Volcano - Part II

Posted by Liz

Friday, February 12, 2010
Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe

It "snowed" all night.

When we got out of our bunks around 7:00am this morning, there were “drifts” of ash in all the corners of the teak cockpit near the companionway.

Starting at 7:30am and we swabbed the decks, main cover, stanchions, bimini, dodger - everything - with buckets and buckets of sea water - which is so gross and polluted we dared not to make water with it for the past few days - sadly, it’s now the cleanest substance available.

A bunch of salty icky sea water came down the cowl vent in the aft cabin…I'm now sobbing.

If you could see the boat - and after we worked our tails off the last three full days scrubbing, waxing and polishing/cleaning the stainless (even had the toothbrush out), and now it seemed, all for naught.

Looks like the fallout of war...very eerie and grey with haze still blanketing the skies.

At 3pm – the top decks are relatively clean. Ed scrubbed the teak a few times. We took the bimini off and cleaned it with fresh water as best we could. Polished all of the stainless (again!) on the boat. It almost feels a bit futile, because the ash is still coated on thick on everything above our reach – all over the shrouds, rigging, spreaders – and is sure to blow off and down all over everything. We’ll probably be cleaning non-stop for the next few months as a result of this.

As we were hoisting buckets of water today, feeling sad that we and our sea home had been put upon by this event, Ed was the good one. He said: “As much as we feel put out, we’re just a speck; think of others who maybe live on the island of Montserrat who were really affected, or think of the poor people in Haiti who recently have lost not only their homes, livelihoods, but friends and family.”

He put things in perspective for me. This is not insurmountable.

We spent the whole day cleaning decks and polishing stainless – we used all 40 gallons of the new water we just put in the port tank yesterday – gone in a heartbeat. Went back to the marina to refill the water gopher bladder – and when we got back to the boat, grit and ash all over. The wind is just blowing it everywhere.

There’s no escaping it. It’s coated thick and 65 feet over our heads on all of the rigging and spreaders – areas we obviously cannot reach with our human hands.

We were also able to finally obtain reports of this event, and the effects of this eruption are widespread geographically - - the ash fallout goes as far south as 14N (Martinique, two islands south of us) and up to 20N (north of the Virgin Islands!)… but where we sit, we got it bad because of the weird wind direction (NW) which was unusual and took all the ash SE (towards us in Guadeloupe). When the dome collapsed, it sent ash up 6-9 miles into the sky (various reports) and spread out over many of the islands.

The winds have finally (and thankfully) shifted East today, but the breeze is light (only about 7 knots) and too light to blow any of the mess away. But at least it’s blowing it west, which means it should be clearing out of this region. We need more breeze from the East, and we are praying for rain to clean the boat… but that is not forecasted.

Sailing life is tough enough – keeping the boat safe, choosing our weather windows, physical labor on a regular basis…but add in this sort of unexpected act of Mother Nature – and you feel a bit helpless. We’ll manage, and we’re just going to be living in a dusty environment, probably for the next several months. I guess this is all part of the “adventure"!