One day and 130 miles out and SW of Saint Martin, Picton Castle is sailing along sweetly in perfect Caribbean tradewinds. “Tradewinds” so called due to their being generally quite reliable and thus your ships of trade could depend upon them to get somewhere and back again. Made quite an advancement in commerce once these winds were better understood. And this would have been after Columbus’ time.
Yards are almost squared, the creamy canvas a lovely sight aloft. Yards feathered nicely. Skies and seas are certainly “Caribbean Blue.” The swell less than six feet, and has been laying down this afternoon. We are sailing through quite a bit more Sargasso weed than I am used to seeing in the past. Some sea birds fly and dodge about. Hard to say what they are. My guess is that they do not care what we call them. We passed an oil tanker hove-to “not under command” probably awaiting a berth at a St Croix oil terminal. We passed an east bound tug and tow headed towards Statia last night.
Flying fish abound all around the ship, but nary a one has been sacrificed on deck yet. It is warm here now. Sea and air temperature about the same at 84F / 29C. And of course, being at sea and a salty sea at that, it is quite humid. Also, by being in the Caribbean there is an abundance of radio stations we can pick up on my little transistor radio I got in Fiji some years back. Spanish, French, Dutch, English stations. Reggae, salsa, sport and no shortage of stations trying to save my soul. It’s easy too, all I have to do is send a bit of money. Seems a good deal to me.
Today we ran through some safety/emergency drills. Fire drills and the like. Good to do. Good training and awareness all around. This followed by what we call the “power shower.” The fire hose in the rig blasting down on us. Very cooling. With some lemon fresh Joy, you get squeeky clean too! Not bad. The ship’s cabin boy was quite excited about the prospect of the power shower. Tomorrow is the Awesome Picton Castle Caribbean Seamanship Derby. If all goes to plan tomorrow afternoon the watches will test themselves against each other in a vigorous series of challenges of seamanship. Knots, finding the running rigging, boxing the compass, steering to a half point, or a quarter point even better. Perhaps there should be a coffee making catagory? Now, that would be a worthy challenge.