April in the Abacos

Carol really liked Spanish Wells; I thought that it was OK but it was not where I wanted to be. Carol seems to be better at the lemon/lemonade thing than am I. At $1.00/ft. it was not an expensive interlude. Oddly, we did not eat out any night we were there. With Good Friday and then Easter Sunday most of the restaurants were closed; the only one open served only fried food, now not part of my dietary regimen.

The big decision was when to leave and where. Having been convinced that Sunday was a bad day, it was, Monday looked somewhat better and Tuesday looked good, I bowed to the inevitable, WEATHER, and we stayed in Spanish Wells on Sunday. Monday we waited for high tide, about 1000, and got underway for Royal Island, again, as a point of departure for Tuesday. We arrived and anchored at Royal Island before lunch and just lazed the rest of the day away, stirring only to watch other boats entering the harbour.

On Tuesday, transit day, we woke early. I checked the weather on the internet and using our XMWeather. XMWeather had been showing a wedge of high waves jutting into the Northeast Providence Channel; for several days the isobar like lines of wave height had been showing 8 and 9 feet, the reason were stayed at the dock. On Tuesday morning that wedge had been replaced by a rhomboid of 12 foot waves. That didn't make any sense so I decided not to tell Carol lest that send her anxiety levels soaring to heights as high as the purported waves.

When we looked out we saw that two other boats, Megerin and Wind Dust, were already underway. Knowing Megerin from Royal Island and Wind Dust from Spanish Wells we decided to follow suit and had the anchor up before the sun was up and headed though the harbour's cut. We were in the open water by 0730, headed north with a little bit of wind to help us on our way. When we were far enough north, out of the lee of the islands the ocean swells were, maybe, 4/5 feet but with a long period between, giving the boat a pleasant, gentle rise and fall. This sunrise, versus the last one at Royal Island, seemed propitious.

We left trailing behind the two other boats, at 46-ft. and 44-ft. When we cleared the cut between Little Egg Island and Egg Island we saw two more boats ahead of us. The closer of the two was a catamaran and the other was too far distant to distinguish. Given the math of hull speeds I assumed that they would leave us far behind their sterns. But we were able to hang with them.

We motor sailed, running the engine at 2,700 RPM's, the fuel/speed sweet spot, and put out both sails. There was more wind than we expected but the direction was a little more north than expected; after about 15 nm we were almost a mile west of course from trying to keep some wind in the head sail.

One of the five boats, the one farthest north, turned right, for Africa, leaving just four. We were the only boat with a foresail out and we ended up just passing everyone, to the point that I dropped the engine speed so the other boats could catch up and allow us to follow them through the cut and to the anchorage.

It was a good trip and interesting, too. While I was mindlessly eating lunch I saw a line go flashing along the port side. Turns out that the halyard holding the radar reflector to the top spreader had parted, dropping the reflector about 40-ft. to the water where it was water skiing behind the boat. We recovered it with no apparent damage to the boat or aluminum reflector.

We heard Jesse, on Wind Dust, over the VHF offering the other three boats fresh fish because he had just caught and landed a 4-ft. mahi mahi while trolling on the trip north. This got me so stoked that I broke out my rig and in a few minutes had caught and landed .... a wad of Sargasso seaweed. Not nearly so tasty and the mahi mahi that Jesse, good to his word, shared and that Carol and I had for dinner. He said that this was the first fish that he had caught in the Bahamas in 12 years of trying.

Over the last 12 miles of the trip there was a current pushing us faster than we had any right to be going based on the wind and the engine. Even trying to go slow we made over five knots. The 49.3 nm trip over the open water took about eight hours but we would have been much quicker had we not slowed down to follow the other boats through the cut and to the anchorage.

At 1530 we exited the Atlantic Ocean and entered the Sea of Abaco for only the second time with about four hours of daylight to spare. We used one of those hours anchoring. The first and second tries the anchor would not set well so we moved on and tried again until it finally did. When I dove to look at the anchor it was poorly set in a thin layer of sand and grass over rock. But, there's not even enough wind to crank the wind generator so a dragging anchor is not a high concern.

This trip, like the run from Nassau to Royal Island, was about as nice as could be. It met the standard of dull, nothing important broke or stopped working. My concerns about the fuel gauge were misplaced; it did work so I do not have to swim in diesel fuel again. The weather was beautiful. With the arrival of the most recent high pressure weather system things have been cooler; some mornings have broken below 70^o and one below 60^o. On Monday night Carol actually pulled the bed spread over herself for the first time in many weeks.

A colorful ending to a great day!