When the sun rose this morning we had the loom of Bermuda’s lights on the horizon, and it’s possible we will see that same loom behind us as the sun sets. Our timing was terrific. We reached the northern reefs with their many lights and lighthouses before sunrise, which helped us verify our location and our approach to the island. Once the sun rose we were close enough to pick out the individual light towers and buoys. We had a lovely light breeze–just enough to sail for a bit without the engine as we made our approach. Otherwise it was sunny and about 75 degrees. A beautiful day.

Our goal when we motored through Town Cut into St. George’s about 0840 was to do a quick turn around: clear Customs, fuel and head back out to sea. The first glitch ocurred when we had to wait for a motor yacht to vacate the dock so we could go in–half an hour wasted circling. Next we were shocked to learn that the gas dock was closed! It had closed last Monday for major repairs of the quay wall and replacement of the underground tanks and will be closed through February. Now that was a major glitch. Our 250 gallons of fuel gives us a range of about 800 miles and we used about 200 gallons getting to Bermuda. We really needed to refuel before heading 900+ miles to Antigua.

Bernie, who meets every boat at the Customs dock, suggested a friend who would refill 6-gallon jerry jugs and bring them to the boat on his way home from work. Let’s see, 200 gallons, we have 2 jerry cans, 12 gallons per trip, that’s about 16 trips. That didn’t seem like a viable option. As another option, there are trucks that will bunker fuel, but they have a 500 gallon or greater minimum. In order to deal with them we would have had to find a bunch of other boats also in need of fuel. That could probably be done, but it wouldn’t be quick.

Fortunately there was a third option: A friend, Mark Soares, who was captain of Forever Young, a boat docked beside us one year in Jamestown, now lives in Bermuda, where he has started a Yacht Services business. We called him and he was able to arrange fuel delivery at his dock. Now that was another adventure. His dock is a work in progress. It is an old corrugated iron breakwall just inside the sunken rusted wreck of some sort of small freighter. He has built lovely new floating dock attached at one end. Unfortunately for us we had to use the old breakwall, not the floating dock to get fuel. And the reason will become obvious as I describe how we got diesel. Mark called a gas station to order the 200 gallons of diesel we needed. It was delivered in 2 loads on a flatbed truck, each load delivering 2 50-gallon drums. The fuel was pumped with a small electric pump through a small hose into our tanks. It wasn’t very efficient, but it did the trick.

The next problem was to get avalanche out of the rusty corner of the bay. Mark had it covered: he pulled us off the dock with a mike boat while a half dozen strong young men stood by to fend us off the dock if necessary. It was all very nicely accomplished to our relief.

In the end we were in Bermuda 5 hours, which seemed really quick under the circumstances. We exited Town Cut at 1330 and already have 28 miles behind us. We have gotten to 31 degrees 52 minutes N latitude, 64 degrees 7 minutes W longitude.

And now, goodnight to all from the really tired crew of avalanche, having been up since as early as 0400.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 6:21 pm and is filed under 2007 Trip South. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.