Passage to Bonaire

As the crow flies, it’s 385 nautical miles from Grenada to Bonaire, dead west, as the islands lie at the same latitude. There are however two problems with a course due west. First, the wind would come straight from our stern, which is, for most boats, not the fastest way of making progress downwind. And second, a straight-line route would take us 10 miles or less from several Venezuelan islands. The collapse of Venezuela’s economy has made some people turn to piracy as a means of subsistence. While we’d still be far from the worst areas (mostly in the Gulf of Paria, which separates Venezuela from Trinidad), we preferred not to take risks.

We traced a 450-mile course that would keep us at least 60 miles (a full degree of latitude) from those islands. I estimated it would take us two and a half days to cover the longer route. Once we had a good weather window with the trade winds relaxing a bit (to around 15-20 knots) we chose to depart after sunset to ensure an arrival to an unknown place on the third morning, with plenty of day light to spare.

Since Grenada is a tall island we had to motor for two hours to get to the wind line. From then on it was just the jib and the main with one reef all the way. Except for a couple of squalls that stirred up the pot with 35-knot winds, and some large swells at the beginning, the sailing was fairly smooth. Still, Ada and Kathy were on the verge of seasickness so they had to limit their time down in the galley, with calamitous consequences to our usually luxurious diet.

On the second night, after reaching a point more than 80 miles north of Isla Blanquilla, the first of four Venezuelan islands, we jibed. Baselessly, the confidence in our pirate-dodging abilities grew and we started cutting corners: we passed 49 miles from La Orchilla the next noon, and 35 miles from Los Roques and 23 miles from Las Aves the last night. We kept the AIS silent and the navigation lights off, though, but the moon was full anyway.

It’s unfortunate that a trip that years ago could have been broken into several short and comfortable hops along the Venezuelan coast has to be now done nonstop. Los Roques is a National Park and for a while we did consider stopping there. Recent reports from sailors visiting Los Roques and Las Aves made them sound safe, but potentially complicated in terms of bureaucracy. Cruisers spending eight hours doing customs and immigration, or having trouble obtaining the authorization to leave, combined with lack of coverage in Venezuelan territory from our insurance policy scared us away from what some people describe as paradise on Earth.

We arrived to Bonaire shortly after sunrise. The entire shoreline is protected as a National Park, where anchoring is forbidden. We were lucky to find one of the 42 mooring buoys available and in good condition, so we tied the boat to the buoy and took a very long nap. Customs and immigration could wait. And so could diagnosing why the watermaker failed and the starboard engine battery was acting up.