Please indulge me, this is therapy.

After three days on the boat and two nights of uncomfortable motoring 200M into the wind from Cayman Islands to Montego Bay, Jamaica we were ready for some serious relaxing, preferably on land.

Things started to go skewed when B said, ‘shit the paddle board has gone!’ Except for really long passages, and unless the forecast is for a real blow, we always leave the paddle board inflated and secured on the foredeck against the lifelines. We’ve had the paddle board for three years now, this is the way we’ve always done it. It worked. Today it was gone. The ropes holding it on and the end of the velcro leg-rope, still attached to a stanchion, were the last remaining evidence of our well thrashed water toy. I hate the thought of being the cause of leaving some huge piece of plastic left floating in the sea. We are conscientious not to throw plastic into the sea, and have taught the kids to pick up rubbish on the beach, and all that jazz. You do your best, but sometimes it’s just not good enough.

I then went to check-in after speaking to the Port Authority over the radio who’d told me to come in by myself with all the usual documents. It was a bit of a dinghy ride. I always love stepping foot on land in a new country. The Jamaican authorities are super friendly and like to do things by the book. I lost count of the amount of times they said, ‘Ja mon’. Filling in forms involved non-stop writing variations of the same theme on different forms for the four different offices, Port authority, health officials, customs, and immigration taking 50 mins of non stop writing. With a pen. Who does that any more? My hand hurt. Though lots of paperwork is not unusual when checking into countries, this was way above average. By the time I got to immigration, number 4 of 4, the nice woman told me I needed to go back to the boat to pick up the rest of the family. I smiled and said, ‘no problem’.

When we got back the nice woman nearly got me to go back to the boat again because I’d left our boat stamp on the boat. After looking at my face she kindly told me to bring the boat stamp with us next time when we check out. A boat stamp she told me was necessary. We actually have a boat stamp. A boat stamp is just that, it’s a proper office looking stamp that when you stamp it onto paper your boat name is printed with ink, in our case blue ink. Nothing more. We got ours in Montenegro because there you cannot get duty free diesel without a boat stamp. You also need an agent and he adds $30 for the coast of a boat stamp to his fee and gets it made for you. Ours incorrectly says MV (motor vessel) in front of our boat name instead of SV (sailing vessel). Our nice Montenegroen agent profusedly apologised about this but couldn’t take back as we were leaving that day. In truth, until today we have never used it, or been asked for it again. Hence, I didn’t have it with me in my boat papers. Silly me.

We were done and I looked forward to going to the shops. It was at this point we found out that the shops were a 40 minutes walk away. In this heat and with the kids, this means, well it means it ain’t happening. We did get to stretch our legs and the kids kicked some leaves about. By this stage we didn’t fancy shopping anyway, but got quotes from taxi drivers to take us to the shops and back. $35 was the highest quote from one guy wanting to be our best friend and $20 the lowest from a guy called Dandy whom I liked and figured I could get it done to $10 when I ring him if we go shopping here.

At this point I realised I hadn’t had too much sleep in the least 48 hours and hadn’t yet had breakfast. B and the kids had just finished theirs when I picked them up, but the kids were hungry again. So back to the boat for some down time. The kids swam. Life was looking good.

Then Kai came and said the swimming platform had fallen into the sea. One of the lines that lift it up and down had broke. I knew it was chaffed and it was ‘on my list’. Rack another retro-lesson in ‘a stitch in time’. By the time I got the platform up I was knackered, the weight on those things would surprise you. Whilst I was doing it, the wind had changed and an unforecast wind came out of the exposed north. All of a sudden the Anchorage was untenable. We rapidly lifted anchor and scooted around the bay hunting for a better spot. Both sides of the bay were as bad as each other and the waves were nearly breaking. Tired, we dropped anchor into the middle of the bay. A French couple, the only other boat in the bay came racing past in their dinghy. In all our action we hadn’t seen that their boat was dragging badly and wasn’t far from being beached. They were able to lift anchor and move their boat and dropped anchor in a similarly miserable spot as us. Looking at other boats, it always looks like they are rolling like a stuck pig, and then it dawns on you that your boat must look the same to them. The French man from Strasbourg jumped into his dinghy and came over to discuss anchoring strategy.

As he was coming over a boat returning from open sea came in and told us a storm was coming in and it wasn’t safe to stay. We felt rotten. After several bad anchorages in our first years on Spacegrazer we’d vowed that we wouldn’t be in that position again and are always studious on where to drop the hook. Here we didn’t have many options. Jamaica has only a few ports of entry. The weather forecast was good so we decided on Montego Bay rather then the extra 100M to further east to Port Antonio. If we did that we wouldn’t come back this way. And hey, the weather didn’t indicate a northerly.

We had another half an hour of sunlight and knew that we had to move NOW. When things happen on a sailboat, they happen qucikly. We followed the boat to the harbour where they took a berth in the Marina. Someone from the dock yelled out for us to do the same but we worked out our draft is too deep. So we dropped the hook in a tight spot between a wall and a mooring buoy indicating the boundary of the cruise-ship’s (yeah that’s where the photo comes in) turning circle is. Our anchor held. We took a big breath. The rolling was gone. That was much too much stress for one day. I got the boat in order, lifted the dinghy onto the davits and had to do monkey climbing to get back on the boat because the normal route of stern ladder was out, due to the swim platform sticking half out (remember that broke earlier too?). A job on tomorrow’s list.

B brought out a beer and I cracked it open. Just as I was enjoying my first sip the dinghy rocked violently to one side, the high pressure pump for the dinghy/paddle board plopped neatly into the water and drifted silently off in the darkness never to be seen again. (I did look for it in the dark in the dinghy – more plastic waste in the sea – yuck!) One of the four dyneema lines holding the dinghy to two stainless steel lift rings broke through. WTF dyneema is stronger than steel and I check regularly for chaffing. I dropped the dinghy back into the water, put a temporary fix on it. Looked for the pump, couldnt find it. Lifted the dinghy, did some more monkey climbing. Sat back drinking my beer thinking what next?

And people wonder what we do all day…

We’re still blown away that neither of us noticed the paddle board disappearing.