After spending a few months with Stephanie on Sail La Vie, David asked me to move onto Boom Sharkalaka and start doing charters together. I took the role as main chef and him as captain, but we shared all duties and guided each tour together. Most of January was spent in the Exumas, working on boats, spearfishing, diving, and chartering.
One of my favorite memories during this time was leaving the Exumas after New Years Eve with no engine and virtually no wind. After helping out a few boats in the Exumas for a week, we were heading back to Nassau to get the boat ready for a charter. Planning to leave at sunrise, I went to start the engine after an early morning workout. The engine would not start, after trying to turn the key multiple times with no luck, we switched out the starting battery, then concluded the starter was bad and decided we had no choice but to sail. Normally, we avoid using the engine and choose to sail at all times, but there was virtually no wind that day and we had 35 nm to go.
We put the mainsail up, pulled anchor, and began our journey while avoiding sandbars. Once we had our first heading, we let the jib out and sailed around 4-5 knots getting out of the shallows. Adjusting to our final heading, we sailed wing on wing and continued at about 4-5 knots for the first few hours. It was a beautiful sunny day with flat clear seas. David and I both worked on projects; I went through every storage compartment in the galley and salon and took inventory of all the food while David worked on videos for YouTube.
Hours later, after finding that bugs had infested nearly all our rice and pasta, our wind was starting to die and we were cruising about 3 knots with many hours to go. We continued to enjoy the present and relaxed on the deck until 4 pm when we checked our speed… 1 knot. At this speed, we would lose our heading without enough speed to steer with the rudder while also pushing our arrival time to the next morning.
A few minutes later, David had pulled the dinghy, Baby Boom, up against the hull, started the engine, and tied it up, and got us up to 3 knots! We still had a few more hours, I made dinner and we watched the sunset over a glassy flat ocean. As we finished dinner I started wondering how we were going to dock in this situation. We arrived at the inlet around 9 pm; after the channel, David hopped into the dinghy to push while I steered and used the bow thrusters when necessary. We backed into the slip successfully, using Baby Boom as our bumper, cushioning Boom Sharkalaka from the dock. After being completely tied up we ended our night and prepared for the maintenance that would await us the next day.