Last time we left you in Trinidad, we were in the boatyard getting Azimuth ready again for the next season. This time we will tell you about the rest of our time in Trinidad and an eventful sail to Curacao.
It was seriously hot in that boatyard. The temperature on paper was not that high, about 32 degrees, but Trinidad is a very wet country full of steamy rainforest and the humidity most days was 85%. Its easier to deal with such heat in the trade winds of the Caribbean. At anchor, you can pretty much guarantee a steady flow of air through the boat and a cooling breeze across the deck. In the boatyard? Nothing! So after a month of it we were pretty well ready to get the hell out of there. Some vicious mosquitos too!
What really makes a place though is the people. Trinidadians are a lovely crowd and can not do enough to help you. They also like to party, and life is pretty good! After all they live in a beautiful place, and the oil industry has bought some prosperity to the country. Crime rates are still a problem though, although we never felt threatened during our time there. I guess though we really didn’t travel far and lived in a tight community of boatyard life and other cruisers
The cruisers put on some really nice events. Every Thursday night at the adjacent boat yard called Power Boats.
Every week we also went to a local outdoor restaurant place with lots of food stalls called the fish fry for some tasty food and a good chinwag with the other cruisers
We never got bored of watching these crazy guys romping around in the tree behind our boat!
Finally though the guys managed to finish the gears and after some mucking about, put the steering gearbox back together. I refitted it to the boat, tested the autopilot and everything worked as expected! It was time to depart!!!
I put together a video of the launch. We were both pretty nervous!
It felt pretty amazing to be back in the water again, and we were soon heading on our way out of the bay and out to open sea again with the long sail to Curacao ahead of us
That first couple of hours were amazing sailing. It was light seas, good winds, and Azimuth was leaping through the water with clean bottom! Even the autopilot sounded happy…. oh but wait a minute! Whats that grinding noise??? Oh no!! The autopilot decided to pack up!!!! Alarms went off … no rudder response. Now what?
Well, after playing around for a while, trying things out, I came to the conclusion that the motor that drives the autopilot (which has many gears inside it) must be the culprit. It couldn’t possibly be the gearbox that we had spent so much money fixing right?
What to do? It was getting dark, we were about 2 hours North of Trinidad. We both decided then that we couldn’t go back. For one it would be like admitting defeat, and for two if would be a bit embarrassing turning up again having been so happy about leaving. So, it meant that we had to hand steer all the way to Curacao, at this point about 450 miles away
The winds were very light or non existent after the first 24 hours, so we actually just stopped and had a rest for a few islands, drifting in the right direction towards curacao at about 1.5 knots on the equatorial current. There were some large squalls and thunderstorms around. After two days we were both in to the swing of it. The wind seemed to pick up at night and die in the day. The squalls were not too strong and so we had the full sails up. Unfortunately about 3 in the morning on the third night we were hit by a really nasty squall! it went from no wind to about 30 knots. All hell broke loose! I was asleep below and poor Ailsa had to shout and scream to wake me up. The rain was lashing down and we fought to get the sails under control for about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, in that time, we managed to do some damage to poor Azimuth! Mainsail ripped at the top, and one of the winches got stripped when the furling line became jammed, and someone (who remains nameless) carried on pressing the button!
The next day revealed the damage, but we still had a functioning genoa, and we managed to sail the rest of the trip with no incidents. it took 4 days and we arrived in Spanish Waters in Curacao, dropped the anchor and pretty much collapsed!!!
It all gets stored in the sailing experience file. I don’t think you ever stop learning. We will definitely pay closer attention to squalls in the future, and of course it was more difficult, because we were having to hand steer, and you could literally do nothing else, especially at night when the other person is asleep.
The night time was really quite special on that trip. The sea was lit up at times by the bioluminescence in the water. The wake went out behind the boat for many tens of metres as a green streak, and the crests of the waves were lit up. The stars were spectacular too, with the milky way plastered right across the sky, and I used the stars at night as a reference for easier navigation than using the instruments. I wish you could capture that on camera, but its only something that you can experience first hand, very cool.
Anyway, we made it to Curacao and motored in to the very protected anchorage called Spanish Waters. It is a huge shallow lagoon with a very narrow entrance to the sea. Lots of boats at anchor and a very vibrant cruiser community.
We anchored close to a boat called Sans Souci, Jessica and her young family were people we had met in Martinique. Jessica did a video about us and Azimuth on her YouTube channel called Boat Life. We stopped by to see them, and they very kindly filled us in on how to check in to the country, even giving us the bus fare we needed to get in to the local town Willemstad! We set off to town the next day and had the customs and immigration done in about an hour which gave us the chance to go and explore the town a little and first impressions very really good. Its like being in Amsterdam in the Caribbean! Willemstad is based around a channel that leads to the perfect enclosed harbour. The river splits the town in to two, one side is called Punda and the other is called Otrabanda, and the two sides are connected by a floating bridge across crystal clear azure water. When boats want to come in and out of the channel, the bridge disconnects it self from one bank and swings across floating on its pontoons. A very bizarre process that seems to work very well!
It was a lovely introduction, but we were still pretty exhausted so caught the bus back to the boat and went to bed early!
First order of business was getting any repairs underway. From experience we know that these things can take ages in the Caribbean, so the sooner things get started the better. I was kind of gutted really, we had spent a month in the boat yard in Trinidad getting Azimuth up to scratch and here I was looking at a long list of boat jobs! First thing was to get the main off. We found a sailmaker on the island who actually came to the dinghy dock to take it away to his workshop. Were still waiting on that one, but fingers crossed it can be mended. It is only torn at the seam, so should be fixable.
Then it was on to the autopilot. Firstly I took the motor off, dismantled it and fully tested it. It worked perfectly! Damn! Actually, not such a bad deal, because replacing that would have been very expensive. So now I am scratching my head, it cant be my brand new assembled gearbox??? I climbed back in to the hell hole under the cockpit floor and lo and behold, i discovered that the bolts that hold the sub gearbox between the main gearbox and the autopilot motor had somehow shaken loose. The whole thing was moving, and the gears were not meshing properly. Of course these particular bolts were not accessible without a complete gearbox strip down! So, back in to the heat, I got the whole assembly out. Dripping with sweat, and managed to strip it down, apply thread locker to the offending 4 bolts, reassemble with as much force as possible, reassemble and then shoehorn the whole thing back in to place in the hell hole. We need to do a sea trial to check it, but as of today the thing is fixed!
The last thing to sort was the winch. All we did in that case was swap the damaged bits for a winch that doesn’t get used that often. Hopefully we can source replacement parts at some point!
That was a few days of boat jobs then. Time to explore a little more. Right across from where we are anchored we found a really nice beach, a bar and an old fort to explore. The water here in curacao is about the clearest we have seen in the Caribbean.
Yep, that is a huge drill rig you can see in the photos. It is just parked in the bay right next to the fort, a real contrast of old and new. A reminder of all the oil activity in this area of South America
On another day we took the bus back to Willemstad to go and explore some more. This time we visited the old market which is now converted in to a food hall where we had a delicious lunch of local food. That afternoon we visited the slavery museum. Whilst obviously a tough subject, it was very well done and we both learnt alot about the history of slavery in Curacao and the surrounding islands.
There is a huge and vibrant artist quarter in Willemstad and all over the town there are public art works mixing with the vivid colours of the buildings. Very cool place to explore
Thats all for now. Join us next time as we go and explore some more of Curacao!
Nice one!
Just saw that winch. ouch!