Reuniting with Che Figata in Trinidad after a long hurricane season sailing sabbatical — June 21, 2022 through November 7, 2022 (subtitle: What we did on our summer vacation)

Greetings from Trinidad! We have finally returned to Che Figata after our hurricane season sabbatical. As I am sure you all recall, last year we sailed Che Figata back up to New England for the summer and then back down to the Caribbean (Antigua) at the end of hurricane season, enjoying wonderful New England cruising including a much loved trip up to Maine. This year we opted not to do that for several reasons — the most compelling being that our younger son was getting married in Seattle in August and we needed to fly around the country to visit family and see good friends in advance of the circumnavigation planned for February 2023. We knew that we would miss most of the summer months on the boat as we attended the wedding and visited our far flung family so it didn’t make sense to put all of that wear and tear on Che Figata (or ourselves!) to sail up to New England and back down to the Caribbean. For the record, to give you a sense of the breadth of our travels, during our 4 month family and friends tour, we visited Connecticut, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Washington and Hawaii! As we mentioned in our last blog post, another reason to leave the boat in Trinidad — safely outside the hurricane zone — is that Trinidad is known for having skilled workers who do every manner of boat work (repairs, varnishing, installations, canvas work, etc.) at affordable prices. We had a long punch list of wants and needs in anticipation of our circumnavigation and Trinidad was a great place to get our work done while we were off galavanting.

Of course, those were our stated reasons. It turned out that keeping the boat in Trinidad was a great decision for another reason. Though we didn’t know this when we left Trinidad, Zack needed surgery to repair a massive tear in his rotator cuff, as well as two smaller tendon tears. With our boat in Trinidad we were able to schedule his surgery right after the wedding and still give Zack 3 months to recuperate in the States before heading down to the boat. Given his his post-op restrictions, he would not have been able to captain the boat in a sail back down to the Caribbean. The good news is that the surgery went really well and he should be 95% recovered by the time we leave for our circumnavigation. In the meantime, we will just be making small hops between islands (vs. making a long ocean passage) as we slowly make our way from Trinidad up the windward islands to St. Lucia, the starting point of our rally. You may be thinking “what happened to Zack’s shoulder” since we didn’t write about it in our blog. We do keep some secrets, particularly if one of us might find sharing a particular story somewhat embarrassing. The short story is that we were on a hike on Antigua and he fell while walking down a really steep incline. Because he remained active and continued to work his shoulder most of the pain resolved and we didn’t realize how badly he had injured it until he had an MRI when we returned to the States. And that’s all we are going to say about that!

While visiting friends and family we kept very busy ticking off our to do list. As we mentioned, we had a long punch list of boat work in anticipation of our circumnavigation. Well, we had a long punch list of other items to prepare for our voyage — everything ranging from doctors visits, to travel related vaccines, COVID boosters, acquiring spare boat parts (lots of them), buying some DVDs and a few board games (to entertain us on long passages), stocking up on medicines and toiletries, buying galley items not easily accessible during a circumnavigation, finalizing crew for our trip, designing the “official” Che Figata cap (it came out so awesome that we used it as our feature photo for this blog entry!), purchasing the required navigation charts and flags to “dress the ship” and many, many other tasks. Naturally, Jill kept us on track with a color coded spreadsheet (we know that shocks you 😉). Unfortunately, our punch list translated into 9 pieces of luggage. Yep, we left Trinidad with 4 pieces of luggage and returned with 9, 3 of which were those “Walmart Special” large hard sided suitcases with 4 wheels that are the maximum size permitted on the airplane. It will be fun trying to find room for all of this new stuff! [BTW, if you are wondering about the significance of the “bee” logo on our caps, Hummel is German for bumblebee. That stylized bee appears on our sails.]

Of all of the tasks we completed though, we are most excited that we found someone to crew with us from St. Lucia to Australia. He is a retired Brit, Mark Curtis, who we found curtesy of our friends Ruud and Laurie on Blue Pearl. Jill is particularly excited because Mark prefers a vegan diet, likes to cook and one of his daughters, Maddie, is an accomplished vegan chef and yoga instructor in Costa Rica. (You can follow her on Instagram under @eatonlyplants). She has promised to give us some virtual cooking lessons and may join us for a bit in Panama. Mark is also a very accomplished sailor with multiple ocean crossings under his belt (as we publish this he is crossing the Atlantic with Ruud and Laurie headed, ultimately, to Grenada) though Jill views that as secondary to having an assistant in the galley and his vegan chef connection! (Zack respectfully disagrees.)

All in all, though we were busy and did miss our boat, we had a wonderful time seeing family and friends. We are so glad we had the opportunity for extended visits with those we love before we set sail in February. Our kids and their partners/families will all be visiting us in the Caribbean before we depart from St. Lucia in February but we won’t see our parents, siblings, nieces, nephews and friends for a very long time. As you can imagine, it is bitter sweet.

But, before we close this entry, we need to share one funny (not at the time) story about our interactions with American Airlines (AA) as we tried to check in for our flight. For international flights AA strongly encourages you (with lots of scare tactics) to arrive at the airport 3 hours in advance of your flight. So, for our 5 AM flight, we arrived at O’Hare at 2:30 AM. What they don’t tell you is that the check in agents don’t arrive until 3 AM. You can get to the airport 3 hours in advance but you will just stand in line until the check in counters open at 3 AM. So we had a nice 30 minute wait before we could even begin the check in process. All we could think about was the extra 30 minutes of sleep we could have had! Then, when they finally opened and we got up to the counter, the agent would not check us in because we didn’t have a return ticket. Trinidad, like many countries, requires visitors to have a return ticket before entering the country.

Of course, we were flying to Trinidad to be reunited with Che Figata so we did not have a return ticket — we would be leaving Trinidad by boat. No worries, we were prepared! Specifically, because Trinidad is a well oiled machine when it comes to the cruising/yachting community, we were made aware that before we left the country we needed to present a letter to Trinidad Immigration and Customs that indicated when we planned to fly back home to the states, that we are leaving our boat in Trinidad during our visit and when we planned to arrive back in Trinidad. So naturally we had such a letter prepared and presented it to Immigration and Customs before we left the country to get an official Trinidad government stamp on our plans. Our letter specifically stated that we were leaving our boat in Trinidad on June 21 and would be returning to Trinidad in “approximately” 4 months to be reunited with our boat. Unfortunately, the check in agent insisted that our letter was “expired” because it was more than 4 months from when we left our boat. He didn’t seem to understand that the point of the letter was to confirm that we left our boat in Trinidad and would be returning to it so no return ticket is needed. We had our own transportation out of the country. Despite the letter, he continued to insist that if we wanted to get checked in and on our flight we had to buy a return ticket.

Naturally, we balked at that idea and encouraged him to speak to a supervisor. He left his post ever so slowly to speak with someone only to return 15 minutes later to tell us that the supervisor hadn’t approved our exception. We then asked to escalate our situation to another supervisor which he did with the help of a colleague but all she did was call this supposed supervisor to let her know there were “2 persons” at their desk that needed assistance. No details on the situation or our fast approaching departure time. It was now 3:45 and we had been waiting at the counter for clearance for 45 minutes. When we suggested that we might miss our flight our agent’s colleague let us know that we needed to be patient (guess standing in line for 45 minutes while we tried to resolve this situation was not patient enough) and that we still had 35 minutes before we were at risk of missing our plane. That would, for those keeping track of the time line, had us still at the ticket counter with 7 pieces of luggage that needed to be on the plane at 4:20 AM for a 5 AM flight. That didn’t feel right to us so we implored our agent to reach out to the supervisor again to get us clearance. He was very hesitate and asked his ever so helpful colleague whether he could call the supervisor back. She replied that he “could do what he wanted” so we pleaded with him to please call back to get the supervisor’s attention. He was clearly conflicted — we could literally see the sweat on his brow — but he gave in and called the supervisor. Miraculously, when she heard the complete facts she quickly approved our check in without a return ticket. Common sense finally prevailed but not until after we had been standing at that counter for 60 minutes. We got through security just moments before the gate agents started the boarding process for our flight. For curious minds — what happened when we arrived in Trinidad with our one way ticket? They took one look at the letter we had presented to the AA check in agent and we sailed through immigration and customs along with 9 bags of luggage! Oh and we had a 5 minute wait at the Trinidad customs station for which the customs officer apologized profusely. She explained that they were “resolving a situation.” If she only knew.

Now that we are back down in Trinidad (phew), the fun begins. We have a lot of organizing and boat related work to do before we can leave Trinidad and head to Grenada where our younger son, our daughter and their +1s are meeting us for the Thanksgiving holiday. It will be a hectic 10 days and we will regale you with all the tedious details of our first month back down in the Caribbean soon after the Thanksgiving holiday. In the meantime, we hope everyone has a fabulous Thanksgiving filled with family, friends, laughter and good food.