It's a good thing most of the really bad hurricanes seem to hit in August and September because we were still in St. Kitts and it was now July 30. We toured St. Kitts and then came the Showdown with our crew, especially the gal, whose attitude had been growing progressively worse. In addition to a misunderstanding over their pay for the week we had charter guests aboard, the crew also believed it was too risky to go directly to Curacao, now the current plan, because of all the problems we'd had with the boat. We made a deal with them over the money and compromised the float plan by saying we'd sail south then west so we'd be near islands in case anything broke.

Oh, if I'd only known then what I know now, we could have saved the money we spent on this deal and headed directly to Curacao from St. Kitts. However, you need to remember that Charlie and I had never sailed this boat with just the 2 of us. Even on our test runs in Long Island Sound we'd always had other people aboard to handle lines, sails, etc. and I was still new enough to sailing that I didn't feel comfortable sailing with just the 2 of us.

To be fair, even after sailing "Blue Star" over 17,000 miles, we still take crew on for any passage over 3 days and 2 nights because even with just one more person on board, we can do 3 hour watches, which translates into 3 hours on and 6 off. For us, anything less than 6 hours off is just too tiring. Before leaving St. Kitts with our now less disgruntled crew we did make a quick check for other available crew but no one materialized.

We sailed south for a day and a half down to about the 14th parallel, then on August 1 we changed course and headed directly for Curacao. The engines behaved themselves on the downwind run: they were mostly turned off. The generator, too, ran beautifully.

Finally on August 4 in a driving rainstorm, we reached Curacao. We had to wait for the weather to clear so we could see the narrow entrance to the huge inland bay called Spanish Waters. Once inside we tied up at Seru Boca Marina where we'd made reservations before leaving Connecticut.

We were now supposed to rent a house and start a charter diving business. But that's not quite what happened. Unbeknown to us the adventure had just begun.

To be continued.