October 20 – November 14, 2023; 11164 nm and 1699 days after departure from La Rochelle

Yeah, well, sometimes plans changes, don’t they? Thanks to a huge tropical disturbance (initial stage of a potential hurricane) which seemed to head right in our way we ended up in Aruba. Who would have thought. It’s the most western island of the ABC islands which lay right in front of the Venezuelan coastline.
It looked like that depression could have even developed into something big. (It didn’t in the end but it still brought a lot of wind.) We certainly didn’t want to take that challenge! The imagination of winds up to 30 knots and much more in gusts right on the nose plus nasty heavy squalls made our decision fairly easy. Close haul sailing can be fun for short distances but even in fair wind situations it’s not a comfortable way of cruising long distances. And with a forecast like the latter it would have been very difficult, exhausting and unnecessarily dangerous. And with the current as well pushing us, who knows where we might have ended up. Wise as we were we decided to take the safe and grown up way. Before we left we had already set up a plan B in case the weather wouldn’t stay as we were hoping. The plan B was to go east as far as possible to gain a better angle to sail later to the DR. That’s what we did. We headed east instead of further north. And by the way, just in case someone might think we didn’t pick the right weather window or we were not cautious. We can assure it was a sensible window as even the weather guru, Chris Parker, agreed that it was a good time to leave to head to the DR. (For non sailors, Chris Parker is THE source to get weather routing support. He is the master of custom weather and routing information especially for small vessels in the Caribbean and US east coast.) The only trouble is you can never trust weather!
Fortunately with or new star link connection we did get all the weather information within seconds and we could download different weather models and of course a much wider region. And all that as often as we wanted. It gave us the big weather picture and with it of course more safeness. Especially with the sudden bad weather situation we very much appreciated the possibilities of having fast internet at sea!

It was after 3 days and about 100nm north of Santa Marta/Colombia when we changed our course and headed east. So far the trip was nice. We were sailing pretty fast and after the second day even the squalls had mostly stopped. In the first days we had a lot of visitors which used us as an overnight resting place. Different sea birds traveled the nights with us. They arrived just before sunset and left just after sunrise. The funniest one was a booby. He saw Altimate, landed, found a suitable place, put his head in his feathers and fell asleep. Altimate was heavily rocking and sometimes rain was pouring down but Mr. Booby didn’t care. He managed somehow to firmly rock with Altimate’s movements, even in his sleep. Amazing that he didn’t fall over. Only once he woke up, did some booby like lubberly steps, not without pooing of course, and stumbled to the starboard side. Once he was settled again he turned his neck, hid his head into his back feathers and was immediately dreaming again. Such a funny fellow! Though the cutest visitors we had were a couple of sea swallows (at least I think they were sea swallows). They were also trying to find the right place aboard Altimate to spend the night. One of the birds was the investigator. He was checking the main sail (we were just using the genua) to find shelter from the heavily blowing wind, he also tried the davit underneath the solar panels but then he figured that it was much dryer and completely protected from wind inside of Altimate. I couldn’t believe it! Even though I was standing in the gangway, this little fellow flew inside and checked whether it could be a nice place to stay for the night. He decided it was! He flew outside and came back with his mate. I was still in the gangway when he came back. He kind of had to persuade his mate though. So he first landed on my hand to show that we were harmless. At least that was my guess why he came so close. And then he just flew in again. He needed a few chirps to finally get his friend inside. Well then, so very cute , they were resting on our “banana string”. It was definitely the best place they could have chosen! The least rocking place on the boat, dry and no wind at all. After a few moments of adapting and cuddling with each other they fell happily asleep. To protect our fruit net from possible little poos I threw an old towel over the net which did a great job!! Amazing how often little birdies seem to poo!!!

Apart from our stowaways we were also luckily be followed by many, many dolphins. Roughly after a day we had changed our course the wind had dropped completely. It was nice that the sea was incredibly calm but motoring is just a pain in … for sailors. It was actually so calm that we switched off the motor for a few minutes and jumped in the big blue to have a nice cooling swim. It was a strange feeling knowing there were about 1000m depth beneath us. Unfortunately that was just a short interruption from the noisy motoring. Shortly after our refreshing stop we had the glory of being followed by a huge school of dolphins. I don’t know what it is about dolphins but they still get us exited. It doesn’t matter how often we see them. They always manage to free our “endolphins” 😉!!! Thanks to the lake like sea condition we could see them perfectly. And friendly as they were they kept us entertained for almost an hour. Lucky us!!! Apart from a few bites from fish which we annoyingly didn’t get in, nothing much exciting happened. Well, we managed at least to catch one tuna and half of a mahi-mahi. That was indeed rather funny. Just a shame that I was asleep at the time it happened. El Capitano was pulling in the fighting mahi mahi when suddenly the guy gained a huge amount of power and challenged El Capitanos strenght. The fish pulled out the line!!! Strange but hey mahi-mahis do seem to be clever and strong! When El Capitano finally pulled the fish in, only half of it was left. Hilarious. Somebody else was faster than us and took a huge bite. At least it was enough meat left for the two of us!

November 1st, after 5 days at sea early in the afternoon we arrived at Aruba. Fortunately the check in process was very easy, professional and didn’t even cost anything. 45 minutes later all was done and we could leave the check in area. Another hour later we had moved to an anchorage and could enjoy our deserved anchor beer.
Meanwhile we have already spent two weeks in Aruba. While waiting for a good weather situation we explored the island with a rented car. Aruba is a bit like Bonaire, a mainly dry island with plenty of cacti and spike plants but with beautiful white beaches. It has a lot of hotels and regularly cruising ships coming in. Therefore it is very touristic. On one hand it feels very European and on the other hand it feels very American. For my taste the laid back Caribbean flair is a bit missing. But hey, who am I to judge!
As well we are ready to leave. Apart from sightseeing we took advantage of having the car and did some grocery shopping as well as doing our laundry. We took Altimate to the gas station to fill up the used diesel and we changed the genua as we had again problems with the furler system. As we couldn’t finally figure out what caused the problem, we gave it a shot and tried our old sail (which we had carried around for 5 years). Quite a challenge when the wind blows like crazy and you have to cope with I don’t know how many square metres of sail. Even more difficult was actually coping with unfolded genua which we had to take ashore to be able to fold it. Our poor dinghy was filled with genua and El Capitano and I had to find a space to fit in as well. Somehow we managed and the results were very pleasing. One sail nicely fitted back in the bag after folding and with the old genua mounted, the furling worked as easy as before. Our impression was that the other genua was too close to the top curler part which caused a tangling with the rope and with it the constricted movement. Next time in a marina we have to check on that. Having the time we went out and sailed close haul in 25 knots to test the furler and to remind us what it means sailing in such conditions. Well we did it for an hour and were already fed up. The hard earned miles were fast caught up when we turned back. We got reminded we do not want to sail in such conditions!

Now we are just waiting, waiting, waiting. Oh and by the way our goal is not necessarily directly the DR anymore. If possible we aim for one of the lesser Antilles to have the chance to visit some of the islands we haven’t seen yet. The trip will take about 6 days and we’re curious where we end up this time. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully we can leave end of this week. Another disturbance could help us with some southerly winds to get further north east. Let’s see. and please cross fingers!!!