First Passage

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As I write this to you, we are just completing our first passage aboard Ocean Star, leaving from Tortola and heading to Nevis. It has been a long and quite rough 30 hours of travel with our first taster of life aboard a yacht underway.

The crew has been split into 3 teams, called rather unimaginatively 1, 2 and 3, and over the course of the voyage each team has taken it in turns to be on watch. What this means is that you spend three hours on deck either steering the boat, on the bow watching out for passing traffic - other vessels that is, or performing hourly engineering checks to ensure there are no leaks in the hull and that everything is working as it should do. After your three hours on, you spend six hours resting or sleeping before it is your team’s turn to be on watch again. This cycle continues day and night and the three hours on watch can seem pretty long at midnight when the rain is pouring down and there is not a light in sight. I now know though, that the waterproofs I bought before my departure are up to the challenge of the odd tropical storm as I sat nice and toasty inside my jacket as the rain drummed down around me. But despite the moments of cold and seasickness, the sight of the sun rising over the sea and salt spray with no one else for miles at 6am this morning, is a scene to remember.

Night has just fallen and the lights of St Kitts are twinkling along our port side as we head in on the final straight to Nevis, where we are all set to have a great few days cycling around the island and visiting a local marine biologist to find out about all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures that are found on the reef bordering the island.

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