“Our adventure was worthy of this major race. The final preparations for the departure happened very quickly - a diesel tank repaired, washing, food, customs papers and the departure photo. We sailed non-stop as far as Isla Aves, and then there, just like the sailors who have only just entered the Bay of Biscay and return to carry out repairs in Brest, we had breakages...and returned to the pits, at Curaçao. Urgent work (6 weeks!) with our technical team (thanks, parents) which had come from France, and we set off again with just one engine towards Isla Aves to see once again the beach and the reef on which we had run aground at the end of September. This place is amazing! And to think that instead of six weeks’ work and stress in the heat and with the mosquitoes in Curaçao, we should have been spending three weeks in this archipelago. We will have to come back one day, because for the moment we couldn’t hang around, we had to sail against the wind as far as St. Martin to finish off the work, because our new engine was being delivered there. We left immediately to cross the Caribbean Sea northwards, where we should have been able to find shelter if the weather deteriorated. That was a brilliant idea! Close-hauled, the wind got up to 25 knots and the sea became seriously rough. This long tack hard on the wind took us to Puerto Rico, where we had a night of recuperation well-hidden in the mangrove. From here, a long beat to windward began, punctuated by squalls which were sometimes quite violent, and tore off our wind indicator. From tack to tack, island to island, we tried to protect ourselves as well as possible, and dropped anchor from time to time to swim and sleep for a few hours. During the last open sea crossing between the Virgin Islands and St. Martin there were a lot of stormy squalls, which we preferred to avoid if possible; this gave a crazy GPS track, and several nights on deck for the skipper. After a week's work, Samaya was relaunched, relatively rejuvenated: new port engine, rudders and daggerboards repaired, hull joints redone, new trampoline, new dinghy, new diesel tank, new anchor chain, new mattress for the port forward berth, and of course a multitude of small repairs ‘that had to be done’...
The crew of Samaya
http://catamaran-samaya.blogspot.fr
