The voyage from Puerto Rico is, formally, not quite 900 miles a bit east of north (18 degrees).  The weather forecast predicts fair trade winds for a couple of days and then there will be up to 30 knots of wind from ENE for a couple of days before easing off.  We plan to pull a bit eastwards and expect to be pushed westwards in the harder easterly wind.

So, we set of in great weather and had great sailing for about 36 hours making about 7 knots on th GPS…..

…..then the gale sets in.  During the second night we have rain and a steady wind of about 35 knots with gusts approaching 50 knots.  In such weather, 25 ton of Aquaryd really proves herself.  Steady going, very little slamming down into troughs….but it is not dry sailing.  Huge waves smash into the hull and dissolves into clouds of spray; it is like sitting in a shower.  There is some sea sickness in one of us, the remaining three take turn in the cockpit although th autopilot does the work.  Set on low sensitivity, the pilot kicks in occasionally otherwise the boat is very well balanced.

For a couple of days´, conditions are such that cooking is not feasible and eating is not, etiher.  We drink water and feed on slices of bread and just keep going.  In an instance, Leif comes up in the cockpit and sits on the lee bench to take a turn, fully dressed in foul weather gear with life harness in the lap when a huge wave enters the cockpit.  The life harness “thinks” Leif has fallen over board and inflates itself.  So the neat and supple harness morphed into a rather intangible heap of “something”…..  Mates Håkan and Magnus do magnificient work in helping to keep things together.

After a full 4 day of this, things eased off a bit, we could start cooking and a meal of bacon-and-eggs in the morning made all the difference.  By a combination of motor-sailing and very tight reaching we make landfall in the evening on day 7. Radio Bermuda turns out to be very active. They follow us on the AIS, lead us around the north-east corner where fishing nets are rampant and into the narrow coral-reef studded canal, through “town-cut” (a real “cut” through the island into the lagoon).  At 01:00 in the morning we are greeted on Ordinance Island by “Immigration&Border Control”.  Two stern-looking, effective ladies handle the formalities after which they break into heart-warming smiles and welcome us to the Island. Gee…..!  In the end we sailed almost 1000 miles in 7 day minus 6 hours. 

Bermuda is a many-thousand meter volcano on the ocean floor that just barely breaks the surface (in the south-west two other peaks fail the surface by some 15 meters…!).  It is a gigantic English garden with small, winding roads, inns and hotels everywhere….and golf clubs!  We moor in St.George on the northern tip.  A 30-minute bus ride takes us into Hamilton, the main city where we gang up with radiologist Anders H, known from Lund, now employed in Hamilton (!) Bermuda is expensive.  Locals pay very little tax and instead tourists, and all, pay heavily in sales tax.  Wages, however, according to Anders H are high too….  We explore the Underwater World Museum with a “virtual reality show” of America’s Cup which will play down in the month of May.  We duly take a boat ride out to “Dockyards” on the tip of the south-western “fish-hook” of the island, where the race boats are statuioned.  Unfortunate little to see, although Swedish Artemis is on display in many places: Too much wind for action.

On the last day of March we leave the boat.  She will be on a bouy or a month before we start next phase, into the US and up to NYC !!  Bermuda Yacht Service will look after her.

Today Gina and Torsten leave us.  Their presence on the boat has been much appreciated. Easy-going and positive, a real asset!!  They are now off to Cuba before returning to Lagos, Portugal, where they now live.  They pop out early enough and go in search of a rental car but promptly return shortly afterwards.

We can now use a car!! With their help skipper tries to find border control to check out.  After having driven out to the liner terminal where cruiser customers dwindle about in the mall they have built out there, we make telephone contact with an official who promptly announces that No, we do not need to see you….!?  A bit of a disappointment.. ….almost.

Remaining crew “fill her up”, with diesel, with water and with food.  We take it easy, use the WiFi, loiter about and enjoy the time and prepare for 900 nm straight into the ocean.  Wind forecast is so-so, there is considerable wind from ENE, up to 30 knots; not so bad. 

Dinner at a local restaurant and early to bed.  We have a big start tomorrow !

On leaving next morning we hoist anchor…..wait a minute! we moored on a buoy last evening. 50 m away is a “new” yacht not there yesterday.  After some pondering we realize that we have used a private buoy and the owners, during the evening, have entered our boat, released the anchor by undoing it from the winch and manually let out ? 30 m of chain after moving the boat a bit away.  Resourceful act, indeed, and no problems for us.

So, we motor along the coast line some 40 miles to the west.  San Juan is a huge place, a north American city with a magnificent harbour.  We pass the entrance fortresses (they seem to be at every harbour), big cruise liners and moor in San Juan Bay Marina, very posh and well-functioning…and not, actually, too expensive.  Here we can have any sorts of provisions which we plan to arrange for tomorrow. We immediately dig into the local WiFi – the modern life-line to, eh…“life” (Facebook, Instagram, etc) – not altogether a blessing. Dinner at the local marina restaurant.

Today we want to make it to Puerto Rico so we rise early and “do morning” and then up and away.  We follow the southern coast of St.Thomas and sneak deep into the harbour of Charlotte (Amalie).  Apparently, St.Thomas was Danish into the late 18-hundreds much the same way the St.Barth was Swedish.  The harbour is huge and very active. 

We continue westwards, south of Isla de Cuebras. Sticking out from the north eastern tip of Puerto Rico is a string of small islets sitting on a reef and here we see the most quaint, picturesque small “heaps-of-sand” sticking up, much like the vernacular “island-with-a-apalm-tree-and-a-wrecked-sailor”.  Very charming.  We pass by, however, and head for the lee shores of Isla Palomenos, a couples of miles from Puerto Rico’s NE tip.  Fancy hotel but basically deserted.  An empty shuttle ferry passes by every 30 minutes (?).  We anchor up and dinghy across the sound to the main land to have dinner.

Monday evening, however, and after a memorable drink in a local marina bar we wander about looking for a restaurant.  30 minutes later a man in a car embraces us and drives us some 3 miles of to a mall area with some open food places.

Typically American bar like hall totally lacking charm but with good food (meat).  We enjoy dinner and worry a bit about the return to the boat. Leaving the place. However, our driver shows up with a new car only to take us back to the boat (!!).  Another Aquaryd hero – we have quite a collection now.  Back on the boat some of us have a swim and then back to bed.  Another great day.

Change of crew.  Ludde has had his weeks of “during-work-session” vacation and has left the boat some days ago.  In his place arrives Magnus, Håkan’s son and also a charter skipper in Croatia etc.  A seasoned sailor in other words.  He drops down from the sky in a little 2-seater airplane from San Juan and after had had an extra tour of the entire island.  …and also skipper returns.  So now we are all set to continue and the upcoming long stretch up to Bermuda starts to set the tune:  We need to move west-wards to San Juan and prepare.

So off we go along the southern shore of Tortola over to Sopers Hole where we can check out of BVI.  On these shores we decide to adhere to proper border regulations in order not to mess with Mr. Trump’s  new(?) border protection.  After checking out we enjoyed a wonderful lunch with tin band and all.

Curse due west, north of St.John in the USVI and around various promontories into Cruz Bay on the western tip.  Here we make use of our US Visas in our passports – ESTA is no good for sailors!  Quick doing but we are delivered froma considerable sum of dollars for mooring during 30 minutes (?) – how do they expect us to do it without getting on shore?  We quickly leave Cruz Bay and sneak across the sound to St.Thomas, or rather St.James Bay where we drop anchor and make evening.  A long and eventful day indeed.

Squeezed between a rock and a hard place (= sailing adventures and equally important work with Episurf) skipper skips the boat for a frantic flight from Beef Island via San Juan, Dallas to San Diego where the AAOS has it yearly orthopaedic convention. Simple thing, dinghy to the jetty and an eight minute walk to the terminal!

Meanwhile the crew enjoys the BVIs, rounded boulders at Virgin Gorda, beaches at Peter’s Island.  Lots of good sailing in the everperforming trades.

After having slipped down-wing in the dark, but moon lit, of the night, we make it into BVI and Road Town at about noon.  The night’s stretch is the one the daughter Rebecca has sailed many times in the opposite direction, a rather hard-tacking process into the strong trade winds.

Checking into BVI is a long ordeal.  It is not that the officials are “mean”, it is just poorly organized or rather we share resources with ferries from USVI…..! Road Town is no favourite; an expensive luxury marina and very Americanized down town.  On advice from a colleague skipper while checking in, we make it for Trellie Bay on the eastern tip of Beef Island.  This turns out to be an extraordinarily sweet place….cramped with boats; on buoys they are really tightly packed.  We hook up and in the evening we make it to a very Caribbean beach restaurant.  Soft tunes into the warm night…..

…so, early swim and breakfast.  Breakfast is made up of, primarily, various amounts of muesli + yoghurt and “Ludde” is the prime mover here on account of his diabetes, which he manoeuvres meticulously….and coffee/juice.

We jump into the dinghy and make it underneath the bridge into Simpson Bay Marina around Snoopy Island.  Bridge opening is spectacular with an endless row of super yachts passing.  We jump into a taxi and make it for Maho Bay, the famed landing/starting area of Princess Julianna’s Airport.  Standing behind the starting jets blows you to smithens…or at least into the sea should the jet be a jumbo.

This ordeal makes a drink at the peninsula restaurant necessary after which we have a lovely walk in the sands along Simpson Bay Beach, lunch at “Karakter” before rejoining the boat.

Since we have 90 nm downwind to BVI (British Virgin Islands) we plan to leave in the evening in order to arrive and check in before closing time tomorrow  So….

After usual morning exercises we move the boat into the harbour and tie up next to some gigantic yachts; batteries are to be delivered. Our 52-foot yacht is dwarfed, indeed !!  Looks like a little dinghy.  Batteries are delivered and installed…and works perfectly, which is good to note.  A special "detail" takes the old batteries to a junk yard ”round the corner” in the dinghy and then we are off to new adventures, that is new islands.  We aim for St.Maarten, which is only a couple of hours down wind. We anchor up in Simpson Bay, just outside the bridge leading into the inner lagoon.  While the largest town, Philipsburg, mainly is commercial, the lagoon area and out to the airport is mainly – touristique (one may wonder which one is to be preferred?)

We dine on the boat and plan to raid the island in the morning….

We stay the day and plan to roam the island.  So, morning swim and breakfast, we go ashore.  Skipper checks in crew and boat into the country and subsequently we go the the chandlery.  We are realizing that the large consumer group batteries are “finished”  we need new ones and additionally the main engine does not charge.  So a local electrician come to the boat and finds a “blague”:  I small cable going from the battery separator to the plus-pole ahs been lengthened by putting a black cable on a red one which, subsequently, had been hook on to the minus pole.  Quick and cheap fix, luckily.  Buying 735 Ah in 7 batteries was not so cheap but was “planned”, skipper had known this was coming. 

In the afternoon we strolled around: To the air strip, or rather to the approach, where planes come in only geet off the ground...! to Fort Oskar, Fort Gustav (now a local police station) and Fort Karl (obliterated).  An afternoon swim at Pebble Beach after the long and hot promenade and dinner ashore; the day was complete.

While Nevis, was not particularly inviting, St.Kitts has poured everything into the tourist basket.  From out distance it all looks inviting enough although we resist the temptation and pass by along the south-western border.  Instead we make it straight for the jewel of the islands, St.Barth, the old Swedish island, ceded to France as late as 1870.  A bit like coming home and trot along Östra Strandgatan……They nourish the Swedish connection dearly at St.Barth.

Very posh, though.  Cartier, Hernes and Rolex have bouthiques there and the assembly od yachts in the harbour is spectacular: 3 J-yachts and all of 27 super yachts were gathering to compete for the “Bucket”.

We moor up on a buoy and eventually on anchor, since buoys in the area are private, quite some ways from the harbour proper.  Immediately we make it to shore and wander about. We get there after working hours so checking-in will have to await tomorrow.  A local late-evening coffee shop provides WiFi, the inevitable traveller’s companion.

Next hop.  From Antigua we can choose to go to Barbuda, due north or eastwards to St.Kitts and Nevis. We clear out of Antigua; the same rather comminute procedure and then we choose St.Kitts.   We have a rather rolling downwind sail in fresh winds down south of Nevis and end up on a buoy.  Being a perfectly round island, Nevis offers poor protection and the bay is shallow and winds sweeping down from the volcano are strong.  Not the calmest night, however, a safe one, attached as we were to a proper buoy.  We end up not actually landing on Nevis.  We dine again on board

We stay the day on Antigua.  Morning with some physical activities.  Morning swim on the other side of the restaurant, breakfast and then we pay our dues; ? SEK800 for staying at the slipway…!  Well, once in a lifetime so…we move over and manage a pretty elegant landing stern-to in difficult winds.  Administrative activities, in buildings that Nelson walked, at the port authority, being shuffled around back-and-forth between different booths and then we take the bus to St.John, “capital” of Antigua.

We push through the crowds downtown and manage to get down to the harbour and the tourist quarters here, where “inhabitants” of two mega-cruise ships mingle about.  Finally we find a taxi that takes to a local, gigantic supermarket where we store up.  We then make a tour along the southern coast with the driver as our very initiated guide.  Jolly Harbour is impressive.  A huge marina park created out of waste land by a Swiss entrepreneur who bought the area for $1 on the promise to create something spectacular.  He did deliver well!!  The southern coast is, at places, far away from the beaten track and the, suddenly, there is an exclusive resort tucked away on some promontory. John Kerry apparently has a favourite hide-out here. It is a mix. The tour ends high up on top of Shirley Heights, just east of English Harbour, where defence activities now have given way to a fancy restaurant that is perched precariously on the edge with a magnificent view of English and Falmouth Harbours.  We dine on board after an exhaustive but satisfactory day.

Today a bit of a leap up to Antigua, fabled and renowned.  This is were Nelson holed up in a stronghold and could capture a fair part of the Caribbean islands.  The sailing is phenomenal. 12-14 m/s from a direction, ENE, such that we can reach up to English Harbour.  You are basically out on the ocean in these passages between the islands and heavy Aquaryd does it very well, dry and yet going through the waves instead of climbing up and slamming down.  Enjoyable indeed.

So, at 1600 hours we enter English Harbour.  We need water and we need repair of the steering wheel, where two spokes have loosened at the hub.  Just having moored an restaurant owner shows up with six cold beers….ah, what a welcome.  A local fellow at the slipway knows a fellow….and all of a sudden Trevor shows up.  He promptly brings with him the wheel but only after considerable difficulties getting it off; aluminium nut on stainless steel is a bad combination, indeed.  So here we are stuck at the service bridge and cannot really move without a wheel.  We stay, the locals are nice indeed and in the evening we dine at the newly opened Italian restaurant at the bridge head “Orviato”.  A very nice Italian family, the son, the beer provider, runs the show with help from parents.  All have moved over and opened 3 months ago.

So….up early after, of course, a visit at the local boulangerie to have fresh morning bread, a real treat in the French parts of the world.  We go west of Guadeloupe.  Point-a-Pitre, the capital lies in the middle of the butterfly-shaped island and forms a cul-de-sac, a dead end return.  So we sail across and then motor up along the the west coast in small winds.  Deshais, at the north-western corner proves to be a charming spot where we had sea turtles swimming about around the boat.  Exotic and a good sign of a healthy nature. We love that.

We try to get a drink at a local bar in the evening but here French orgeuil prevailed and finally we were disappointed and left.  Dinner instead on the boat and a good sundowner to sooth us.

We get up early in order to make the short hop to Iles les Saintes and my friends Anders and Cathrine Rydin, who have built a house here to replace the boat. Due to some health issues, however, they are not here.  We get to these wonderful small islands in about 3 hours, good sailing and take a buoy at the main bay.  The medical “boat” building look the usual (strange) and the Rydin house looks just fine, completed on the outside although the garden needs a bit of a fix-up.

We exercise a bit by climbing up the main-top on Terre Haut (300+ meters), which is good for the legs; they do not get all that much work on a sail boat.  These small islands are such picturesque place, a real favourite for us.  However, without the Rydins we decide not to stay another day.  Dinner on the boat after the usual “sundowner” and, of course, lots of swimming.  The water holds 27.5 degree Ç and is just right.

Dominica.  This is where Marion and Skipper hoped to go during Christmas holiday, but engine troubles kept us short.  Our “boat boy”, Lawrence, returns promptly in the morning with a map and some tourist brochures.  We decide to go for a tour up to 1) the rain forest and 2) a water fall.  After having cleared into the country by going to a deserted old industrial zone where governmental offices were now housed, we ganged up with a friend of Lawrence and a mini bus.  The guy was knowledgeable and knew to tell us abut the American Medical School in a gated campus and only open to US-students (?).  He knew lots of biology, rain forest species etc. 

The rain forest itself was magnificent.  We hiked a 7 km trail and we got to study the mechanisms of “feeding on itself”: huge fallen logs were left to be decomposed by fungi, parasites, animals, insects, etc. All in a steaming humid “green house”.

Water fall it was:  After hiking for a couple of km. traversing rivlets on stepping stones, logs or swinging in lians, we could bathe in a pool with a 30 m shower hitting you on the head with – some force; one understands the feasibility of “water canons”…

All in all and eventful and different day.  Dinner on the boat

So today is the day when we will start to move….to Dominica, which is supposed to be the least exploited and most original of all the Caribbean islands. Swim and quick breakfast and then up and away.  We have >60 miles to go.  Wind is not bad as we sail along the lee coat of Martinique and between the islands it is usual trade wind – 12-14 m/s.  Wonderful sailing where we in long stretched exceed 8 knots with the wind in a reach.  Coming in under land of Dominica is eases off and the last couple of hours we motor up to Portsmouth close to the northern tip.  In Portsmouth it is indeed very orderly, like we have been told,. We are met, at dusk, by a “boat boy”, Laurence, who is courteous and advices us where to moor.

Step 1 in a 3-stepped process to get the boat to Halifax is about to start.  At 2000 hours, Håkan Dettmar och skipper Leif land in Martinique.  They re met at the airport by Gina and Torsten Adalberth, with a rental car and together we get to the boat without these mirage-like taxis.   On the boat is already Hans Tornqvist and Anders Lundin, so the crew is gathered.  The Adalberths have a hotel room for the night……

……we reconvene in the morning. With the use of the car, we stock up big way on food stuff.  Due to the carnival, Carrefour is closed, but Leader Price at Jámbette is open, to us and to millions of other people….!   Boat is fully ready, all tanks are full and after getting the “clearance” (swiftly done at the harbour master office to the tune of €5) we are ready to go.

Go, well not that far, only actually.  At 1300 we move 2 nm. west to anchor up underneath Forth Louis.  The party is going on (funny, just like 6 weeks ago when I was here last – do they always have a carnival?)

So we join up, enjoy the joy, the deafening drum rythms and the local beer “bakfull” (dead clean translation of the Swedish word for “hang over”??!!)  Just like last time, however, the party ends at 2300 or so.  After a night cap, sandwiches etc. in the cockpit we turn in.  A somewhat hesitant star for “adventure part 1” – more will follow.