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After more than a year of sailing, we’ve reached the hurricane-free shores of Trinidad. Here in Chaguaramas, near Port of Spain, we’ve hauled out our boat at Coral Cove Marina for painting, repairs, and refitting. We’ll use this break to travel to Ottawa to see our family, especially our much-missed grandchildren. This time will also allow us to process the data we’ve collected, perform quality checks, and calibrate our CTD measurement system to ensure the accuracy of collected oceanographic data. Once this assessment is complete, the data will be transferred to the Ocean Database. In October we’ll return to Trinidad to continue our project and our adventures. Stay tuned!

Turrell Bay has long been called a retreat bay due to the presence of the Hurricane Hole – a mangrove lagoon of 180 acres, serving as a refuge for local fishing boats and yachts in case of storms and hurricanes. And this time the lagoon was filled with boats hiding from Hurricane Beryl, but everything did not go as planned. A significant rise in water (up to 2 meters according to eyewitnesses) during a storm with high waves dragged boats from moorings and mangrove trees. Boats were huddled together up to 50 boats and sank each other, piling on top of each other. Catamarans simply flipped over, were thrown by the waves and overturned by the force of the wind. Many yachtsmen were in the boats and filmed the horror of what was happening. During the passage of the eye of the hurricane, many tried to get out of the lagoon, but the passage was blocked by sunken boats, they were locked in. In the three weeks after the hurricane, many boats were pulled out, but the remaining sunken and huddled boats left a depressing impression. We were already heading out of the lagoon when we saw a Ukrainian flag on a broken mast on one of the yachts. We approached it to find out if our fellow countrymen were in trouble – a thin, mustachioed Cossack appeared from the boat with the words Glory to Ukraine, our answer was Glory to the Heroes! It turned out that he was an American with Ukrainian roots – his Ukrainian grandfather emigrated from Slovakia before the First World War. His name was John Smith, and he spoke almost no Ukrainian, but he told us a lot about his life, in which he spent 55 of his 75 years on a sailboat without a motor or electronic navigation devices, moving only along the Caribbean Sea. He proudly said that his last boat was called Cyganka (Gipsy) and he survived the hurricane on it. Despite the broken mast, his spirit is high and he looks to the future with optimism. We also told him about our experience of the tropical storm. We also learned that he had written a book ” Little Fish Big Pond”, a copy of which he took out of the cabin and signed for us. What a wonderful meeting we had! Now we are reading the book in turns and enjoying it.