Zen Sailing Again

We can’t think of a more pure Zen boating experience than sailing in the tropical breezes of the Caribbean on a fast boat without an engine. If you have a good boat in the Caribbean, you need an engine as much as you need a hole in your hull. The wind always blows. Always.

The Wanderer achieved total Zen sailing consciousness in the accompanying photo, which was taken during the St. Barth YC’s Carnaval Sail on February 14. Dressed as The Joker for the event in which costumes are mandatory, we were sailing the Olson 30 La Gamelle that we had used for a full season of Zen sailing on San Francisco Bay. It is possible to Zen sail on San Francisco Bay, but because it can be cold, and because calms and adverse currents mean you sometimes need an engine, it’s more challenging to become one with the water and the wind.

Our sail back to the Corossol anchorage after the Carnaval party at Columbie was as good as the sail there. It was warm, the orange sun was falling into a cloud-speckled golden horizon, and we were sailing to weather with a full main and #4 — La Gamelle’s only sails — in about 10 knots of breeze. It wasn’t our intent, but La Gamelle was effortlessly passing boats left and right. Small wonder sailors on St. Barth keep asking us to sell La Gamelle.

Of course, nothing in sailing is as easy as it might seem, as there was more than a little work involved in achieving those Zen sailing states. First, the week prior, we’d had to launch La Gamelle from the St. Martin Shipyard, where she had spent the offseason. About a third of the boats in the yard had been damaged, some of them extensively and/or beyond repair, by October 13’s hurricane Gonzalo. Gallant La Gamelle, perhaps because of Santa Cruz designer/builder George Olson’s karma, went unscathed.

The first job each season with La Gamelle is pumping all the water out, usually about 30 gallons. There is just no keeping the torrential rain out, so we’ll probably just drill a big hole in the bilge for the next offseason. Then we have to get rid of the perhaps 10,000 flying bugs. What we wondered, was the deal with all the tea bags broken open throughout the bilge? De Mallorca later informed us they weren’t tea bags, but rat bait. Then there was the matter of getting rid of the incredible amount of mold on the inside. If we were in Mexico, there would be 10 guys in line to stoop for an afternoon to de-mold the boat for less than $10 an hour. If you could even find someone to demean themselves to do such work in St. Barth, it would cost $40 an hour. So the mold job has been postponed. But it’s not quite as bad as it seems, because we never go inside the boat.

It’s always comical to watch La Gamelle being launched, because the yard lifts the 3,000-lb boat and lowers her into the water with an ancient 90-ton crane. Overkill to the max. La Gamelle is easily the smallest boat in the yard, and was perhaps a nuisance, as they’ve had to repeatedly move her around in order to launch other boats. But she’s cute, so we think that even the grizzled yard workers kind of like her.

Once La Gamelle was in the water, we had to take her through the Simpson Bay Causeway, which only opens every few hours, then wait another 15 minutes for the opening of the Simpson Bay Lagoon Bridge to the Caribbean Sea. How does La Gamelle get around without a motor? The Wanderer pushes La Gamelle, with de Mallorca at the helm, using ‘ti Profligate’s 12-ft AB inflatable and 15-hp Yamaha. La Gamelle even hauls butt when being pushed. As we went in circles waiting for the bridge to open, we passed by the moderately large motor yacht built for Steve Jobs, a boat he never saw. We’re huge fans of Apple products, but not so much of Jobs’ motor yacht.

It took us forever to get through the bridge because the ultraconservative captain of the lead megayacht insisted on passing through the narrow bridge opening at about one quarter of a knot. Other captains with much less clearance have been known to charge through at 5 knots or more, blessed as they all are with forward and aft thrusters.

Once out in the Simpson Bay anchorage, which was rolling like crazy and where we were surrounded by 150-ft-plus yachts, we had to anchor La Gamelle. Then we had to use the dinghy to ferry load after load of the stuff we store on La Gamelle in the offseason over to ‘ti Profligate. If you’ve never repeatedly climbed onto and off of a madly rolling Olson 30, it’s a lot of work, particularly when you’re collecting Social Security. De Mallorca was no help, because she had to check out with the bridge and Immigration officials, who were uncharacteristically friendly this year.

Once we got all the junk off La Gamelle, we had to connect two tow lines, secure the tiller on center line, raise her anchor, lift the dinghy in the davits, weigh ‘ti Profligate’s anchor, make the 20-mile upwind tow to St. Barth, then reverse the process once we found a spot with enough room for two boats. We know it sounds like nothing, but at the end of the day, we were so tuckered, and every bone and muscle was in such agony, that we suspected we’d contracted the dreadful Chikungunya virus that’s swept the Caribbean.

And then before we able to sail La Gamelle, we had to bend on the sails, find new jib sheets, weigh anchor, and issue a fervent prayer to the rod-rigging gods that the rig would last another season.

The is all a long way of saying that it’s sometimes harder to achieve Zen sailing consciousness that it might seem. But trust us, it’s worth it.