Date First Posted: January 28, 2006
Log Entry Start Date - January 15, 2006
Log Entry End Date - January 18, 2006
Location(s) Covered - Los Roques, Venezuela to Bonaire
Present Location: Bonaire (Harbor Village Marina)
Latitude: 12 09.8 N Longitude: 68 17.1 W
Weather: Partly cloudy with frequent showers
Distance covered since last entry: 59 nM
Total distance traveled since departure from Antigua: 477
Commentary:
Gran
Roque, Venezuela
Our landfall from Antigua was Gran Roque, the largest and only island with a settlement in Los Roques. It has a small airstrip for planes from the mainland, and small "resorts" for tourists, but not much else.
The day after arriving, we continued on to the island of Crasqui. We had planned to go a bit further, but when we turned on our autopilot, it didn’t work, so we stopped at the first opportunity, only about 8 miles away.
Hilary
as we are anchored at Crasqui, in Los Roques
The autopilot had performed well enroute to Los Roques under hard conditions, a good test of a new installation and pretty much all new components. However, after anchoring at Crasqui, we noticed that the nuts holding the connecting pivot pin between the hydraulic ram and our steering quadrant had both come loose. This wouldn’t have kept the pilot from working, and we had planned on checking these anyways. At the same time, the motor wasn’t working. We cleaned the brushes and the motor was just fine. We used this opportunity to mount the motor on rubber shock mounts, which will cut down the sound of the autopilot a lot, making sleeping on overnight passages in our aft cabin easier. Nancy has named our autopilot "Jimmy". Naming autopilots is common among cruisers. This name came from a NASCAR driver "Jimmy Johnson", that our friends Pat and Wayne had spotted at the church we visited in St. Barts in 2005. In spite of the requirements for a Pit Crew, we're happier with "Jimmy" than we were with his predecessor.
From Crasqui, we went on to another small island called Sarqui. This had a beautiful beach we walked and swam along. Other than Gran Roque, which has a 300-400 foot hill, all of the other islands are low and made out of coral. The fish were literally jumping all over the place, and the water was perfectly clear.
From
Sarqui, we left for the Aves Barlovento (windward islands of the Aves).
This was about a 40 mile sail, which we did under a poled out yankee and
main. We found our way through a couple of coral reef passages and stayed
in an area with hundreds of red footed boobies (sea birds) that were nesting
in the mangrove trees. There were always dozens soaring overhead, just a
short distance away.
Aves
From the Aves, we had another 50 miles to sail to Bonaire, and about 9 further miles up the coast to our marina. We arrived about dusk on January 18th, motorsailing with just our yankee. There wasn’t very much wind, and the halyard to our mainsail came undone shortly after we left. Re-running this halyard would have been a challenge at sea, but we did it in the marina in just a matter of a few minutes.
All in all, the passages from Antigua to Bonaire have been a good test of the boat and good practice for us. We managed to set up our spinnaker pole for downwind sailing (which we’ll use a lot); we’ve serviced the autopilot, and had a couple of night passages.
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This site was last updated 01/29/06