Puff the Magic Dragon, Lived by the Sea...
After cruising south along the western coast of Guadeloupe, Jim and I turned our rudder to port (left to you land-lubbers) and headed north, up the eastern shore of Basse Terre, the largest of the Guadeloupian Islands. We were sailing to La Marina Bas du Fort in the cosmopolitan town of Pointe-a-Pitre.
Fishing is a major source of income for the locals and one of the ways they make their catch is with the use of a fish trap. They start with branches about 1-1 ¼ inch in diameter and form a box that measures 6x4x3 feet. They cover that with chicken wire and, at either end, form the wire into a cone extending one foot into the trap. Coconut is popular bait and a hunk is secured with a piece of string dangling inside kind of like the way we hang a neon sign flashing “Eat Here” outside a diner They attach a buoy to a line tied to the trap and toss the whole thing in the drink. The fish can easily swim through the wide end of the cone, down the tunnel and then through the small end but then, sadly, it’s fish sticks for dinner.
Normally, fisherman set their traps at a depth of 30-40 feet. The Guadeloupians being much more adventurous will set their traps in water up to 150 feet deep and…they set them everywhere. Some are marked with nice, store-bought yellow or orange buoys and some are marked with bright white empty Clorox jugs. However, and I guess this is for the stealth fishermen, some are marked with clear, empty 2 liter soda bottles (Mother Nature has long since removed the labels) and as if that isn’t hard enough to see, there are a few that are marked with black floats. The clear ones are a challenge, but the back ones sneak up on you like no-see-ums. The problem this causes for boaters is simple. Props suck up line like fish traps catch fish. Once you’re “caught” you’re done for. The lines also get stuck between the boat’s rudder and the hull and when that happens, steering the boat becomes impossible. Either way, someone has to get into the water with a good scuba knife and cut the tangled mess free. If you’re lucky, the line will not have pulled your prop off. If you’re not, then someone is going scuba diving.
To pick our way through the mine field of fish traps, I stood at the bow of the boat and directed Jim with hand signals. He successfully steered us, while under full sail and without the use of our engines, to the marina in Point-a-Pitre where we were sure our fish related problems would end. Not so.
When we were about 2 miles away, we called the marina on the VHF and were told they’d send a guy out in a dingy to guide us to our slip. We made it to the entrance to the channel leading to the docks, dropped the sails and waited. Then we motored through the channel to the marina entrance and waited some more. We called again (after making sure our VHF antennae was in place – remember Simpson Bay?) and waited for a response. Nothing. There was a guy on the dock waiving, and we being the friendly Americans we are, waived back. After 30 seconds or so, he waived again and again we waived back. After another 30 seconds he waived one more time and then the light went on. Just so you don’t think we’re dense, he was waving not beckoning. When you’re on a boat, people wave at you all the time. You wave back and smile. A lot of boaters will wave and wave and wave until you wave back. It’s a boating thing.
Jim was behind the helm and steered us up to the empty space on the dock. The space the dock guy was motioning for us to parallel park our 41 foot boat into looked to be about 40 feet long. Guadeloupe is a French island; but unlike Paris, most people here don’t speak any English. My French is passable for ordering dinner, saying hello and asking the simplest of questions provided I have time to rehearse them in my head before putting my American foot in my mouth. Even though we’ve been sailing for 10 years or so, pulling up to a dock is still a little nerve racking. A 16 thousand pound boat, even moving at modest 1 to 1.5 knots, still has a lot of momentum.
Jim turned to me and said, “Tell him I’m not pulling this boat into that space. Tell him to find us another slip. Tell him, TELL him, TELL HIM….” I tried to form the phase in my head but nothing was there. All the while, the dock guy was waiving our 41 foot boat into a 40 foot space that had a 46 foot catamaran behind it and a 30 foot speed boat in front of it. Docking a boat is not like parallel parking a car in DC, where Jim often says, “They call them bumpers for a reason you know.”
I jumped behind the helm, prayed for a gigantic shoe horn to materialize in the sky and gave it my best shot. As it turned out, with the dock guy and Jim's help, I managed to squeeze in with inches to spare on each end. Don’t ask me how and I don’t think I could do it again, but we were docked.
Two of the great things about being in a marina are electricity and water; both made by someone else. Eyes of the World is all set up to make her own electricity and purify salt water into the best drinking water, but both require turning on the generator, checking filters, monitoring gauges and generally paying attention to what you’re doing. When you’re in a marina, you can hook your boat up to both water and power, take as many hot showers as you want, run the AC all you want and never turn on your generator. With the greatest of anticipation (we’d been fending for ourselves for about a week) we grabbed our hose and our extension cord and made for the hook up station. I have to explain that the extension cord isn’t like the one every keeps at home but can never find when you need it. It’s a 40 foot long, 1 1/4 inch thick, 45 pound monstrosity that carries enough juice to light up the Vegas Strip. The hose is a hose in every respect which means no matter what you hook it to and no matter how new the washer is, it leaks a little from each end. Well, neither fit the Guadeloupian hook ups. Drat. We searched the boat for the correct adaptors, the dock guys searched their workroom for the correct adaptors but we all came up empty handed. Of course it was late Saturday night which meant all the Chandleries (boating hardware stores) were closed until Monday so getting the parts we needed wasn’t going to happen until Monday and even then, whether or not we could find them was questionable. The odd thing is our boat was built in France. Guadeloupe is a French island. You’d think that those two factors would make for a perfect match. You’d think.
When you’re at anchor or tied to a mooring ball, the aerodynamics of the boat cause it to naturally point into the wind. All of the hatches open in way that directs the wind into the boat, providing you with a wonderful cooling breeze. That doesn’t work when you’re on a dock. If you’re not pointing into the wind, then there is no great cooling breeze, just an occasional puff of warm air usually carrying with it, 150 mosquitoes. We were not happy sailors.
Generally, we turn on our generator when we need to charge our house batteries, run the compressor, the water maker or the washing machine. We limit that time to an hour and a half twice a day. In addition to the fuel tanks for the motors, Eyes of the World is fitted with two additional 25 gallon fuel tanks, both of which were at least three quarters full. We decided it would be ok to run the generator overnight so that we could use the AC…for the sake of the dogs. We started her up and turned on the air and were happy sailors once again. Sleeping conditions that night were great however, shortly after sunrise, the generator turned itself off.
Our Onan generator is equipped with several safety switches that automatically shut the system down before a malfunction can cause it any damage. When any system that uses sea water as a coolant shuts down, the first thing we do is check the water flow into the cooling system of the unit. I opened up the bilge, closed the through-hull valve (you only have to forget that step once) and unscrewed the top to the strainer. To my surprise, sometime during the night, our generator strainer had become home to two juvenile puffer fish. I lifted the mesh cylinder out of the strainer and deposited the two squatters into a bowl of sea water. Jim and I took a few pictures of the little cuties and then tossed them back into the sea. We put everything back together, opened up the through-hull valve (another step you only have to forget once – keep your eyes open for a blog about impellers) and turned the generator back on. Vroom, vroom, she worked like a charm.
Our boat was back in order, it was a bright, clear day, the AC was cranking away and things were looking up. I started breakfast while Jim headed down to the…hmm…shall we say…lounge? A little while later, I hear the familiar sound of the hand pump from the head (lounge for you land lubbers) being used, and used, and used. “Hey,” Jim called up from the bathroom. “Something’s the matter with the head.” That is Jim’s boat speak for “Rick, can you come down here and fix this?” As far as maintenance jobs go, fixing the head is pretty much at the bottom of the list. I called back, “I can’t come down right now, I’m making you breakfast.” Which is my boat speak for, “Are you out of your %$#^ mind?”
There were two things in Jim’s favor. The first was that the clogged line was the salt water intake line (I’ll give you a minute to think that benefit through). The second was that he hadn’t had his morning coffee yet (take another minute on that one as well). Jim took the pump apart, checked the gasket, checked the hoses, primed the line and tried again. Nothing. He then removed the hoses, check the toggle switch that controls the pump’s direction from intake to outlet and put everything back together again. Nothing. “Hey. I’m not that hungry right now,” he called. Translation…”please come help me!”
I went down to the head and basically did everything he did but in addition, removed all of the hoses leading to the head and blew air through them to make sure they were clear. Now I want you all to remember that these were hoses that took nice clean water from outside the boat and directed it toward the head. Even so, I had to psych myself up to bring them to my lips. We put everything back together and….nothing. There was one small 6” hose that connects the through-hull to another valve but because of its position, it’s a real pain to take off. It was the only thing we hadn’t check so I bit the bullet, loosened the four ring clamps and wrestled the hose from its confines. Because of where it was, it had a pretty dramatic curve in it that made it impossible to see directly through but there wasn’t any light reflecting on the inside of the tube so I knew it was clogged. I took it up to the deck, inhaled a big breath of air and blew on one end as hard as I could. Pop. Another puffer fish shot out of the tube like a dart from a blow gun. He sailed a good 15 feet, hit the water and swam away. Jeeze, these things are worse than the mosquitoes. We put everything back together and Ta-Da!, the head was working again.
You’d think our puffer fish problems would be over. Think again. The generator shut off the next morning at sunrise. This time, I knew exactly what to do. I opened the strainer to the generator, lifted out the mesh cylinder, walked upstairs to the deck and dumped a single puffer fish (not nearly so cute as the first two) back into the water, this time, foregoing transporting him in a nice bowl full of salt water. I started to reassemble the strainer...hmm. Yesterday we had two in the strainer and one in a hose, so before I put the strainer back together, I slowly opened the through-hull and allowed water to flow through the tubes, into the strainer casing and then into the bilge. HA, there was another puffer fish in the tubes! I’m so smart! As I was congratulating myself on my ingenuity, I glanced at the mesh cylinder still in my hand. Drat. How am I going to get that puffer fish out of the strainer? The strainer looks like a jar with a narrowed opening at the top that’s just a bit larger than the mesh cylinder. Water comes into the top and is strained through the mesh before it goes into the heat exchanger for the generator. The strainer is made of clear acrylic so I could see the fish swimming around inside. I ran up to the galley and grabbed two wooden spoons thinking that I could gently sandwich the little guy between the spoons and lift him out to safety.
The wooden spoons were about ten inches long and the strainer was about nine inches deep so the math all seemed to be working in my favor; I had one inch of usable handle and was certain I could make this work. Have you ever been to a carnival and watched the “Carney” use that ring attached by a string to a pole take a Coke bottle lying on its side and sit it upright? Seems pretty easy. Oh if life were that simple. As soon as I put a spoon into the water, the puffer fish darted to the bottom of the strainer. I needed at least two inches of handle to dexterously maneuver both spoons at the same time. I could use one spoon to scoop him to the top but then only had a split second to slide the second spoon into place. He had the same amount of time to dart back to his perceived safe zone. Keep in mind that in the wild, what fish do most of the day is eat and dart away from larger fish. Puffy had a lot more practice at this than I did. After a good 30 attempts and as many thoughts about just getting the big fork we use for grilling, I finally got the little sucker. Well, I don’t know if you’ve put two and two together, but the name of the fish is a….wait for it…here is comes…PUFFER fish, and that is exactly what that little shit did. He puffed himself up to the size of a tennis ball. Oh that grilling fork was looking better and better.
I finally managed to use one wooden spoon and a set of tongs to free the little guy and release him, I’m sure, back into someone else’s strainer. We got our generator running and Jim has since barricaded all of our intake holes with chicken wire so we don’t have any more run ins with “Puff the swimming dragon, lived in the sea, clogging up our intake valves so we couldn't peeeee…”
