Author: Juan

Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, colloquially known as the ABC islands, are three Caribbean islands belonging to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Aruba, the westernmost of the three, lies roughly 85 miles Northeast of the Colombia/Venezuela border. The islands share a unique and beautiful creole language, Papiamentu, which is based in Spanish and Portuguese, with influence from Dutch and English. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt the need to say “this lady will pay for everything” in any language. Or “my hovercraft is full of eels”. However, those are two of the sentences in a list of useful phrases in Papiamentu I found. Perhaps I’ve been living my life wrong all these years. I’ve decided to make radical changes so that those two sentences become useful to me in my day-to-day life. E señora lo paga pa tur cos. Mi hovercraft ta yen di conglá. Hopefully the lady will pay for the hovercraft too.

Geographically… let’s see if I get this right. First, there’s the West Indies. That term includes all the Antillean Islands in the Caribbean Sea, plus the Lucayan Archipelago (Bahamas and Turk & Caicos) in the Atlantic Ocean. In turn, the Antillean Islands are divided into the Greater and Lesser Antilles. The Lesser Antilles is more or less the chain of islands we’ve been following (first South and now West), and are further subdivided into the Leeward Islands in the north, the Windward Islands in the south and the Leeward Antilles in the west. The latter comprise all the islands just North of Venezuela, including the ABCs. None of which makes much sense anyway, because if we now wanted to go from a Leeward Antille (say Bonaire) to a Leeward Island (say Guadeloupe), we’d have to go to windward.

Politically, the ABC islands are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but in different capacities. Bonaire is a special municipality of the Netherlands. However, it’s not part of the European Union, and the official currency is the U.S. dollar. Aruba and Curaçao are two autonomous countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, each with their own weird currency. Until 2010 it was simpler though: the islands were all part of the Netherlands Antilles, a now-dissolved country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Now, a question for the readers: we came to Bonaire in 2007 when it was part of the Netherlands Antilles. Today it’s part of a different country, the Netherlands. Do we count our two visits as visiting two countries?

In our infinite ignorance, extraordinary stinginess, and staggering laziness to do just a little bit of research during the summer, we thought of the ABC islands as all Dutch, and bought just one courtesy flag, the Netherlands flag, to rule them all and be done at once with the item “buy courtesy flags for all the countries we’ll visit next season”. Not only they are all three different countries, but Bonaire, even though it is part of the Netherlands, has its own flag. We figured it’d be less disrespectful to fly no flag at all than to fly a Dutch flag. So, if anyone is interested in a brand-new Dutch flag, let us know.

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.