Southwinds Sailing June 2004 - Southwinds Magazine

when a miscreant wave managedto slosh cold water rightdown the neck of my foulweather gear and soak me tothe skin. It may have beenlate April out in the Straits ofFlorida, but it felt like winterto me.Because of my condition,Lollar got stuck withmost of the steering thatnight, and he responded likea soldier. We were doing it allby hand. The autopilot I haveIf you lead an exemplary life, your ideas will endure. Cuba was celebratingthe 45th anniversay of the revolution the day after we departed.our east was the skyline ofHavana.Marina Hemingway, ourdestination, was somewherein the middle. Finally, withNigel Calder’s guide to helpus locate the landmarks, wepicked out the entrancethrough the reef into MarinaHemingway. The sea buoy(red, black and white verticalstripes) is just a quartermile from the reef. The waythrough the reef is markedon board is useless in stuff like that anyway.The rhumb line course from the Dry Tortugas, where wedeparted, to the entrance of Marina Hemingway, eight mileswest of Havana, was 175 degrees. The best we could do was195. Southeasterly winds wouldn’t allow us to sail the boatwhere we wanted to go, so we hoped that we could get a liftfrom the east-going current.Some time during the night, the exact time was never recorded,the working jib blew out. It ripped along the foot,and the clew also ripped out. After a trip to the foredeck, harnessand tether hooked up to hard points nearly every second,I got the jib under control and under some heavy-dutyshock cord that forms a V on the foredeck. From then on itwas sailing under the reefed main alone. The storm jib, whichI carry all the time, was not in a place where it could be recoveredeasily. It was buried under mountains of things in disarray,in a locker in the forepeak. Standing up and attemptingto get it was not in my cards. The cold was leaching my abilitywith two big red cones to starboard and two stakes to port. Itis a tight squeeze, not to be tried at night.As one enters the cut, a Guarda Frontera (Cuban CoastGuard) building, painted blue, will show up 45 degrees offthe port bow. Though we had called on channel 16 severaltimes—entering Cuban territorial waters, six miles out, threemiles out and again near the sea buoy—we got no response.Inside the reef, however, an official came out and waved usaround the 90-degree left turn around the seawall. Fendersout, we stopped along the concrete seawall and welcomedthe various officials aboard. First was a doctor who also didan agricultural inspection. We brought no eggs or fresh meat.They would have been confiscated. The doctor hit us up forsome money, inspected the boat’s first aid kit and sprayedsome kind of disinfectant into the head. He was aboard for atleast 20 minutes. We also had Cuban customs, immigration,the Guarda Frontera and, I suppose, the equivalent of theCuban DEA. The latter came with a dog that sniffed aroundto think clearly right out of my gray matter.As John steered around and over big waves, I managedto get out of the wet clothing and into something dry andwarm. It wasn’t fleece; it was only cotton, but it was dry cotton.My sea boots that I managed to struggle into far too lateprovided the capper. Warm and dry is life-giving after coldand damp.Sometime in the early morning hours we could see theloom of Havana off to the east. We were steering 180. Sailingdue south toward an unlighted shore with an off-lying reefmade me start shivering again, so we tacked over to port andsailed 060. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t fast. It was, on the otherhand, safe.After sunrise, we were able to pick out some of the featuresof the Cuban coastline. To our south was a tabletop kindof mountain, so we were west of where we wanted to go. ToNEWS & VIEWS FOR SOUTHERN SAILORS SOUTHWINDS June 2004 25