran into a rainstorm with gusty winds. I had my fowlie jacket on but hadn’t done it up yet. I ended up standing my trick at the helm with my jacket open. Luckily the rain was fairly warm

We took in all sails around 5:30 and motored into the anchorage at St Pierre and dropped the starboard hook. The Captain says the holding is not great here but the anchorage is fairly sheltered so we should be OK.

St Pierre never really recovered after the eruption of 1908. From a population of 40,000 there are now only 7,000. The current city is built inside the ruins of the old city. There is a good museum here which I intend to check out.

I have looked at the picture taken the day after the eruption so many times that my mind overlays that scene of utter desolation over the current lush green countryside. We are anchored near to the point where the photo appears to have been taken so it’s almost like a temporal shadow. It is a very odd sensation.

Our watch is on tomorrow and I have galley so it will be a long day.

Thanks for reading.
KJ

Went on a great hike up into the mountains of Dominica today.
WT, Nicola, Susie, Nicko and I took a bus up to the mountain town of Laudat where we paid our $5.00 US site fee then started our hike by Pitou Gorge.

Our objective was the Boiling Lake and the Valley of Desolation high up in the Morne Trois Pitons National park. The trail is very good and fairly easy to follow but it is essentially a 6 mile stairway! The valleys are very steep and covered in lush rainforest. The first part of the trail we climbed relatively slowly under scattered showers and then we came to the top of a ridge and started a 2 mile up and down that was a real workout.

Eventually we came to the top of a high ridge and looked down into the valley of desolation with the steam from the boiling lake rising from the forest on the mountainside beyond it.

After a very steep scramble down into the valley we passed hotsprings and boiling pools with steam rising straight into the sky. Everywhere there was sulphur coated rocks and bubbling hissing sulphurous steam. In places the ground was hot and you could here the steam hissing and roaring beneath your feet. Very cool.

The valley of desolation is indeed desolate the result of a massive phreatic (steam) explosion in the 1880s sometime. There was a smaller one in 1997 as well.

From there we followed the hot streams down the valley a bit and then climbed up to the edge of the Boiling lake. This lake is the largest of it’s kind in the world and is a very impressive example of the power of the tectonic and volcanic forces beneath our feet. The lake is in the bottom of a perfect cylindrical pipe maybe 300′ across. The center of the lake is in a constant state of roiling boil. It makes a steady rumble a it does so.
Very impressive.

On our way back through the valley of desolation we stopped to look into many of the boiling pools and steam vents and followed some of the sulphur mud flows. The guide of another party gave us a hard time for “analysing” things without a permit?!? Apparently looking too closely at things is considered “research” and needs a permit of some kind. Go figure.

Susie figures I must have looked like a geologist or somebody scientific. Who knew

Of course every downhill we had done meant a subsequent uphill and vice verse. My knee which occasionally gives me trouble when hiking was really sore by the time we got back to the Pitou Gorge.

Susie took off ahead on the way back and was down almost a half an hour before Nicko and I stumbled out the forest. WT and Nickola followed us out maybe 15 minutes later. All safe and sound.

Tonight the Ruin Rock is putting on a BBQ for us so that’s where I will be heading once I get cleaned up.

Thanks for reading
KJ

Here are the pictures from our expedition.

Spent the day yesterday doing shipwork like sanding and painting, all of which can be done one handed
We also loosed all the square sails so they could dry. Unfortunately I couldn’t go aloft to help. Bruce did however which was a first for him and I have a photo to prove it!

This morning we had to hoist the anchor and motor a little further out to give the anchor a better grip on the steep side of this island. We are now anchored in about 100′ of water and almost the same distance from the shore. Nothing like a little anchor work after breakfast to start the day off on the right foot!

I’m thinking of spending the day fairly quietly today and will join a bunch of people heading into the hills tomorrow. We will be going to the boiling lake and the “valley of desolation” the most recently active area of this volcanic island.

More later…

Woke up this morning with my hand throbbing. Blah!

Eric our Doctor arranged for a tour guide for the day so I went ashore on the early skiff after a hurried breakfast. Once there we had a bit of time to kill so Eric bandaged my hand properly. At least this way it might actually heal in a timely manner.

The tour was fantastic. Kurt, our driver, is actually the captain of the whale watching boat at the Anchorage Hotel and has access to the hotel’s 4×4 so we were able to get up high in the mountains. The roads on Dominica are very narrow, many are literally a single lane. Plus there is a lot of road construction underway which means they are rough and muddy in places.

We went up to Freshwater Lake which is in the crater of an old volcanoe. Very nice high up in the rain forest covered mountains. We also went to Trafalgar Falls which are beautiful. A quick side trip to Pitou Gorge was interesting. That is the narrow channel part of Pirates II was filmed in, when they fell into the gorge in the cages.

The landscape here is very much like the West Coast of Canada but with tropical foliage. In fact part of the trip today was in deep V shaped river valleys very much like the area around Sandon near Kaslo B.C.

We went all the way across the island to the Carib Territory which is the last indigenous area in the Caribbean.

After we got back to Roseau we had a great dinner of fish and chips and I’m now hanging out with Eric at an apartment he rented here.

Thanks for reading.
KJ

Eric is a bit of a video wiz so check out his latest here: Picton Scullery Ackbar
Pictures of my day ashore as soon as I can upload them.
They are here.

Spent the morning doing osfo and doing spot painting of the starboard bow topsides.
It was nice and cool, sitting on a plank suspended off the rail, as that was the shady side of the ship. This afternoon we are going to be doing the same but on the port side which is facing the sun which will be really hot.

The schooner Spirit of Massachusetts was anchored here. Her captain was 2nd mate on the third world voyage of the Picton castle and came alongside for a visit. When she was leaving she sailed across our bows and saluted with a shot from her cannon and a proper dipping of her ensign. We responded with a good horn blast. Very cool.

David and I went ashore yesterday and wandered around the town of Roseau. The town is beautiful and still pretty much as this area was 50 years ago. The buildings are mostly two story with the lower story stone and the upper story wood.

The current crew hangout is a fabulous bar/restaurant called the Ruin Rock Cafe. It is built inside the ruins of an old building and serves an amazing variety of flavoured rums that they make themselves. The Guava was definitely “dangerously yummy” They also have things like coconut pineapple, ginger, tamarind, lemon and other fruits as well as very exotic ones like snake and centipede ?!?.

I’m hoping to go on an around the island tour when we get ashore tomorrow.

More later…

It’s later and I have a very sore left hand. Blah.

I’m going to file the following under the “It seemed like a good idea at the time” file or maybe the “20/20 hindsight is a bitch” one.

After lunch I shifted the scaffold over to get at the last spot on the starboard bow. In doing so I tried to position it such that I could reach it from the rail. Well, as I tried to lower myself down I realized that the plank was about a foot too low! Unfortunately I didn’t find this out until I was so far over the rail that I couldn’t get back up!

Then I made my big mistake. I figured I would just hand over hand my way down the rope to the plank, it was only 1 foot after all right? Wrong! The line was too thin to hang onto and before I could get both hands onto it I slid down the rope, missed the plank and ended up hanging off the end! I also badly rope burned my left hand, ripping most of my callouses off and giving myself second degree burns on my index finger and the palm of my hand! Ouch.

So there I was hanging over the brilliant blue sea by my fingertips feeling like a right great goof. I tried to climb back up onto the plank but because my weight was on the end it kept swinging away from the ships side. I yelled “On deck!” and got an immediate response and then yelled “Help!”. There wasn’t anything anyone could really do and in hindsight I should just have dropped into the drink to swim over to the ladder. Ben and Susie were working alongside in the skiff and they came over to see if I could clamber into it before letting go but I ended up swimming anyways.

To everybody’s credit nobody laughed, which was nice

David, helped me bandage my hand, fresh water rinsed my gear and hung it all up for me while I found some dry clothes. Thanks David!

It’s a good thing I have a couple of days off to let the blisters break and get a start on the healing process. Hauling on lines is going to be a pain for a while.

It’s also a good thing I mostly type with one finger

Thanks for reading.
KJ

Mar 30,09

We up anchored and sailed off the hook this morning and went from 8:00am muster to sailing under all plain sail in about one and a half hours.

Just as we were preparing to get underway a small tanker came into the anchorage which made things a bit crowded. We also had an inter island freighter anchored beside us. As the anchor came up we backed the outer jib and set the fore lower topsail aback and we spun around on our heal quite nicely.

The winds have shifted around more to the East which means we will be heading into them going this way as we were going into them coming North. The Captain says we should be able to sail most of the way however which will be good.

Yesterday while I was ashore I spent some time reading up on Dominica. There are 9 volcanoes there many of which have been active in the last 10,000 years. Dominica is probably island that has the greatest concern since it is overdue for a major eruption. My kind of place Since we will be there for about 10 days I hope to get a good look at some of it.

More later…

It’s mid afternoon and I go on watch in an hour or so.

The weather is fabulous with a steady Force 4 wind blowing from the East and we are sailing “Full and By” as close to South as we can get. The water is an amazingly luminous blue to windward. I noticed on the way North that it changed from the green that was common around Grenada to blue. Going this way the bright Sun in the almost cloudless blue sky is making the seas practically glow to windward of us. I’m continually amazed at the range of colours that the surface of the sea assumes. Sometimes it depends on the weather or the depth of the sea but other times there doesn’t seem to be anything obviously different from the day before but the sea is definitely a different colour. Today is one of those days. Beautiful!

Thanks for reading.
KJ

Tues Mar 31,09

I can’t believe it’s nearly April already.

Well the nice weather didn’t last through our aftermnoon watch resterday by 7:00pm it was squally and raining pretty heavily. After we got off watch the ship really started to roll for a while but settled down by the time I went on watch at 4:00am.

Our night watch was good. My helm trick was from 6:00 to 7:00am this morning just as the Sun was rising above a bank of clouds in the East. We are sailing “Full and By” trying to head as close to South as we can get. I always have trouble sailing that way because I tend to over steer a bit when correcting which causes us to fall off farther than we need to. Also today we didn’t have the royals set so we have to use the leach of the T’gallant to determine our closest windward course. It is more sensitive to the rolling of the ship which mimics the luffing which means we are as close as we can get to the wind. I think I did OK as I managed to keep the course close to SSE on average which was pretty good. If I do say so myself

We are heading SExE under all sail, except for the Mizzen staysail and gaff topsail, and we may be able to get to Dominica under sail alone.

Thanks for reading.
KJ

Wed April 1,09

We took in our sails and fired up the engine midway through our watch.

We arrived in Dominica at 9:30am this morning and am now anchored “stern to” just off shore The shore is very steep here our stern, which is maybe 40′ from the shore, is in something like 20′ of water and our bow is in more than 70′! We are waiting to get cleared in currently then I will be going ashore to check out what there is to see.

More later…