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What to do next? I loved the BVIs and was not ready to give them up. I remember hearing someone at Sunsail make a pitch about buying one of their charter boats. It turns out that most charter companies do not own the boats but lease them from people who like to cruise, a sort of sale-leaseback deal. The lease is for five years, and the financing works out so that all an owner has to do is pay the initial deposit. Financing is arranged from a bank so that the debt service on the loan equals the monthly leasing fee you get from Sunsail; and then after five years you sell the boat, pay off the bank loan, and get all your money back, or at least a lot of it. Okay, some of it. In the meantime, you get to sail Sunsail boats all over the world in one of their 90 or so locations at no charge. Hey, was buying a Sunsail charter boat a great idea or what?
I talked about the idea with Embry, who realizing how much this meant to me, agreed to go along with the deal without shaking her head (too much) in despair.
The boat that was available at the time was a Jeanneau 39i, which had been on the market for a while, and the price had just been reduced. I cleaned out my savings account and did the deal. (Embry and I always kept our savings separately.) I named the boat Second Wind, clever name, no? I bought the boat in 2015 and left her in the Sunsail fleet until 2020, when the lease expired and owners were required to move the boat out of the marina. Then not able to sell the boat when the Sunsail lease was up and having no place to put the boat, I paid a couple of Brits to move the boat up to the Chesapeake where Second Wind replaced Carolina Blue (which I sold to one of my crew) and became our last sailing vessel.
I know what you are thinking. This sounds like another disaster story brewing. But no, these Second Wind cruising years were (mostly) just as good as the Dan Look chartering years and, in some ways, even better. The way it worked was that for the five years between 2015 and 2020, I chartered with Sunsail–for free! — at least twice a year. One cruise each year was in the BVIs mainly with two or three good friends mostly from high school and college days or friends from Washington, and a second cruise was in faraway and exotic locations with Embry and two or three other couples. We chartered boats in the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, Puget Sound, the Bahamas, Tahiti, and other parts of the Caribbean. Of course, there are stories that go along with each of these cruises, and we did have our share of close calls and challenges but overall the cruises were without serious incidents.
The one exception was an extremely challenging cruise in the Adriatic. Embry and I had completed five days of extraordinary cruising in perfect conditions with two couples who were great friends from planning school days in Chapel Hill. We had reserved a 45-foot Sunsail boat from their base in Croatia. We were warned that toward the end of the week, a “disturbance” was expected to move into the area from the southwest so I decided to sail in that direction so that when the disturbance did arrive, we would have the wind behind us, and it would be easier to get back to the base. Little did we know that in this case the “disturbance” would produce gale force winds.
Toward the end of our week-long cruise, we had docked in a very protected harbor on Viz, the farthest island to the west. We could tell that it was windy on the day we were to depart; but since we were in a protected marina at the base of a steep mountain, we could not tell how strong the wind was. We had two days to get back to the Sunsail base; but since we had 40 miles to cover, I decided that we should leave the marina and venture out. If the wind was too strong, we would return and stay another day.
None of the other cruising boats, however, were leaving the protected harbor.
As soon as we left the lee of the harbor, wham! We were headed to our destination, like it or not. The Adriatic, which the day before was a deep blue, looked like a chocolate milkshake with foam in the air everywhere. I made one feeble attempt to turn around and realized it was impossible. The wind gauge showed gusts up to 45 miles an hour and even higher. The rain was coming down in torrents.
What to do? Well, there was no choice. We could not make any progress if we tried to turn back given the strong winds, so I cheerfully said to the wide-eyed crew, “Well, here we go.”
Because the Adriatic is relatively shallow, you don’t get the giant swells you get in the ocean when there is a storm. You get chop with steep waves that are ten feet high and occasionally even higher. Fortunately, our destination, about 25 miles away, was almost directly downwind. So we never raised the main and sailed only with a mostly rolled up genoa. Even so, the ride was terrifying. Up we would go slowly with the huge chop behind us, then when the crest hit us, we would zoom down the front of the wave like we were on a roller coaster in an amusement park.
The challenge for me was not to jibe unintentionally since the gale force winds were directly behind us. It was not long, however, before three of our friends became seasick. Few words were spoken. Embry said that when I gave the order for everyone to put on life jackets she knew we were in big trouble. When we surfed down the front of the wave, I checked the boat speed and we were surfing at over 14 knots, almost double our normal, maximum boat speed.
The other challenge for me was to stay on course since in such high wind the only direction that the boat could go was almost directly downwind. That meant that if we passed by the protected anchorage that we were supposed to dart in to, we could not turn back to make our destination. The wind would be too strong. We had to get it right. Exactly right.
About two hours into the ordeal, just as I was feeling like I was almost getting the hang of it, directly ahead of us coming out of the mist and pouring rain appeared a giant cargo ship aiming right at us. If we did not change course, it would hit us. I had to jibe (change direction pointing away from the wind, in contrast to “coming about,” pointing into the wind). And I had to do it immediately. The genoa was rolled up so that only a tiny bit of sail was out, but I still did not know how much pressure that would put on the mast when the boom swung around. If we dismasted, it would be curtains.
I hollered “jibe-ho,” turned the wheel, and the boom slammed from one side of the boat to the other. The strong force did not take down the mast. Bravo! Dodged another bullet. The giant ship passed by us, missing us by several boat lengths. Talk about another close call. But what I could not figure out was what were the odds that in such horrid conditions we would get run over by another vessel. We had been battling the storm for over three hours; and in what had been a rather crowded sea the day before, this day we had not seen a single boat of any type—except for the giant freighter.
When we got close to our destination we had to go through a passage only about a hundred yards wide. Then we should be in a protected area and able to turn into the small, protected cove where the marina was. As we got closer to the passage, I could see the spray from the giant waves hitting the shore and going up into the air over a hundred feet. I had never seen anything like it before or since. This had to have been the Adriatic storm of the century.
But we made it, found the marina, and tied up. I finally could relax. Our dear friends, who had been seasick most of the time and never complained, recovered and after a while were talking to me again. This was the first time one couple had ever sailed. And to their credit this was not the end of our friendship.
This was the most sensational experience of our cruising days but not the only close call we had on Sunsail boats in exotic waters. When you cruise as much as we did, you are going to have adventures and some close calls, but if you pay attention and know what you are doing, you will come through them—at least we did. And of the dozen or more bare boat cruising adventures that I had over the years cruising in distant seas, this was the most dramatic and certainly the most dangerous. I was afraid that our good friends would never speak to me again, but thankfully they took it all in stride and we have remained great friends even to this day.
There were many other cruising adventures. Tahiti will go down as my favorite cruise in exotic waters, and I enjoyed all of them, even the Mediterranean, where I sailed with son Andrew and his girlfriend in similar conditions to the Adriatic. And my all-guys cruises with old friends and classmates from high school and college cruising mainly in the BVIs (and also the Grenadines and the Bahamas) will also always be special, and for those experiences I will remain profoundly thankful for as long as I am still kicking. One of my best friends from both high school and college was first mate on almost every one of these cruises and earned the nickname “Defacto,” since the title of “first mate” was reserved for Embry.
In 2015 the father and son Brits delivered Second Wind to Herrington Harbour on the Chesapeake where we had reserved a place for her. We raced and cruised that boat for four more years before selling her in 2024 after the Covid epidemic had passed. In fact, Second Wind was a godsend for us during the Covid years and we cruised with her many times anchoring in secluded coves on the bay far away from the pandemic.
And 2024 marked the end of my sailing career. We sold Second Wind to a young family who moved the boat to a marina on the bay about 30 miles to the south. But that did not keep us from chartering and that happened in 2023 at the tail end of Covid when we went on our final BVI cruise, billed as “The Last Hurrah.”
Stay tuned for that one next—the penultimate —post of the series.