Yep, I am prone to sea sickness and I live on a boat.  Usually, 95% of the time, I am fine and can prevent it from coming on, but sometimes I don’t think, act too confident, and just mess up.  Shall I back up?

Wayne, Matt and I pulled off our mooring early Tuesday morning to head to Curacao which had a pretty good weather window.  It had been blowing stink for the last few days and Tuesday was the first day the winds calmed down to 20 kn (from 30 kn).  The seas were 1.5-2 meters in 5-6 second intervals (meaning they were coming at us frequently).  They hit the boat on the beam and stern a sort of swirly wave that rocked the boat an odd way.  All was good for the first 90 minutes until I decided I wanted to bake brownies and prep the ingredients for my upside-down cheesecake.  Not sure what I was thinking (Oh, right, I wasn’t!)

First, I should have taken a meclizine to start the day, just in case, nice preventative measure.  If there is bad weather, I usually take one in the morning before departing.  If we are going to do a passage with several overnights, I will actually wear the patch.

Second, I should have stayed at the port helm where I was getting a great breeze, could see the horizon, and felt fine.  But, I wanted to bake some yumminess, didn’t feel bad at the time, and thought it would be fun.  So, inside I went where there was no breeze, hot, and rolly.

I didn’t actually get “sick” but I sure as heck did not feel well.  I managed to make the brownies and crush the vanilla wafers for the crust of my cheesecake before I decided to sleep it off.  Yeah, I love that my body knows how to make me feel better – a quick nap did the trick.

But, this left the boys to navigate and manage the double reefed sails on their own – which is fine as they love to do that anyway.  We made it safely to Curacao, took us about 6 hours to sail the 40 nautical miles.  We had never been to Spanish Waters and the channel into this anchorage is peppered with reefs.  Luckily our charts helped us navigate.  This anchorage is split into 4 areas: A, B, C, and D.  We read that A and B are the best areas as they have good holding, a solid breeze, and are close to marina’s.

Anchorage areas outlined in Spanish Waters.

We could not tell where each area started and ended as the GPS coordinates were on my computer and not accessible without internet. We tried anchoring in several places but the screwy winds had us blowing too close to other boats.  We found a few places that looked good but the holding was not good.  So, after 6-7 attempts, we were frustrated, hot, and really wanting to just call it a day.  Luckily, we found a good spot, in 7 meters of water (not too deep), not near any other boats, with good holding. Yeah!  This entire anchoring process took several hours so once we landed the hook, we had a beer and rested a bit.  Since it was too late to catch the bus to go into town for formalities, we decided to dinghy around two of the three marinas to get our bearing, then have dinner and play a game of cards.

Sugar Shack on the border of area B in Spanish Waters