DATE _12/29/05___ TIME ___12:00 PM START PORT _Christmas Cove__ END PORT _Jost Van Dyke______
START MILES___3353__ END MILES __3362____ LEG MILES __9______ TOTAL MILES ___3362______
START HOURS _603___ END HOURS __606_____ LEG HOURS __3______TOTAL HOURS ____606______
START FUEL ___1791____ END FUEL ___1791__ LEG FUEL __6_______ TOTAL FUEL __361_________
AVERAGE MPGs __2.0____ REMAINING RANGE __1170-_____ GEN FUEL EST. 2143/2616/591Gal
END PRT _240_______ END STRBD __285______ END SPLY __60_____ FUEL BALANCE ___585_ Gal
SEA STATE___________________ WIND DIRECTION___________________________________________
12/29/05 After DeeDee’s Mom left we cruised to Jost Van Dyke to spend New Years Eve at Foxys. Although we did not have a baby sitter and would have to be back to the boat early, we still thought it would be fun. During the day, a friend of ours, Tim and his family spent the day with us. He has a home in St. Thomas and took his little boat out to see us. It was great for Isabella as Tim’s kids and his nephew spent New Years Eve night with us and slept over. Isabella had a blast with them and they were really great to Isabella. New Years Eve is our wedding anniversary and although we have been together over ten years, this was only our second anniversary.
01/01/06 Today we cruised to Tortola and went into the Village Cay Marina. We will spend the week here getting the generator warranty work done and cleaning the boat. It is much easier to clean the boat when you are at dock because you of-course have the dock but also have great water pressure and very calm water.
01/05/05 We took Isabella to swim with the dolphins today. They are amazing animals but to me it is so sad to see them in the wild all the time and then see them in captivity like this.
01/06/06 We finished most of the warranty work and headed off to St. Thomas with two things outstanding. They need to replace the starter and have not done that yet. Also, they replaced some of the light bulbs in the generator gauges with 12 volt bulbs instead of the proper 24 volt bulbs. This melted the gauges and now I need to get those gauges replaced. We will try and spend another day in Road Harbor next week to finish this off.
DATE _12/14/05___ TIME ___12:00 PM START PORT _Jost Van Dyke___ END PORT _St. Thomas_________
START MILES___----__ END MILES __----____ LEG MILES __---____ TOTAL MILES ___----______
START HOURS _---___ END HOURS __---_____ LEG HOURS __--_____TOTAL HOURS ____---______
START FUEL ___----____ END FUEL ___----__ LEG FUEL __---_____ TOTAL FUEL __---_________
AVERAGE MPGs __---____ REMAINING RANGE __-----_____ GEN FUEL EST. ----/----/---Gal
END PRT _---_______ END STRBD __---______ END SPLY __--_____ FUEL BALANCE ___---_ Gal
SEA STATE___________________ WIND DIRECTION___________________________________________
12/15/05 We cruised to St. Thomas today as Jason had to catch his plane back to the states. It was a good week of kite boarding but we only got one week out of three of wind. Larry was able to go both ways by the last day but very shaky. DeeDee did not get a chance to try to get up on the board and spent her time dragging with the kite to improve her kite control skills. Jason must leave today but we hope he can make it back in the next few months.
We will use this coning week to do some boat maintenance and get ready for DeeDee’s Mom to come in on December 22nd and Larry’s Sister comes in on January 7th. . While we are doing our boat maintenance stuff we will probably stay in the main anchorage of St. Thomas.
12/25/05 We had Christmas on the boat in the morning with Isabella opening her gifts from Santa. Later we went to the Ritz and had Christmas dinner with DeeDee’s mom.
DATE _11/30/05___ TIME ___12:00 PM START PORT ___Bonaire_______ END PORT _Jost Van Dyke - BVI
START MILES___2822__ END MILES __3269____ LEG MILES __447____ TOTAL MILES ___3269______
START HOURS _517___ END HOURS __587_____ LEG HOURS __70_____TOTAL HOURS ____587______
START FUEL ___1511____ END FUEL ___1742__ LEG FUEL __231_____ TOTAL FUEL __355_________
AVERAGE MPGs __1.9____ REMAINING RANGE __1,600_____ GEN FUEL EST. 2143/2430/287Gal
END PRT _350_______ END STRBD __400______ END SPLY __70_____ FUEL BALANCE ___820_ Gal
SEA STATE____1 – 3 & 3 - 5__ WIND DIRECTION________ North East________________________
11/30/05 We left for St. Thomas today at 11:30 AM. We should arrive in St. Thomas sometime on Saturday morning. We left today for three reasons. First, there was no wind in Bonaire to kite board and none forecasted for the near future. Second, it is rare that we get a multi day weather window to travel against the wind. Third, we have Jason with us so we can have much easier shifts driving the boat.
Jason has never crewed on a boat before and this will be his first time. Because one leg from Bonaire to St. Thomas is 435 miles with no turns, it will be a little easier to get him to do his watches. All he needs to do is look at the GPS and confirm that we are on course and keep on eye out to the sea and on the radar to be sure we are not on any collision course with other boats. There is also the responsibility of keeping an eye on all the instruments to be sure things like engine temperature and pressure are all steady.
One additional thing we do when cruising for safety is to do an engine room check every three hours. The person on watch will check the RPM, Engine Temp., Oil Pressure, Voltage, Burn rate of gallons per hour, Stabilizer oil temperature, Stabilizer oil pressure, Fuel Filter, Engine Room Temperature, Amount of fuel remaining, stuffing box packing, see that the bilge is clear of oil, check for leaks, bilge pump filter, and make a note of our position. This will reveal any trends that we should be aware of such as a rising oil temperature or pressure allowing us to address it before there is a catastrophic failure. It also provides us a record of our position in case we lose our instrumentation we can navigate from our last position.
The seas our first day out are not big but because we are going head into them it is a little rough. When it is rough like this, most everyone takes turns sleeping in the Salon. It is to the back of the boat and has the least amount of movement. DeeDee and Isabella usually sleep together on the floor. Isabella loves it because it is special night that she is not sleeping in her bed and gets to stay up and also sleep with Mommy.
DeeDee does not get sea sick but the first day or two she gets very sleepy. Larry and Jason took the shifts at night and let DeeDee sleep the first night out. DeeDee also puts Isabella to bed and gets her up in the morning so we try and accommodate her shifts around that.
12/1/05 The seas are a bit rougher today. Again, they are not big but we are going right into them. We have been cruising for 24 hours now. They say it takes three days to get into the “routine” of cruising when the motion is not noticeable anymore. We are only cruising for three days so will probably not experience that.
Nothing notable regarding the boat except a warning alarm going off to notify us there was water in the fuel. Water sinks to the bottom of a fuel tank so the correction is simply to open the valve at the bottom of the tank and drain the water. Water comes from condensation but more often it comes from a bad source of fuel. In this case I am sure it is from our last fill in Venezuela. The dingy has had some problems running under load lately. We thought it was something wrong with the motor but have spoken with other cruisers and have found that they are all experiencing the same problem. We are told that although I have 95 octane gas, the refining process is not as good as in other countries and therefore the combustion of the fuel is not as strong.
Again I am going to compliment Nordhavn. They have such a great design on the fuel tanks. There are two large tanks of about 700 gallons each and a supply tank of 70 gallons. The supply tank supplies fuel to the engine and the generator. The two larger tanks are plumbed from the bottom and run into the supply tank. Any combination of both tanks or one tank can be selected to fill the supply tank. The valve can simply be opened to one of the large tanks or the fuel can be pumped through a “fuel polishing” system to fill the supply tank.
The number one problem in power boats is bad fuel. Either contaminated with dirt or water. The Nordhavn design allows the two larger tanks to fill the supply tank from the bottom. Usually, the tanks have a feed line going to about one inch from the bottom of the tank. The typical system allows bad fuel and water to gather at the bottom of the tank with no way to remove it. The Nordhavn system has the two larger tanks feeding the supply tank from the bottom and therefore all the bad fuel and/or water goes into the supply tank. The supply tank in turn has a drain on the bottom of it to bleed off the water and/or contaminated fuel. The supply tank also has a water alarm to alert if there is water in the bottom of the tank.
One additional design is having a separate tank for the wing engine. This provides protected fuel which is isolated from the larger tank. To put fuel into the wing engine day tank it must be polished through the filters to guarantee good fuel is being given to the emergency engine.
We are cruising at 1,800 RPM at about 6.8 knots. This gives us about 2 miles to the gallon. At this RPM the engine is only working at a 50% load. We could easily go up to a 70% load and still not be working the engine too hard but it would then be burning at a rate that would only give us about 1.2 miles to the gallon. Just one or two knots makes a huge difference in fuel burn. If we were going across an ocean we would probably slow down to about 1,500 RPM which would be at about 5.8 knots and get 3 miles to the gallon. That would give us a 4,500 mile range.
It is just great to have a boat that is reliable like this. The only problem we have had since leaving Venezuela has been a control pad for the stereo has gone out. (Remember we said we over engineered the media system)
12/2/05 Last night Jason took the 6 PM to 9 PM shift and DeeDee took the 9 PM to 12 AM shift. Larry took the 12 AM to 3 AM shift but when he went to wake up Jason, he was still very sleepy. Larry did a double shift from 12 AM to 6:30 AM. This is normal to change like this depending who was able to sleep and who was not. The previous night Jason was on the 12 AM to 3 AM shift but stayed longer to about 4:30 AM because he was not tired. Some cruisers believe that shifts should be kept no matter who got sleep and who did not so the crew is acclimated to the schedule. We believe this is not the best way especially when you have a four year old child on board which causes DeeDee’s schedule to change all the time.
The seas are very calm today. The wind is under 12 knots and the seas are only 1 – 3 feet. We could not ask for anything better. It was so calm today that Larry went up on the dinghy deck and washed the dinghy.
We are going to try and go directly to the British Virgin Islands. We have learned that the kite boarding appears to be in the sound at Virgin Gorda which is in the east end of the British Virgin Islands. Technically, we have cleared out of Bonaire to the U.S. Virgin Islands. However, we will attempt to enter directly into the BVIs. If they do not permit us to do so, it is about a three hour cruise over to the U.S. Virgin Islands to clear in there.
We have had a favorable current behind us and we will probably need to slow down tonight to allow us to arrive in daylight. The computer shows us arriving at 4:45 and sunrise is not until 6:40 today.
12/03/05 We arrived this morning at Jost Van Dyke in the BVIs. We simply cleared in and continued on to Virgin Gorda. Our homework has shown that Virgin Gorda is the place to kite board in the Virgin Islands. We have stayed here in Virgin Gorda before. There is a resort close by to where we anchor by the name of Bitter End. It does not have much but does have a few restaurants and a little store to get some essentials. One cool thing for Isabella is that they show a kid’s movie every night at an outside movie theater.
Jason and Larry went over to see the kite boarding outlet on the island. The guy was very nice and even lent us a beginner’s board for Larry to use.
12/04/05 First day of kite boarding! Larry went first and was able to drag in the water with the 9 meter kite. That was after putting the kite into the trees one time. Larry crashed the kite and popped the bladder in the kite so unfortunately DeeDee was not able to get a turn today.
12/05/05 DeeDee got her chance to go today. She was dragging in the water quite well. These kites are so powerful if you do not gently dip them into the wind they will take you right out of the water. Take a look at the photos to see DeeDee in mid air on a few tries. Larry got up on the board for the first time. He was only able to go one way and will need to learn the opposite direction as well.
When Larry goes he can still only go in one direction. That is, with the wind. Jason gets in the dingy with the kite launched and they drive to the one side of the water. At the one end, Jason hands the kite to Larry and he then boards to the other side. When Larry gets to a point where he can go no further, Jason jumps back in the water and takes the kite from Larry. Larry then swims back to the dinghy and drives the dingy close to Jason. Jason amazingly then lies on his back and puts his legs over the side of the dinghy from the water. He then powers up the kite by dipping it into the wind and drags himself into the dingy. They then drive the dingy back to the one side to start all over again.
Jason is just off the charts for kite boarding. Again, see the pictures. He regularly gets 30 feet off the water. He is awesome to watch.
12/07/05 While Jason is here and we have wind, we are spending everyday kiteboarding. Today the winds are blowing at 20 to 25 knots. DeeDee went back to the trainer kite to drag because the wind is so strong even the smallest kite we have, (9 meters) is too powerful and therefore too dangerous. Larry dropped down to the smallest kite today. He had a rough day. On one of his runs he lost his board and it flew up and split open the front of his head. Not a terrible injury but he probably should have had stitches.
The winds are supposed to be really really strong over the next few days. It will be interesting to see how we do in such strong winds.
DATE _11/11/05___ TIME ___6:00 AM START PORT ___Aves__________ END PORT _Bonaire________
START MILES___2764___ END MILES __2822____ LEG MILES ___58____ TOTAL MILES ___2833______
START HOURS _508___ END HOURS __517_____ LEG HOURS ___9_____TOTAL HOURS __517________
START FUEL ___1483____ END FUEL ___1511__ LEG FUEL __28______ TOTAL FUEL ____124_______
AVERAGE MPGs __2.07____ REMAINING RANGE ___3000_____ GEN FUEL EST. 2143/2219/76_Gal
END PRT __full_ Gal END STRBD __full_Gal END SPLY _full_Gal FUEL BALANCE __full_ Gal
SEA STATE____1 – 3__________ WIND DIRECTION________ East______________________________
11/11/05 What a great cruise. Perfectly flat seas and just sunny as can be. Slo Dancin took this leg with us as well. We are now able to define the perfect Caribbean island. Bonaire is it!
The water is a clear as we have ever seen even in the Bahamas. There are literally hundreds of dives off the islands. The street names are named for the dive. For example, if you walk to the beach from any street, you will have a dive at the end of the street. It is amazing. At the back of our boat is the best snorkeling we have ever seen. There are six foot fish swimming by on a regular basis. We are in 30 feet of water and within a short distance the depth drops to over 1,000 feet. One additional thing that makes the perfect Caribbean island is just enough civilization to get dinner and a little bit of night life. Also, the food is great and the people are friendly and peaceful. There is absolutely no negative attitude. This island has only 11,000 inhabitants and I would say is the perfect island. If you would like to see a view of the island go to bonairewebcam.com.
I am not exaggerating when I tell you that you could take the dinghy around the island and every few hundred yards there is another great dive or snorkel. This island does everything the right way. The natural resources are much protected. 75% of your mooring fees go to protect the local environment. The brochures will tell you that once you arrive, you are considered part of the family. That includes the responsibility of protecting the local resources. I must tell you that this strategy of inclusion is not just words; you can really sense it when you are here. The local people truly welcome you versus many other islands which view the tourist, as a necessary evil. We have only been here two days and are already in love with this island.
We have met a family on the boat Patagonia. They are originally from Argentina but then moved to California. They are Ricardo, Gloria, and a four year old girl by the name of Tatiana. (sp?) They had the same plans as us to head for the Virgin Island for the Holidays but love it here so much they are staying for a full three months. We are excited about the opportunity for Isabella to have a playmate her own age for awhile.
11/16/05 We met a family on a boat by the name of Endorfin. The Dad is from Canada and the wife is from Singapore. They have a daughter who is six. They came over and spent the afternoon along with the family from Patagonia. Just a great day of snorkeling and hanging out behind the boat.
Ricardo from Patagonia is quite a good free diver. Larry spent the afternoon trying to improve his free diving with him. He reached his personal best of just over 50 feet. It is amazing that the world champions dive hundreds of feet. 50 feet seems like there is absolutely no air in your lungs and to try and imagine going hundreds of feet is just incomprehensible. Although it is just going down to the bottom and coming back up, improving the ability to go deep also improves the ability to stay down at the lesser depths. This is a big deal when spear fishing. When you spearfish, you need to hover over the reefs to find the fish hiding in the holes. Then you need to have enough air to find the fish in the reef and shoot the spear and then retrieve the fish which was hopefully speared. The better the ability to stay down the better chance of getting bigger fish.
11/17/05 This is the first time we have had this much rain since leaving Florida. It must have rained 8 inches. This gave Larry the day to do boat maintenance and service. It was the time to change the oil and fuel filters on the main engine and the generator. It is so great how easy it is to change the oil and fuel filters on the boat. First of all, Nordhavn does such a great job of providing access to the engine. You can walk around the entire engine standing up. Also, the main engine, the main engine transmission, the wing engine and the generator all are connected to an automatic oil change pump. To change the oil in the main engine, all that needs to be done is open the valve to the main engine oil sump and drain the used oil out. Then change the oil filter and refill the motor with new oil by simply pushing the fill switch on the oil change system. In our old boat the access to the oil filters were on the outside of the motor and there were two on each motor. You had to crawl to the outside of the motor to get the oil filters off and it took literally hours of being bent like a pretzel. To change the oil on both engines in our old boat took 6 to 8 hours. In the Nordhavn it takes less than an hour.
One additional advantage of the newer 47 Nordhavns is that the Lugger motors utilize electronic fuel injection. On our boat, it extends the oil change from 200 hours out to 500 hours. The main motor has just reached 500 hours. What is amazing is that the generator is already over 2,200 hours. What is interesting is that Nordhavns on the west coast put more hours on the main motor and Nordhavns in the Caribbean put more hours on the generator. This is due to much longer cruising distances on the west coast versus the closeness of the islands in the Caribbean. It is also because the high temperature of the Caribbean causes the fridge and freezers to work more so in turn the battery charge dies quicker and again in turn one must run the generator more to charge the batteries. One last obvious thing is that the high temperatures require more use of air conditioners which again requires running the generator. Williwaw has been cruising three years and started on the west coast. Their generator has just passed more hours than their main engine this past month.
11/18/05 It is rare for the wind to be out of the west in Bonaire. When the wind comes out of the west or south west that is the time to snorkel and/or dive some of the dive spots on Klein Bonaire which is an island just to the west of Bonaire. We went with Patagonia, Slo Dancin, Williwaw and Endorfin. We were not able to get our dive equipment in time so we both just snorkeled and used the snuba line. The snuba line is a 60 foot air hose that attaches to a dive tank which is left in the dingy. It offers a very simple way to dive down deep on the reef without the need to wear all the dive gear.
We spent a few hours diving on the reef and it was just amazing sea life. Also there was great energy created by so many people and all the kids. (Casey – 6 yrs, Tatiana - 4 yrs, Isabella – 4 yrs, Jason – 13 yrs, and Jesse – 10 yrs) We are still trying to get Isabella to snorkel and today she just went bananas when we tried. She is seeing all the other kids do it so we are hoping she will take that next step soon.
11/19/05 Today DeeDee spent the afternoon in an art class and Larry went diving with Williwaw. We took advantage of the VERY rare opportunity to have a baby sitter for Isabella. Larry went diving with Keith and Jason from Williwaw and got to see an eel and the biggest parrot fish he had ever seen. The dive was right outside of the Marina entrance and the schools of fish were as good as you could find anywhere in the world.
Our guests Howard and Denise were due in a few days ago and still have not made it. She had a meeting for her bathing suit business that delayed her and he also had to close a business deal before he could leave so it will probably be a delay of a week or so before they actually get here.
11/22/05 We were both able to dive today while Isabella stayed on the boat Endorfin to play with her new friend Casey. It was an incredible dive. We dove with Slo Dancin, Ednorfin, and Patagonia came as well and they just used snorkels. We went down to as deep as 100 feet but usually hovered about 60 feet. This will sound like a fish story but we saw two lobsters and one of them was easily over 25 pounds. No one in the group had ever seen a lobster that large. We also saw two sea turtles and the highlight of the dive was a spotted eagle ray. In addition to all this we saw the largest variety of fish in one place we had ever seen and just spectacular coral.
The weather here has been just perfect. The locals tell us the wind has not been down like this in a dozen years. The winds have been less than five miles per hour for over two weeks. This island is usually known for the steady trade winds. The lack of trade winds could cause a problem for our kite boarding if they don’t pick up by the 27th when our friend Jason comes in to teach us how to kite board.
11/24/05 Thanksgiving in