The day before yesterday, we finished what turned out to be a five and a half day ocean passage from Roadtown, Tortola, BVI to Cape Santa Maria, Long Island, Bahamas. We were aiming for Clarence Town, Long Island, but it was the middle of the night as we were passing through, so we just kept going to Calabash Bay (on the west side of Long Island, south of Cape Santa Maria).

But I’ll back up to the day before we left (April 4th). We rented a slip at Village Cay Marina in Road Town – we had a lot to do to get the boat ready to leave for what was going to be our longest ocean passage yet. We topped up our fuel & water, stowed our loose stuff, lashed everything down, fixed the remaining broken things, etc. etc.

As we worked, we got to know our neighbour, Lenny, the captain of the beautiful 49′ Hallberg-Rassy in the next slip. Lenny’s wife, Paige, also gets seasick, exactly like I do – in rough seas after the sun goes down. Anyhow, Lenny said that on a passage, after taking Stugeron, Paige was wondering “Why am I not sick?“.

It was late in the day, but I beelined it to the nearest pharmacy to get me some. I figured it was at least worth a try – I was dreading being seasick again. At 20 cents a tablet, I bought up all Vanderpool’s had, which was 25 pills. I took the prescribed 2 fifteen mg pills before departure, then one every 8 hours after. For me, it was like a miracle drug – I wasn’t seasick at all! And I wasn’t drowsy/comatose like I’d have been had I taken Dramamine/Gravol. For some mysterious reason, which I look forward to researching, Stugeron is not available in the US or Canada.

Back to the story. Despite all the work that day, we still didn’t get out of the marina until after 3 the next afternoon (nothin’s easy), so we were sailing into the sunset as we left the BVI on April 5th.

The first few days at sea were very uneventful (read boring). The only thing worth mentioning is that we ran out of water on the port tank late the second day (the source for our galley foot pump), so Phill did a refill at sea.

I think it was day two when a bird landed on the boat. We were many many miles from land to the south, and our hitchhiker didn’t look like a seabird to us…

It wasn’t long after our hitchhiker landed that his/her mate started circling the boat.

The mate never landed, but our hitchhiker made him/herself at home in our galley. I tried to feed it some orange (thinking it must be thirsty after its long flight from whence it came), but it wasn’t interested.

The bird stayed over night, and left us the next day.

We had a few big bites on the fishing line we trolled the whole time (three to be exact), but didn’t land a keeper ’til day three. Here’s a video of the big event (the repetitive mechanical sound in the background is our autopilot).

We subdued the fish with cheap cranberry vodka ($4.51 for 26oz at the Roadtown cash ‘n carry) on the gills from a squirt bottle, rather than beat it about the head and get the boat all bloody, like these guys did (they start making an awful mess of it at 3:42 or so).

The vodka did the trick – Mr. Durado didn’t wake up again after he passed out. No bloody bludgeoning necessary.

Just a few photos of our durado (and fisherman Phill)…

We ate him for dinner with the last of our lettuce – it was delicious!

It wasn’t long after catching the durado that the winds increased, and so did the seas, so it became difficult to do anything. I thought our sea legs were pretty good, but we’d get tossed around like ragdolls. The upside was that we were making good time.

As the seas increased, we would stay low. Walking around the boat unecessarily was just asking for trouble.

Here are a few more pics from the passage, in no particular order.

We arrived at Long Island Bahamas in the wee hours of April 11th. It was still dark so we overshot the island by several miles to pass some time until the sun was high enough to see our way through the coral into Calabash Bay.

So here we are, enjoying beautiful Long Island, Bahamas.