Son of a Bilge!

Location: Antigua

Damn, it's been a week. There have been good parts and there have been bad parts, but the main takeaways are that boats are great but bilges suck.

The unfortunate reality of boat life is that every week you say goodbye to people. Last weekend, it was Flora's turn. She would fly to Miami to be flown afterwards by private jet to a private island in the Bahamas that she would co-manage. Talk about a sweet gig. We started her last day with an extravagant brunch. David and Kyle's dishes were served on plates the size of platters, and included four eggs, bacon, hash browns, an enormous serving of baked beans, and mushrooms. They finished almost all of it and went into a food coma almost immediately afterwards. After a long nap, we went to a local bar for all of Flora's friends to be able to make their goodbyes. Flora has many friends. There were at least twenty people spread out across several tables, with more arriving by the minute. Also, Bryce came back! He visited Antigua for a week, and arrived in time to say goodbye to Flora. It was nice having a few of the St. Maarten people here, if only for a short while.

Monday I officially started working for Ananda. I was expecting starting off with some deck work, or possibly some polishing. Instead, I went straight to cleaning the bilges. The bilges are the nasty part of the boat underneath the floorboards that houses various devices such as engines and water pumps and is coated with salt and sediment. Once a month, it needs to be vacuumed and scrubbed until the floors are white again. (This is done for safety reasons; if the bottom is clean, you can easily spot leaks.) It is important to note that not only do you have to crawl under the floorboards to reach certain areas, but also there are many pointy things in your way that will scratch your hands as you scrub. Furthermore, the boat was in a dockyard at the time, and so, due to the lack of wind, fans, or AC, you were dripping with so much sweat that you couldn't tell whether the cut in your hand (gotten from the aforementioned pointy things) stung from the cleaning fluid or from your sweat. Good times.

The dock yard is on the north side of the island and the house is on the south side of the island, so we have to drive across it every day. Fortunately, it's a small island, so it only takes half an hour. Unfortunately, it is a very, very bumpy half hour. (Some of the potholes are even worse than the ones near the Snowdon metro station back home.) Fortunately, the seat belts in Kyle's car have very sensitive locking mechanisms. (There's also a stretch of road near Willoughby Bay that absolutely stinks of sargassum seaweed, but that's a different story.)

Kyle grew up in Antigua, so he's showed me some local food. I love the local bread, but then again, I love all bread. I've also tried a dish called pepper pot, which is a green soup filled with okra, peppers, chicken legs, and pig tails. Absolutely delicious, although the packaging method was slightly strange.

The boat currently has rudder issues, and there's only one person on the island who can fix it. This means that he can set whatever terms he wants with us. One of these terms is that he wanted to work on the boat in a dock yard on the south side of the island. As mentioned before, we were on the north side. And so, Friday, we splashed the boat and motored around Antigua. This was quite a procedure, as Ananda is not the smallest of boats. (The rudder is 1.5 times my height.)

Once the boat was lowered into the water, the procedure of leaving the narrow slip involved me running around with a fender almost as big as I was to put it wherever we were getting close to the shore, Kyle yelling distances from other boats, and David yelling instructions at everyone. After exiting the slip, we had to make a series of abrupt turns to follow the only channel deep enough to safely exit the harbour. Then, for the next hour, we were in a fishing area, and I had to keep my eyes trained for fish pots, which are marked by a white buoy that unfortunately looks exactly like white caps, of which there were many.

Things calmed down when we entered a channel between the island and a nice barrier reef. This is an area of calmer water, and we passed a few friendly sailboats. We then entered the harbour, conducted a few abrupt turns to check the propellers, and docked at Catamaran Marina (there were no catamarans). Despite the tests, just as we were docking, the bow thruster (propeller at the bow that allows for sideways maneuverability) stopped working, and it was somewhat challenging to complete the docking. Following this, we scrubbed the boat from bow to stern, ate, went home, and collapsed.

Yesterday I went sailing! David's friends invited him to sail with them at the local Antigua Yacht Club regatta, and David's friends' friend invited me to crew on their boat. I was foredeck on a 35-foot boat called Cricket. I liked it a lot, because it reminded me of the boat that I sail on back home. (That's a shoutout to you, Bill.) Unfortunately, my finger got jammed in-between a sheet and a shroud, and a solid millimeter of skin got ripped off the pad of my fourth finger. This made doing absolutely everything very uncomfortable. The wound also looks horrendously ugly, which is not a plus. However, the sailing was beautiful. We went out of the harbour and sailed down rolling waves, looking at the green hills and the turquoise water crashing on the rocks at their base. The wind was perfect, and I spent much of my time sitting on the rail (the side of the boat, for balancing the boat) chatting with my crew members. I found out that the main trimmer's daughter was Kyle's classmate. It's a small island. After sailing, I talked with that day's racers. I met a lovely couple who recently left Bequia because of the volcano. Their names were Nate and Nicole. This seems to follow the couple's names theme quite well; the list now has Karl and Kara, Daniel and Daniella, Brent and Beverley, and Nate and Nicole.

Due to the multiple repairs that need to be made, Ananda's trip up to the States has been postponed for at least a month. Unfortunately, I can't stay that long; the summer sailing season in Montreal beckons. This week, we haul the boat out again on Wednesday, then I get yet another PCR test (I think this will be my 13th), then I fly out on Saturday. What awaits me when I land is another PCR test, a three-day hotel quarantine, an eight-day home quarantine, a final PCR test—self-administered this time—and then I should be done. I'll let you know how it goes. Ciao