Anchored off the Eden Rock Hotel, Baie St. Jean, St. Barth. Cruising
doesn’t get much more lovely than this.
Catch the Corinthian Spirit
January 14 – Tiburon
Corinthian YC’s popular midwinter regatta,
a four-day series starting this weekend (and continuing on Feb.
14-15), is apparently coming together nicely. Despite unfortunate
conflicts with just about every other midwinter on the Bay –
not to mention MLK Day, Valentine’s Day and President’s Day –
over 120 paid entries have already been received, and more are
pouring in every day. The entry list, broken down by class, should
be on www.cyc.org
later today.
J/105s at last year’s CYC Midwinters.
This year, there are one design classes for Beneteau 40.7s, Express 37s, Beneteau 36.7s, J/105s,
and Alerion Express 28s, as well as a class for IOR Warhorses. Photo Latitude Archives
Gigantic ebb currents on both days could
well wreak havoc on the fleet, but nothing should put a damper
on the shoreside festivities. All sailors are invited to the
dinner/dance party upstairs in the Ball Room, featuring the Bay
Area Blues Band, as well as to Scott Easom’s slide-illustrated
presentation about the new Pyewacket at 10 a.m. Sunday
morning. Both events are free, open to the public, and promise
to be fun.
CYC will accept entries up until 11:00
on Saturday morning. See www.cyc.org
for how to enter and more details. “Pray for wind!”
says CYC race official Michael Moradzedah. “We’re going
to need it.”
Profligate’s
Progress
January 14 – St. Barth, FWI
Given the amount of drinking down here
in the Caribbean, it’s a subject that’s rarely written about.
But maybe it should be.
It’s no secret why people drink down here.
It’s hot and they are thirsty. Plus drinks are ice-breakers for
folks on vacation making new friends, and guys and girls thinking
about playing footsie. And since St. Barth is a French Island,
more people drink wine than breath air.
The problem is that alcoholic beverages
go down so easy in the tropics, and for reasons we’ve never understood,
seem to have much less effect than in the temperate zones. For
example, we’d be embarrassed to admit how much we and some of
our crew used to drink during Antigua Sailing Weeks, but it was
massive amounts and we did it long into the night. Nonetheless,
we were functional and up and at ’em on the race course by 9:00
the next morning. Had we drunk that much back home, we wouldn’t
have been able to get out of bed. Furthermore, we rarely got
a hangover despite doing it day after day. Who can explain that?
Other than regattas in the Caribbean and
a few other special occasions, we’ve never been big drinkers.
And now that we’re a little older, we drink even less. For example,
if we’re alone or having dinner at home, it would never cross
our mind to have a drink. If we go out for dinner with friends,
the most we’ll usually have is a cocktail and a glass of wine
with a meal. We’re always turning down drinks or saying no thanks
to more wine.
We came to the Caribbean to have sailing
fun and get healthy, not to drink and party hardy. But damn,
it’s hard to avoid drinking. Take yesterday, for example. We
had a glass of rosé with lunch. Big deal. About six hours
later, we had a Mt. Gay and tonic while watching the beautiful
sunset from the back of Profligate. We actually only drank
part of it.
On our way to dinner in Gustavia, we passed
through Le Select to try to find our crewmember/guest, who shortly
after he arrived on the island managed to find himself a nearly
permanent guest at one of two luxury villas here. He wasn’t at
Le Select, but Chris, the captain of the 90-ft R/P Leopard
of London was, and he asked us to have a drink. Since Chris
has been Mike Slade’s very active skipper for 13 years, aboard
the likes of the Ocean 80 Ocean Leopard, the Farr 80 Longabarda
– which famously ran aground at the entrance to the St. Francis
YC many years ago – and the two-year old Leopard of London,
he’s a fountain of information. So how could we not have a Mt.
Gay and tonic with him?
You can’t imagine how much background and
other information we were able to get from Chris. Such as the
fact that the complete plans for L of L were revised more
than 80 times before the boat was built. That the owner likes
R/P over Farr because he knows he’ll be getting the work of John
Reichel and not some lower employee in the Farr organization.
That one of the successes of the very successful L o L
charter program is that Chris, a certified diver, includes six
dives plus a night dive in the base cost of each charter. That
charters in the Med are much easier to book and much easier to
do than those in the Caribbean. For one thing, there are many
more affluent people close at hand, and secondly, many of the
charterers don’t want to do anything more than be stern tied
to the dock at St. Tropez or Monte Carlo where they can be seen.
In the Caribbean, on the other hand, charterers, particularly
Americans, want to sail everyday, and there’s a lot of wind in
the Caribbean.
In the course of learning all that and
much more, another Mt. Gay and tonic managed to slipped down
our throat, almost unnoticed.
During a delicious dinner a short time
later, one small glass of wine seemed like the only thing to
order.
So let’s see, that’s a total of five servings
of alcohol in a day when we really didn’t intend to drink anything.
And we still hadn’t swung by Bête à Zaile, the island’s
current hot spot, where people were throwing down drinks, very
expensive drinks, as though they’d just crawled in from the desert.
When we ordered a café crème, we were surely the
only one of the 150 or so patrons who wasn’t imbibing something
alcoholic.
Our point is that if one has five drinks
on a non-party day, can you imagine how many you can have on
a festive day? Certainly more than is good for a human body,
particularly on a semi-regular basis.
A santé!
We don’t have any photos to illustrate
drinking on St. Barth, so here’s a couple of shots of what the
island looks like through a sober lens.
The maritime view from inside The Wall restaurant as a fine little
local yacht sails out of Gustavia Harbor.
The anchorage off Gustavia and the industrial port. Who can pick
out the 146-ft Mari-Cha III?
Profligate on the hook at Publics as the sun sets behind
Pan du Sucre.
The Columbie anchorage, named after Columbus, who discovered
the island and named it after his brother. Off in the distance
is Ile Fourshure, St. Martin, Tintamarre, and even Anguilla –
which rhymes with vanilla.
Well, we do have a drinking photo after all. This is Tom Reardon
aboard Ticonderoga, of which he has been the captain for
the last 18 years and three owners. “More than one beer
a day and you’re headed for trouble,” he warns.
The small and lovely bay at Corossol. You’ll rarely find a tourist
here.
Baie St. Jean. If you stand here long, you’ll surely be hit by
an airplane, for it’s only a couple of feet from the end of the
short runway.
They chopped off part of a hill and built a new main road down
past the airport. As you can tell, it was too easy for planes
to land on top of cars and people when the old road was in use.
The harbor at Gustavia, St. Barth. Thirty-five years ago, the
harbor was virtually empty and there was only one or two restaurants
on the island. Now you have yachts like Ronald Perlman / Revlon’s Ultima III, and restaurants all over the island.
One of the reasons St. Barth is so popular is that they do things
right. Check out the lovely new palm-lined stern-to area in front
of the Hotel de Ville (city hall). Try to find a similarly nice
public facility anywhere in the Caribbean. Photos Latitude/Richard
From the Beginning We Told You It Was
Never Going to Happen
January 14 – Santa Rosalillita, Mexico
According to a CNN news story, Mexican
President Vicente Fox’s grand plans for a yachters’ paradise
have produced only a half-finished marina of crumbling boulders
and a highway that ends abruptly, giving way to sand and scrub
brush.
The ‘Nautical Staircase’ was supposed to
build 27 new or revamped marinas along Baja’s 1,000 miles of
rocky coastline, then add luxury hotels, new airports, golf courses,
and oceanside businesses to serve all the new visitors.
Because of failure to produce an environmental
impact study, not even the first step of the staircase has been
completed, at tiny Santa Rosalillita, which boasts only one paved
road and no hotels or restaurants.
Fox’s term expires in December 2006, and
he can not run for another, so many believe that the project
will expire with with his presidency.
Joel Bartlett writes from Los Altos, “Before
attempting a whale rescue as described in A Whale of a Story
in the Jan. 13th edition of ‘Lectronic
Latitude, divers and those who encourage them should know
that not every whale rescue has a happy ending. In June 2003,
Tom Smith of Kaikoura, New Zealand, was killed while attempting
to rescue a whale caught in line of crawfish pots. An experienced
diver, he had previously rescued a whale who had cooperated with
his efforts, just as was described in ‘Lectronic Latitude.
Who is out making passages in the Pacific
and what kind of weather are they having? The YOTREPS daily yacht
tracking page has moved to www.bitwrangler.com/psn.
Looking for current as well as recent wind
and sea readings from 17 buoys and stations between Pt. Arena
and the Mexican border? Here’s the place – which has further
links to weather buoys and stations all over the U.S.: www.ndbc.noaa.gov/Maps/Southwest.shtml.
Pacific Winds and Pressure
The University of Hawaii Dept. of Meteorology
page posts a daily map of the NE Pacific Ocean barometric
pressure and winds.
