In case you missed it, I am happy to announce that I have been published in SpinSheet magazine. You can find my article, “The ‘First’ Sail of Ave del Mar” on pages 48-49 online by clicking on the article name above, or better yet run out and grab a copy at a store. They’re free!

Thank you one and all for all of your support. More to come!

Epic jam sessions, seasickness and how best to resolve conflicts with your shipmates. In this latest edition of Postcards From Sea, John Herlig discusses these and other pressing issues with his good friend and fellow traveller Albi the German Lad. The pair also try to figure out at what stage it’s reasonable to start calling yourself a ‘sailor’.

I fall in love with the Halberg-Rassy 372 and Henry the German glue guy, plus I get fish and chips at Pusser’s along with a round of #3 painkillers.

Hear also about how a Mantus anchor helped to save Ave del Mar from Hurricane Matthew and about the chalky paint I applied to the Edson pedestal of friends Chris and Elizabeth’s 1979 Cherubini 37C.

Always a good time.

In this new episode of PFS I am recording on the move as I motorsail north on the Intra Coastal Waterway in North Carolina.

In this episode of Postcards From Sea I interview my father, Richard, and talk to him about his lifelong love of boats and the day we found Ave Del Mar.

Time to point the bow north–or maybe northeast and then west and then northwest and then drift a little… The story of sailing 725 nm from Jamaica to the Florida Keys.

Seems that sometime when I was off-grid I aired a podcast episode without even knowing it. So here you go!

 

Happy to have the podcast up and running again.

There are moments when small things go wrong on the boat.

There are moments, too, when you look at the weather and the seas and you say, to no one in particular, No, not today, and your boat stays where she is. I have met boats that forge onward through any weather at all, boats that hide from every shift of the wind, boats going west with the trades and boats heading east right into their teeth. Everyone dances to their own beat.

It was that into the teeth part, specifically around Cabo Beata, Dominican Republic, that helped me end up in rainy Jamaica. I was sick of fighting my way into the trades. I was sick of motoring and motor-sailing and pinching and wind in my face. The day that I was supposed to sail east from Haiti towards the Dominican Republic I called my friend and buddy-boater Aldo on the VHF.

“I can put my dinghy in the water and come to you, or you can put yours in and come to me, but we need to talk,” I said over the handheld.

“You stay there,” he replied. “I will be right over.”

This was part of buddy boating that Aldo and I did really well together. We knew how we communicated well and how we communicated less well, and face to face was the only way real decisions got made.

Aldo was soon on my boat, sitting in Ave del Mar’s salon. I told him that I didn’t like the forecast, I didn’t like the winds, I didn’t like the seas, and I would not be sailing east, at least not that day. As always I reminded him that he was free to go without me. That got tossed right out the window. “If you do not want to go, we will not go,” was Aldo’s simple reply. We had always respected an unspoken veto policy for all sailing plans. Sailing can be hard enough when you like the conditions. There’s really no need to head out when you fear them.

So we stopped and we regrouped and eventually we decided to sail to Jamaica, downwind at last, into the heart of the Caribbean Sea and with a world of options open ahead of us. From Jamaica we could head south towards Colombia and Panama or west towards Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico. Jamaica was brilliant.

It was on this sail from Haiti to Jamaica that there was a shift in the qi of my journey. Several new rips started to appear in the genoa, the predictable result of time, UV degradation, and good, hard use. The electronic tiller pilot died in a glorious blaze of flashing lights. Another winch took flight from the side of the mast. The fuel tanks started to decompose at a remarkable pace. The trip transpired without unnecessary risk but not without undue suffering. All of those little things were starting to add up.

In Jamaica I sat aboard the boat secretly mired in a low-grade panic about how to acquire a new tiller pilot and how to safely proceed with what felt like a decaying boat. I had an obligation to be back in Washington DC in October of 2017 for my niece’s wedding, and I had been worried about finding a hurricane hole somewhere in Central America where I could safely and affordably haul out for a month or two of travel. Adding now the challenge of new electronics, possibly new fuel tanks, and a need for new sails just over the horizon, and that trip south or west started to look like an escape tunnel that led to a fire pit. It just didn’t feel right.

“Ollie’s girlfriend put seven tubes of caulk around the chimney on the roof, so we’ll see if that works,” came the words from my friend Eric, who was watching over my leaky old house in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. A small rental income from this beautiful old victorian home funded my sailing life aboard Ave del Mar. One of my tenants had just been evicted, so I had been without income for a couple of months, and now work had to happen to fix the roof before the vacant unit could be rented again. The house was just like the boat: lovable, capable, a bit tired, and in real need of attention.

There was a time a couple of years ago not three days into my journey from Annapolis when NOAA weather radio was calling for a small craft advisory on the Chesapeake Bay with sustained south winds over 25 knots and some sizable seas. I elected that day to feel my way into the Piankatank River through a dense fog, where with the help of my radar and AIS I fumbled my way up to an anchorage near Glebe Neck for three days of respite. Despite the fact that I sail solo, despite the fact that I like being alone out on the ocean, I do not embrace unnecessary risk. That’s just how I sail. Risk assessment was all that could go through my head as I sat in the marina in Jamaica staring at nautical charts and trying to make a plan.

Distilled down, my risk assessment looked bleak. At the very least my fuel tanks needed clean-out portholes added and the condition of their interiors assessed. It is possible they needed replacing altogether, which involves removing the cockpit sole and the engine, hardly a weekend project for a shade tree mechanic. The sails were taped where they were decaying, but that was a temporary fix. The autopilot was simply dead and needed replacing. Meanwhile, the rental house appeared to be collapsing under its own weight. South and west were calling, but so was my obligation to return for the wedding. In the end I knew what I had to do. I had no desire to be one of those derelict boats that ends up in some third world backwater, rotting away and blaming bad luck.

Forward is a strange word that means so many different things to so many different people. To me it meant taking steps, good steps, regardless of their geographic direction. Cutting miles up the Piankatank River to hide from stormy weather when I was fully green and inexperienced was forward progress because it was the safe thing to do. Delaying my crossing to the Bahamas from South Florida was forward progress because it was the wise sailing decision. Not beating into those trade winds to try to make the Dominican Republic under a cloak of false pride was forward progress, a pragmatic deferment to weather and sailing conditions.

So Ave del Mar and I are going to point the bow towards Reedville, Virginia, and head back to the marina where our journey began four years ago. I’ll be able to get the house in order, see some friends and family, officiate a pretty special wedding, and, in the quiet comfort of Jennings Boat Yard, I’ll be able to deal with those fuel tanks, winches, sails, and whatever else requires my attention, this time with the invaluable benefit of experience.

In 2013 I left Jennings Boatyard a starry-eyed dreamer. With a little luck, four years later I hope to return a sailor.

I stared at the chimpanzee, spellbound. A parade of majestic Mayan figures marched across his face carrying signs that made up a system of messages I found fascinating but impossible to understand. A lone, lithe figure dressed in iridescent greens and yellows danced gracefully above the Mayans. Simply amazing, I thought. The chimpanzee was wearing a helmet, a space helmet, and was projecting this ancient dance to me aboard my boat in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. Slowly one of the Mayan signs came into focus. EEO, it read. E, E, O, I thought. What in the world is that? I concentrated hard. I knew the answer was out there, and I was hoping it would come to life for me. I wanted so desperately to know.

Indeed the answer came swiftly and severely—like a bomb. The chimpanzee was in fact my cockpit bulkhead compass. The Mayan symbols were not parading across his face, they were the compass wheel revealing my bearing as Ave del Mar spun to the north. “EEO” was “330,” which meant I was 60º off course. The dancing man was simply the yellow-green of the central marker on the glass of the compass, his head the shield from the compass’ internal light. I was sailing, and I was hallucinating, somewhere in the middle of my second night without sleep and somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.

Sleep deprived heroes in books and movies wear this battle much more romantically than I did this starry night aboard my little boat Ave del Mar. I was sailing from Ile a Vache, Haiti, to Port Antonio, Jamaica, a quite doable distance of about 155 nautical miles. Somewhere in that first day of sailing the autopilot had failed in a kaleidoscopic display of lights and a cacophony of beeps and buzzes, and my attempts to repair it had failed despite the aplomb I thought I had displayed. No autopilot meant no help steering the boat, and no help steering meant no sleep.

There was a notable absence of drama in this event as Ave and I were hardly in peril. The seas were a bit lively but far from being dangerous. We weren’t falling down waves the size of city buildings, we weren’t fighting leaks that could sink the boat, and we weren’t without food or water. What we were was mired in an exercise of epic inconvenience.

Ave and I made good progress despite running under soft winds. I had the genoa poled out to starboard and pulled taut. So many of the mysteries that used to challenge me while sailing were comfortable old friends now, the drama of their newness gone from our relationship. Sailing without land to hit or shallows to avoid meant that the chart plotter stayed off for most of the trip, silently recording our track in the background while I sailed from the magnetic compass. As that first night fell, I opened the tablet to double check my progress. Ave was right where she was supposed to be but the navigation tablet’s battery was clinging to a charge of less than 10%, another dangerous inconvenience.

A little troubleshooting led me to realize that the USB outlet that powers the device had failed, so I rearranged some electronic assets and I plugged the tablet into one of the backup power sources. Happy to see it charging again, I knew that in the course of the night it would slowly come back to life. The battery charge on my backup navigation tablet was satisfactory to get me into port if needed. Catastrophe avoided.

That first night passed without incident. There were good moments of sailing, of stargazing, and of free thought flow. That is what nights at sea do when they are calm. Morning broke and I was feeling good about the trip and my ability to push through.

As the sun crept higher in the sky I started to realize that the absence of sleep was impacting my thought process, and so I started to think about what ways were available to me to catch a little shut eye. It was becoming clear that not sleeping was not a viable option, despite the good story fodder that it made.

I decided to heave to—a process of effectively stalling the boat just off the wind. This is an old and simple sailing trick that calms the boat’s motion and allows a respite from the attention that the helm requires. In short this involves arranging the sails in a conflicting configuration, each trying to turn the boat in an opposite direction. I have never had to heave to as a storm management strategy, but I have practiced numerous times for whatever the occasion may be, and this was the occasion.

After dousing the genoa I went forward to raise the mainsail, my safety harness responsibly clipped to the bright red jackline. Raising the main was also more complicated than one might expect, because I had no auto helm to hold the boat’s direction. To raise the mainsail you ideally want to point the boat right into the wind which renders the sail inert and makes it easier to hoist. Without a crew member or autopilot the boat wants to fall off as the wind blows the bow away, so you end up side to the swell which amplifies the boat’s rolling action rather dramatically and makes simply standing on the deck a risky undertaking. But I’ve been through this enough times, have feared for my life enough times, have braced myself while clipped to the jackline enough times that it really wasn’t the biggest deal.

The mainsail somehow went up, as I used the boat’s rolling action to offset the pressure of the wind. With the sail in need of tensioning I grabbed the winch handle, looped the halyard thrice around the winch, and started to crank. As the second crank began I was treated to an encore of my “Bahamian Flying Winch Drum” drama as the Australian-made Barient winch fell apart in front of my eyes and the drum flew off of the base. Unlike the Bahamian episode, this one did not smack me in the face and did not fall overboard, both welcome edits to the storyline. But with the second of only three mast winches now out of order heaving to was off of the table as an option. Sleep would have to wait.

A most-undramatic drama, this one, absent all of the squalls, winds, lightning, and heroic undertakings that lend color to the stories that sailors inevitably tell. “The Story of That Night I Didn’t Sleep” seemed a poor title for a tale. I wasn’t holding my breath for Hollywood to come knocking.

Throughout Tuesday I crept onward and the wind speed crept downward. By afternoon the winds were marginal at best, so I started the engine to power through the second leg of the journey. The genoa offered a bit of steadiness to the boat’s rolling action, and the 35 horsepower Universal diesel pushed Ave along at a slow if not steady pace of 3.5 knots or so. I could survive this, I reminded myself. No one ever died at sea from moving slow and steady in settled weather.

It was late in the afternoon when I noticed the unmistakeable sound of the engine RPMs plummeting as the diesel workhorse was being starved for fuel. The particulate was back—or, rather, the particulate was still there—and it was clogging the fuel line out of the tank and into the filters. For the first of six or seven times during this trip I shut the engine down, took apart the cockpit grates, and climbed down into the engine compartment to clear the congestion. With the motor off and the winds light the boat fell predictably beam-to and tossed violently side to side as I tried to hold onto tools and perform my diesel bypass procedure. At one point we rolled enough that my canvass bag of food which lives in the cockpit poured its contents onto my head and down into the engine bilge as I was draining the fuel lines. My prepared sandwiches fell into the murky bilge along with crackers, hard boiled eggs, and whatever else had been at the ready. I paused my fuel operation long enough to pull soggy food from the bilge water and fling it back out into the cockpit with a violent and angry cry. Things were starting to build up.

Onward I motored, onward I steered, and onward I checked the Racor fuel filter vacuum gauge for restrictions. Half of my brain said this isn’t so bad, and the other half brainstormed ways to sink the boat in the first Jamaican harbor I could find and buy an airplane ticket home. It’s a familiar tune on an old boat with the problems that come with boats and age. I remember fondly sitting with a young man in George Town, Bahamas, who was telling tales of making way through a cut that he had no business attempting to clear (yep, I’ve done that too). He confessed so effortlessly, as sailors do, that he almost hoped at one point that the boat would just hit a reef and sink because then the torture of trying to make it through the cut would be over. “No one who hasn’t done it will ever understand just how much you really mean it when you wish those things,” he said, deadpan.

It was in the early stages of the second night that the hallucinations began. They started mildly, not full on space-chimpanzee-and-Mayan-parade level but a simple detachment of consciousness. I would be motoring and staring at the compass when I would suddenly realize that despite looking right at it, I was allowing the boat to turn off course. The numbers just stopped conveying meaning to my brain and my brain stopped sending signals to my hands and everything got weird.

The detachment eventually gave way to a parade of confusing episodes where I couldn’t figure out what the compass numbers meant. Eventually I started to think that some of the numbers were actually words, and I would stare at the wheel trying to determine what it meant and how I should steer. I am navigating currently somewhere between ‘270º’ and ‘EFO.’ Hmmm. What to do, what to do. Reality was slipping steadily away.

Then Dancing Man appeared. He entertained me endlessly, sinewy figure moving elegantly side to side on the front of the compass, tall and thin in an elaborate carnival costume. He seemed so happy and carefree that he brought a sense of carefree to my night. Rarely during that time did I realize that Dancing Man didn’t really exist. There was no ebb and flow into and out of awareness, no moments of Oh! I was hallucinating again. Just me and Dancing Man motoring slowly westward, he with his big hat on and me smelling of diesel.

Every few hours I had to dig deep enough to find the ability to climb down into the engine compartment again to drain the diesel lines of their sediment. This, too, became less of an ordeal. I was Job, and my duty was to persevere. I didn’t want to drain the diesel. I didn’t want to sit in the cockpit confused. I just wanted to see my anchorage in Jamaica magically appear before my eyes, to have a shot of rum and go to bed. I wanted this desperately.

I had long lost contact with my sailing companions as they were both out of VHF radio range. As Tuesday night gave way to Wednesday day I could occasionally hear enough to know that they were out there talking with each other, but the words were merely indistinguishable background noise. Ave del Mar and I trudged on, progress slowed by our erratic route as we twisted and turned off of our desired course. By the time I made landfall in Port Antonio we had added about 12% to the length of the journey by virtue of our wanderings. So goes life.

When I was a young boy my family regularly vacationed in Colorado, camping in summer and skiing in winter. We would drive west on I-70, the five of us in our 1965 Microbus, my father commenting that we were the only vehicle that the tractor-trailers ever actually passed going uphill in the Rockies. Somewhere in Colorado the Rocky Mountains would cut the horizon and I would get so excited. The mountains! I would think. We’re almost there! Throughout that day of slow westward driving the mountains proved elusive. On and on we drove. The mountains were some sort of evil depth perception trick. Jamaica rekindled that struggle in me during the daylight hours of Wednesday as I could see the mountainous skyline of the Jamaican shore, but it never seemed to actually grow closer.

As we know, though, it did draw nearer and late in the afternoon of Wednesday I entered the channel towards Errol Flynn Marina to clear customs and immigration. I was too tired to be relieved. Again I dug deep, concentrating hard as the numerous officials climbed onto my boat and I completed form after form to clear in. I asked questions. I confessed readily and rapidly that I was in a compromised state from lack of sleep. The officials were all professional, friendly, courteous, and helpful. Eventually the parade of red tape ended and I paid for two nights in the marina. Untying to go anchor was more than I could begin to imagine doing. I walked down the dock to my friend Aldo’s boat where he was engaged in a lively conversation with a young French man who had hitchhiked into town on a Dutch catamaran.

“Aldo,” I said, “I am going to walk to THAT bar”—I pointed to the poolside bar—“where I am going to eat something and drink Red Stripe until I am drunk. I am leaving in three minutes, with or without you.” I drifted back to Ave where I put on a decent shirt and grabbed some money, and I was back at Aldo’s boat in short order where nothing had changed. Shirtless Aldo still sat on his coach roof chatting with the nice French lad.  “I will save you a seat and I will buy you a beer,” I said, “because I am going right now.”

Walking alone towards shore along the dock I was soon joined by Aldo who scrambled, commenting to his new French friend on the insanity of the American man he had chosen to sail with. I paused, and we walked together. Grabbing a seat at the bar my first Red Stripe fell quickly away. I snapped a quick photo which went up on social media to announce to the world that I had arrived, arguably alive, in Jamaica. The beer tasted good.

Aldo told me in his broken English that I drive him crazy. I listened to him, as another Red Stripe and a plate of food came and went.

Soon enough Aldo refused another beer but I forged forward without him, solo sailing again, happily and deeply and at the perfect pace.