Friday, May 12, 1995 - Aruba

What a day this turned out to be! First of all, the propane stove quit working. We couldn't use the microwave because the boat was rolling too much, so for breakfast we had orange juice and raw eggs mixed with milk and sugar. We thought everything would be calmer as soon as we got behind the lee of Aruba, but the wind actually increased! Must have been blowing 30 or 35 knots. But at least the waves were flatter. We looked forward to getting into the "calm" of the harbor. Hah! There really wasn't any harbor. It was wide open except for a little strip of reef. And then, to make the day complete, the beloved headsail messed up again when Roy tried to furl it. He struggled to get it under control, but there wasn't much he could do in that fierce wind. In desperation, we tied to the freighter dock. That was a struggle, too. I was barely able to jump onto the dock with the center line and bow line. Roy followed and grabbed the center line while I secured the bow line, but the stern was blowing away from the dock. An official from the Port Authority pulled up in his pickup and sat there talking on his handheld VHF, ignoring our pleas for assistance. In fact, he became incensed that we asked him to help. Apparently, it was beneath his dignity to work with his hands. There were no cleats, just rusty iron rings. I had managed to tie the bow line to a ring, but Roy had no slack in the center line; all he could do was hang on to it. Luckily, there was a short piece of light chain nearby, which I handed to Roy, and he used it to secure the center line. Then a very nice forklift operator stopped and offered to help. Roy climbed over the bow back onto the boat, grabbed a line, and threw it to the man, who attached it to a ring. Then Roy threw him the stern line. He wrapped it around a bollard, pulled in the stern, and secured it. After that, it was relatively easy. We attached about half a dozen lines from the boat to the dock. The Port Authority official gave us permission to stay there a couple of hours to make emergency repairs. An Immigration official came by and checked our passports and boat registration. Eventually, a couple of Customs officials came by and filled out a form. Welcome to Aruba! While we were at the dock, Roy managed to get the headsail under control, but it was a struggle. We wanted to move to a marina, so Roy started walking in that direction to check it out, but the guard wouldn't let him through the gate without a passport. He came back to the boat, got his passport, and started out again. A few minutes later, another Port Authority official came by and told me we couldn't stay there, which we already knew. I told him the skipper had gone to check out the marina. He offered to drive me over there, so I got in his pickup and we started in that direction. We quickly caught up with Roy, who got in the pickup, too. We passed a terrific-looking fruit and vegetable stand. The marina didn't look like much. I tried to ask the official if Roy could get out and go to the marina office, but his English wasn't the greatest, and apparently he didn't understand, so he just drove us back to the boat. (Believe it or not, this small island, with a population of 65,000, has its own language: Papiamento! I thought it was a dialect of Spanish; many of the written words are Spanish. Later we found out Papiamento is a combination of Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and some African languages. It's only been around for 150 years and is spoken in Bonaire and Curacao as well as Aruba. Fortunately, most of the people speak English, too.) To add to our general joy, Roy couldn't find his billfold. The last time he remembered seeing it was in Puerto Rico. He had laid it on the shelf where the mainsheet winch is. We figured it had slid overboard during the heavy seas. There wasn't much money in it but of course his driver's license and credit cards and stuff. Fortunately, after hunting for half an hour, he finally found his billfold in the pocket of one of his pairs of pants. It was a lot easier getting away from the dock than tying to it. We motored to the cove where the marinas are, but we couldn't see a slip we could get into in that wind. A little powerboat came by, and we asked the people in it where we could tie up or anchor. They pointed to an area behind the breakwater and said we could anchor there, so we went over there and dropped anchor, but the anchor didn't hold and we kept blowing backwards. Then a man on another boat yelled that we couldn't anchor there. I tried to raise the anchor but couldn't; it was snagged on something. Roy struggled with it and finally got it up along with 32 feet of old heavy rope that it had fouled on. By then the sun was setting. We hadn't had any lunch and were exhausted. The chart only showed one good place to anchor, but we weren't sure how to get there without going aground. Outside the channel, most of the water is very shallow. Roy motored out into the channel and dropped anchor, even though he knew you're not allowed to anchor in a channel. People yelled at him from shore, and then a motorboat came by and the guys in it pointed to some lights in the distance and said we could anchor there. Again Roy struggled to raise the anchor. The windlass wasn't working right. Roy was afraid it was broken, but eventually he got the anchor up. We motored towards the lights, which were the landing lights for the airport. We thought they were on land, but when we were almost up to them, Roy realized they were in the water, so he had to duck around them. We anchored in 11 feet of water near mangroves. To our joy, the anchor held. We were both exhausted and half starved, not having had anything to eat since breakfast. We couldn't have kept going much longer. The wind was still blowing 30 knots, but we were protected from big waves, so the boat was steady and we could walk around without hanging on. I'd lost my voice, probably from yelling into the wind. The wind generator was spinning like crazy but not generating any electricity -- one more thing for Roy to fix. But at least we're in Aruba and peacefully at anchor, so we can relax. Cooked a good supper in the microwave oven. After we ate, we collapsed into bed and slept like logs.