Sailing the Southern Caribbean

Today’s post is a little different. Instead of me droning on for an hour, for you slow readers, or twenty-eight seconds, for those realizing they got the wrong site, I would like to present you with a cinematic master piece. A MONTAGE!!!

But before you cringe let me also say that it has music, and dolphins jumping, and oceans, and an amazing car race with scantly clad women….OK the last part is a lie.

It’s a video re-cap of our sailing journey across the southern Caribbean from Grenada to Colombia, over 1000 nautical miles, 7 months, and 2 sailboats later.

So go pop some pop-corn, sit back and relax!

Sailing The Southern Caribbean from Hop & Jaunt on Vimeo.

It’s also on YouTube if you have a preference.

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Tortuga Island

Tortuga Island 6/9/09

Unlike what Jack Sparrow had led me to believe the real Tortuga Island was not a bubbling meca of ancient pirates wandering around belligerent. What Tortuga turned out to be was a beautiful, barely inhabited, desert island off the coast of Venezuela.

Our Trusty Quercus

The passage aboard Quercus was as smooth as sailing over night in the windy Caribbean as you could get. Luckily all aboard were by now comfortable in the routine of night watches and glimpse of sleep. When we left Margarita that afternoon a school of dolphins had escorted us out along with the last glimpse of the island. That night we had a stiff breeze behind us and found ourselves a few hours ahead of schedule arriving at Tortuga. Considering Quercus is a eight ton steel boat we were pleasantly surprised at what a good sailing machine she was turning out to be. In any other form of travel arriving early would be a boon. However with sailing into new harbors, specially with coral reefs and shallow waters all around, that you time it so that you arrive when the sun is high enough above you in order to keep a sharp eye on the water ahead. We spotted land around 4:30am, thus requiring us to sail up and down the island for a few hours while we waited for the sun to come up. This decision turned out to be the wisest course of action, even though we were all exhausted and with land within sight it was a little tortuous to force ourselves to stand around a few more hours. The reason this course of action became so crucial was that for reasons left untold Venezuela has a 300 meter error attached to its electronic charts. Meaning that if we had relied on our handy-dandy high tech chart plotter to enter the harbor we would of ended up right on course for land! (more…)