ArgoKnot

We are here! We arrived in Santiago de Cuba early Sunday afternoon, a full day ahead of our plans. Plans are always a wish and a prayer on a boat. Our brilliant weather router, Chris Parker, warned us that we’d better get through the Windward Passage before mid-Monday, and now I’m so glad we tackled that nasty bit of water even earlier. The sea state in the passage reminded me of what you see when you lift the lid on your washing machine and watch it agitate your clothes, only on a far, far greater scale. As you can imagine, in the dark, this was a terrifying bit of the trip for me. Maybe it’s a good thing that our first night out was about as idyllic as any landlubber could wish. I spent a good deal of the first night watching the stars. For the first time in my life I followed the course of Sirius and Orion completely across the sky to watch them set in the west at about 3am, just a short time before the moon rose.

That second night, approaching the eastern coast of Cuba and then entering the Windward Passage was exactly what I’ve always tried to avoid.

When dawn arrived on Sunday morning we were awestruck by the huge mountain range on the southern coast of Cuba. It is monumental!…like some of the island chains in Greece, or in Southeast Asia. What a view to discover as dawn flooded the horizon.

Passing Guantanamo in the morning kept me thoroughly riveted. It is a much more impressive compound than I ever imagined. It is far more than just a prison, and has large buildings dominating the shoreline, along with gigantic wind generators high up on the nearby mountains. Clearly, the US Navy has to supply all of their own needs here. As we approached the no-sail zone a high speed navy skiff rushed toward us. I was worried that perhaps we had crossed into the off limits area, but the navy boat stopped about half a mile inshore from us and then matched its speed to ours to shadow us all the way down that 100mile excluded zone of water. I wanted to wave to them, but wasn’t certain how they’d react. Surely they could easily our large American ensign flying at our stern, but still…. In the end I opted for not waving. The entrance to the harbor was quite amazing, a real natural wonder, being narrow and long and deep. All these mountains rise up for a couple thousand feet, and plunge into the water even deeper so that even a couple of miles offshore we were in very deep water. I guess I always imagined Guatanamo being a bit of backwater. If it is, the other US Navy outposts must really be something! When we passed the final border of the no-sail zone the navy boat stopped and watched us for a bit before returning to their post.

Finding Guantanamo so impressive should have prepared me for the first sight of Santiago de Cuba, but I was again unprepared for such a dramatic sight. This is one of the earliest settled areas of Cuba, and on the bluff that overlooks the entrance to the harbor is the thoroughly magnificent Castillo de Morro, built by the Spanish around 1587 to protect the settlement from invasions by pirates, who had sacked this city in 1554. Santiago de Cuba was the capitol of Cuba until 1607, when Havana took that role. In appearance, Castillo de Morro is the big brother of that fort in St. Augustine, Florida. In modern history, this is where Fidel launched revolution.

Santiago de Cuba was founded in 1510 and became the capitol of the Spanish settlement around 1515, after Barracoa had been the capitol for some years. Santiago de Cuba is actually closer to Haiti (across the Windward Passage) and to Jamaica than it is to Havana, so it has a mixed Caribbean culture that differs from other Cuban cities. I’m looking forward to discovering a bit about this.

Entering the harbor under the view of such a fort made me realize just how far we’ve come on this journey to visit the ‘forbidden gem of the Caribbean.’ It’s all been speculation and endless bureaucratic forms. Passing under that early colonial fortress suddenly made me realize that our long planning and speculating had become a reality! I’m really here!

This is a stunning harbor, with mountains rising on all sides of the harbor, mostly undeveloped. In the pleasure boat part of the harbor, which is the first part as you enter, there is a jolly sense of decayed luxury: a charming marina that must have once been quite a bit more than charming. The same kind of small mildly decayed hotel and two restaurants are adjacent to the marina. It is a lovely spot. Further down the harbor is a large commercial port that has more ships than I can count at any given time. These ships are constantly coming and going, so as we sit at anchor in our idyllic spot of the harbor with mountain views all around and just the few little vestiges of some previous luxury now run to disrepair, we’ll suddenly find our quiet view completely obliterated by some behemoth ship passing in or out. It is quite a sight!

The check in process was quite an experience. In one guidebook I read that Cuba is a very confusing place for Americans, and the best way to handle it is to just ‘go with the flow.’ Clearly that writer for Lonely Planet thinks this is a challenge for many Americans. Hmmm… Well, that has proven true on our first experience with dealing with customs and immigration. I did try to find out as much as I could before arriving so that we would have the appropriate things ready and not cause any concerns with officials. But of course I know that no matter where one travels, you simply cannot prepare for everything! So it is only a little surprising to me that nothing I read matched what actually happened! And it was a thoroughly enjoyable, albeit confusing, experience.

We’d read that dairy products and chicken are not allowed in Cuba. Some sources said that no meat of any kind could be brought into Cuba. We’d been told by some cruisers in the Bahamas that we’d also have to give up all our fresh produce. Great…I’d be trying out the procedure of washing the local veggies in silver nitrite, to avoid the possibility of Hepatitis A which we neglected to do, sooner than I had hoped. Well, we have a freezer full of meat! In preparation for at least having all our chicken confiscated, we have been eating nothing but for about three weeks! We’ve even had a couple of dinner parties onboard that featured chicken in order to get rid of as much of it as possible. We’d also read that in the larger ports the officials would speak English, so I was very glad that Santiago de Cuba would be our first stop. More time for me to learn Spanish in preparation for the rural stops in the future.

Our first guest onboard from the customs and immigration department was a woman who would check our general health and then go through our food. She was not in the least bothered by our frozen chicken. Perhaps she might have confiscated any fresh chicken if we’d had it. She barely spoke English, although her English was certainly far superior to my Spanish. With the assistance of the various Spanish books we have on hand I think we mostly understood each other. She was not concerned about our horde of cheeses or our two half gallons of milk (one in the freezer for future use).

We’d been told that no one asks for beer or alcohol anymore, but that we should have some soda on hand…there are no American products in Cuba, so having a Coke is quite a treat. We were ready with that, and when we offered our visitor a cold drink she promptly agreed. But then stashed the can of Coke away in her purse! Somewhat later she asked for us to “salut” each other, and although her attempt at describing what she meant sounded like we were going to take her to a bar on the dock, eventually it became clear that she wanted a beer onboard Pandora in order to welcome us to Cuba! She must have really wanted that beer because it took Bob and I an age to understand what she was trying to convey! So we gave her a beer and listened to her tell us about her family, show us photos of her young daughter who is her ‘princess,’ and answer her questions about our life in the US and our children. When she asked for a little money, we were happy to oblige. The whole process was rather enjoyable, and after all she’d just let us keep a staggering array of wonderful cheeses that we brought from the US and Nassau, milk for our morning coffee along with my precious herb plants and pretty pink geranium and my newly sprouting avocado seed!

We lowered our yellow “Q” flag (for Quarantine) and raised the Cuban flag on our starboard shroud and up anchored to head for the marina. There was no room for us at the dock –perhaps a good thing…time will tell—so we anchored yet again. We still had the young lady health official onboard, and she was surprised to see me take the helm while Bob dealt with the anchor. She asked me if I was the ‘Capitan,” and I laughed and said no! But I believe she may have said something the customs official when we all arrived onshore, because he had already put me down as the captain. I find this hilarious, and now for our entire stay in Cuba the officials will all be talking to me rather than Bob.

So it fell to me to be interviewed by the Customs and Immigration official while a tv in the background (hanging from the ceiling) played a Cuban soap opera and then an old episode of “Flipper.” Through that cacophony of noise I tried to understand his Spanish and attempts at English. He was far better understanding me than I was at understanding him! And he was clearly more used to the distracting tv noise than I was. After the interview and paperwork, he came onboard to inspect our boat and look for contraband –guns, drugs, pornography. But before he began the search (no dogs involved in this search, although we’d been warned that larger ports would use them) he sat down at our dining table and asked for a beer. Luckily we had one more chilled beer. (We will be challenged to have enough beer for all the ports we will be visiting….we certainly didn’t get accurate information about this!) He did not make as much small talk as his predecessor, but seemed to go into a relaxed state to enjoy his beer. It was a Yuengling, and he told us it was much stronger than what he was used to having. I asked him if knew of the US city Philadelphia, and when he said he did, I told him he was drinking a beer from that city. He recommended we try a very strong rum called Havana Cru. I guess Bob will be looking for that soon.

Once we were cleared in to Cuba we realized that no one had collected the fees for all the various things we’d heard would be charged. It should have cost us somewhat more than $25 for entering the country, and we’d read that we’d be paying $2.50/day for Cuban health insurance. But all we did was serve some beer and give a small tip.

So we awoke today, our first full day in Cuba, to a cool breeze coming down from the mountains and hot sun in this beautiful harbor. On one side of us is boat with a Norwegian flag, and on the other side is a boat flying a Swedish flag. The dock has several boats flying the French flag and one boat from Denmark. We do not see any US flags here, but then we are not flying our own. We’d been warned by the New Zealanders who gave us lots of information back in January, that a couple of ports, and Santiago de Cuba (the home of the Rebellion) for sure, would not be happy to see the US flag in their waters. If we had thought to bring along a small, discreet ensign we might have flown it, but what we have is an embarrassingly HUGE US flag given to us by our son Rob. It’s a wonderful sight flying off our stern, but not worth causing insult or injury here.

What to do first??? See the castle? Go into the city of Santiago de Cuba, about a 15 minute cab ride from here? Time to immerse ourselves in the local scene. It’s hard to believe we are finally here.

The past few weeks have taught me just how determined Bob is to get to Cuba.  There have been a number of setbacks, and I thought the jig was up yesterday morning…and again this morning….but NO!  Yesterday morning we still had no boat insurance in effect, and I cannot possibly describe how persistent Bob has been at working through this.  Insurance is a long, boring story, so I’ll skip it.  I’ll only say that it was yesterday afternoon when things finally fell into place.

I will also skip the details of learning that we should have had a 6-month course of Hepatitis inoculations that would include Hepatitis A which can be a problem in Cuba due to bad water and fresh produce–along with a course of medicine to prevent cholera. The doctor at the Georgetown Clinic said her family goes to Cuba all the time and never takes these precautions.  Bob was just fine with that…  Me, not so much!

So, this morning was farewell to Georgetown!  Last night we enjoyed a gathering on Monument Beach, affectionately called ARG (alcohol research group) and said our goodbyes to cruising friends.  I sure wish someone were going with us, but no one got their paperwork in order like Bob…no surprise!

This is the sunrise panorama that Bob took on our penultimate day in Georgetown.  These last few days have been the calmest days I’ve ever spent anywhere in the Bahamas!  Almost like the gentle summer days on Long Island Sound.

I took advantage of the calmness to work on my latest tapestry.  Bob took a photo of me working, but I cannot access it right now.  Just one of the many small frustrations of living off the grid!

So we left Georgetown at dawn this morning (about 6.15 am), and headed out the inlet toward the northern tip of Long Island.  It wasn’t long before our plotter which shows our charts, our location (GPS), and radar and AIS malfunctioned and quit!  Well, again, I tell you I gave up.  I thought for certain this was it and we’d be heading back into the harbor.

Not so for Bob.  He took apart the housing that holds these electronics and began to see if he could deduce what was wrong.  After a good hour’s effort he called Raymarine and spent another hour on the phone following a techie’s instructions.  Bingo!  We were back in business.  Now we are rapidly approaching sunset and have motor/sailed  70 miles, out of our 350 mile passage.  We are just off Clarencetown at the southern end of Long Island, and tonight we will head offshore to Great Inagua.  We need to maintain speed of 6.5 knots or more in order to get to Great Inagua before sunset tomorrow.  So far, so good.

Tonight Bob and I will spell each other in 2 hour watches, with some overlap time at each change.  There is a small swell this afternoon that is making me a bit green, and writing this post isn’t helping!  Hopefully I’ll do well overnight.

Our friends George and Nancy, aboard Trumpeter, say we must get to Great Inagua in time to go ashore tomorrow because there are so many parrots on the island!  They say that you hear lots of parrots calling when you go ashore and then soon after see them in all the trees.  There are also flocks of pink flamingos on this island.  That’s why we are determined to keep our speed up!  Next stop after that is Cuba!  Hoping for a gentle passage…

Can someone PLEASE turn off the wind??  I’m not sure what is worse: the buffeting about or the noise.  Have you ever lived with  howling wind for a full month, nonstop??  It sounds like the hounds of hell riding straight through me.  Sometimes at night it sounds like horses galloping right on the deck above our heads, and that makes me think of those awful wraith things in Peter Jackson’s Tolkien trilogy.

On the bright side, this boat sure is sturdy.  It has taken all the wind being hurled at it with a fair degree of grace.  On old Pandora we would have been heeling at anchor or at dockside.  New Pandora seems to take all this in stride and stays quite stable.

We had a rip roaring sail from Nassau to Over Yonder Cay on Thursday.  Bob loved it, and I tolerated it.  The wind was behind our beam (the mid-section of the boat) which makes for a pretty comfortable point of sail.  But the consistent 28 mph winds with higher gusts did not make it an easy day for me.  At least I did not get seasick, but I certainly could not do any handwork.  In all that wind, which was gusting over 30 mph quite often, new Pandora only heeled about 10-12%….amazing!

The day before we motored to Nassau in flat waters, about 60 miles from Great Harbour Cay in the Berries.  Bob did some quick provisioning at the American-style Fresh Market before we went out to dinner at Luciano’s, which has now become a tradition for us when we have to stop in Nassau.  Neither of us likes to stop in Nassau. In my case I’d say that arriving by boat in a large city is just not as appealing as arriving in a small town, or better yet, a remote location.  Cities just have too much hubbub for the cruising life style….but maybe that’s just me.  Nassau also has seen more crime in the past couple of years, which puts me on my guard.

The sail from Nassau to Over Yonder Cay was about 75 miles, and new Pandora raced here with speeds ranging from the high 8’s to mid 10s (mph).  This is a lot faster than any of our previous boats.  Bob just loved it…

Here is Pandora looking good on the dock at Over Yonder.

Yesterday in the latest gale, I stayed onboard all day and tried to be creative.  I made bread and yogurt.  The yogurt was my first attempt since back in the 70s when I had one of those electric yogurt makers by Salton–do you remember those?  Yogurt is not something easily found in the Bahamas, and milk will get scarcer and scarcer until there is none at all in Cuba, so I thought I’d attempt making it again, this time with irradiated box milk.  I was pretty convinced that it would not work, but voila!  It did!

I also spent much of yesterday going over the chapters I’ve put together for the Archie Brennan book.  I know I never talk about it, and everyone must assume by now that it’s a defunct project.  But I’ve been lurching along, and it is starting to shape up into something.  I am still quite smitten with this project, and there has actually been some very good progress–in my humble opinion!

I realize now I haven’t mentioned that I’ve worn my acid green t-shirt, newly adorned with tatting, a couple of times!  No one has commented on it–surely that’s a lack of boaters’ understanding anything about handwork, and not that it’s not adorable.

This is more accurate color.

  I made quite a bit of progress of my newest tapestry before I decided to UNweave all of it.  I’ve started again and am almost back to where I’d been when I decided to start over. Sheesh…

There is a lot going on at Over Yonder Cay even when there are no guests staying here.  Everyone works very hard to keep this place going–and to keep it being one of the most stunning spots anywhere.

Yesterday the mail boat arrived with lots of provisions…. the food must have come from the US because I’ve never seen so many beautiful vegetables and fruits in all of the Bahamas.  The produce came in crates!  A crate each of asparagus, mangoes, lemons and limes, cauliflower….

Then a seaplane arrived with a number of other provisions, including some kind of big pneumatic drill thingy…. It landed in the water right near us and drove up a ramp to stop right next to us onshore! Customs and Immigration arrived to make sure that everything had been properly invoiced.  Hmm…

We invited the couple we met two years ago, Ethan and Jaime, to come for dinner last night.  This time they brought their newborn son with them.  What a thrill to hold a baby after so many years.  He is a beautiful baby, and so mild mannered.  He let me hold him with barely a whimper at leaving his mom’s arms.  Jaime’s mother is visiting the island right now from her home in Long Island.  I enjoyed talking to her, Long Island being just the tip of the iceberg of what we have in common !  I hope we will see her again sometime in our own stomping grounds.  It was a very enjoyable evening for Bob and me.

This is a terrible photo, but I have to share it…. there is nothing like holding a baby!

Today we will take a walk around the island and then have dinner in the pavilion where we had a meal two years ago with Rob and Kandice.  I’m looking forward to that, especially if the winds die down as they are supposed to do.  And I’m hoping to see a lovely sunset (the pavilion is on the western side of the island with a lovely beach) without having my eyelashes ripped off.  Ever hopeful..

I’ve been making good progress on the second little tatted trim.  I had initially thought I would put it on a periwinkle, boat neck t-shirt I have with me, but I don’t think the color changes in the tatting thread work as well as I initially thought.  I have a lime green linen tank top onboard that I think will better.  So that’s the plan for now.

I’m a bit tempted to raid the fine cotton threads I brought with me to give to the bobbin lace maker in Cuba.  I’d like to try tatting on a smaller scale.  I’ll try to resist that temptation.

It was such a wonderful experience to arrive in Great Harbor Cay to soft warm breezes and brilliant sunshine. We had a couple of days of magnificent sunrises and sunsets—just what I needed. Since then it’s been gale force winds and ominous skies. Offshore the winds have been very high indeed, around 70 mph. Numerous friends have written to tell me about the cruise ship that got stuck in these winds and had to confine all passengers to their cabins while the ship returned to the US.

So, after getting somewhat used to this violent weather and calming down that Pandora was not going to rip herself right off the dock, I have picked up some projects again. I am about three rings and chains from finishing my little tatted lace trim. Maybe tonight I’ll be able to sew it to my t-shirt. Fingers crossed on that.

Yesterday, I took my copper pipe loom ashore to warp it (far too bouncy onboard for such a task). Bob rigged up a brilliantly technical, Rube Goldberg arrangement for clamping the edge of my loom to a picnic table. It involved two clamps, a length of webbing with a small clasp at one end such as is used for tying things to the roof of a car, and then a length of plain webbing and length of line (nauticalese for rope).

Can you see that Bob attached one clamp to the picnic table and then used the 2nd clamp to attach the corner of the loom to the first clamp.  So clever…. To minimize the torquing of the loom he has the car webbing running from the long bar of the 1st clamp to the other end of the picnic table.  The 2nd webbing is bracing the bottom corner of the loom to the picnic table.It was quite an engineering feat, and in the end, I was able to warp the loom all by myself while Bob walked to the market on the island. With my spool of seine twine in a bucket and tensioned by going over the brace of a picnic table nearby, I was able to use one hand to keep the tension on the warp while making wraps of warp with the other hand. I was done in less than hour!

All finished warping.  Then I sat down for a bit to space the warp threads evenly and weave a header that will support the beginning of the woven tapestry.  Does it look cold?  It certainly was!  The wind was blowing about 30 mph and the resultant wind chill was very un-tropical!

Here is the cartoon I’ll be using for this project. It’s the final line from one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, and it happens to be a favorite with our younger son as well. This tapestry is for him. In this photo I am measuring for possible border sizes.

Meanwhile, in my inbox yesterday I found a message from a friend alerting me to a post on Weavetech that she knew I’d be interested in reading. Now that internet is not a ‘given’ for us I have dropped the daily digest format, so I would never have seen this post without the ‘heads up!’ from my friend.

It turns out there is a new book out by Oxford Press about two subjects very dear to me: ancient Greece and weaving. Being a Greek student in college is what led me to weaving in the first place– 40 years ago. It was the connection between text and textile that brought me to weaving, and now 4 decades later a few people are looking at the connections between the words for various parts of early Greek ships and words used in weaving terminology. And now that I spend such a great deal of time living onboard my own little vessel (though not a ship) I am naturally curious to learn more about these findings.

The book is originally in German, and published by an English publisher (Oxbow) with a division in the US.  You can find it online here.  Surely it must also be available in English, especially since the title is translated –I am certainly counting being able to order an English translation.

Weben und Bewebe in der Antike: Materialitat–Reprasentation–Episteme–Metapoetick
(Texts and Textiles in the Ancient World: Materiality–Representation–Episteme–Metapoetics)
Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer (Author)

What I got to read, through the post on WeaveTech, is an article taken from the book, written by Marie-Louise Nosch and published on a website called www.academia.edu

Though I could not find the article by searching that site (maybe you will have better luck), the woman who posted on WeaveTech sent me a pdf. I’d like to post it here, but will first find out if I need permission for that. Stay tuned. It is a compelling study of the words for various parts of a sailing and rowing ship being the same as words used in both spinning and weaving. Since textile production is an older technology, it is presumed that the words used in ship building and  sailing terms were borrowed from textile terms, due to textile’s prominent connection to ships, ship building, and the act of sailing or rowing.

And on a calmer day Bob and I took a walk on the pristine beach at Great Harbor Cay.

Life took a strange and dark turn 2 weeks ago, and I left Florida to fly home.  I went home to be with my oldest friend as she entered a very dark period of her life.  She has lost someone very dear, someone who was dear to me as well.

During the past weeks I have watched my friend navigate very troubled waters with a strength and grace I did not know she has.  You can always learn something new about anyone, no matter how long you’ve known them.  She has become an inspiration for me.  Life throws unspeakable challenges at us, but I’ve learned a lot from my friend’s deep, still waters.

Along the way I’ve finished reading The Paper Garden, a biography of the 18th c. female artist, Mary Delany.  The author, Molly Peacock, was known more for her poetry than her prose, until she wrote this book.  The book is so popular now that the British Museum has had to limit access to Mary Delany’s paper collages in order to preserve them from the sudden rise in people requesting to see them.

My friend has been an artist since before I met her.  Growing up together, she painted and drew while I wrote things and dabbled in handwork.  Later she began sculpting and got her fine arts degree in that medium.  This quote from The Paper Garden makes me wonder where my friend’s artwork will go next:

Black pigment is made from charred organic matter—and that includes burnt bones. This chilling fact contributes to the black background of Mrs. D’s Rosa Gallica… Not that burnt bones necessarily produced the pigment that Mrs. D. used to create the black backgrounds of her flowers—her pigment could have been made from tar, pitch, lampblack, pine soot, anything charred to get a noir so deep it looks as if it came from the mouth of Hades. But whatever the composition of the dry crystals she ground with a mortar and pestle, then mixed with liquid and adhesive, its source is something burnt. Carbon. Organic. Ashes. Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don’t think it is. But art is a poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.

So, for me, regular life begins to lurch along once again.  I am back in the Bahamas with Bob, in a beautiful spot that we have not visited before called Great Harbor Cay.  When we left the harbor for a short sail yesterday, three dolphins found us and played in our bow wave.

The sunsets have been stunning, the Bahamians are the friendliest people I have ever met, the cruisers have been pretty friendly too, and Bob is letting me rest.  The days are warm and slow.

My biggest wish is that my friend could switch places with me.  I would take a couple weeks of her grieving and the growing responsibilities she has taken on to care for others in her family, while she could spend some time here– healing.  Life is so thoroughly unfair….