by Judy Handley | May 2, 2017 | 2017 Life Logs |
2017 Life Logs, Day 122: Last Night at Anchor in the Bahamas
Date: Tuesday, May 2, 2017
Weather: Mostly Sunny; Light Winds SE 10
Location: At Anchor on the West Side of Allans-Pensacola Cay
After listening to the weather this morning, the decision was made to head for Fort Pierce in Florida. The long-range forecast for getting out of the Bahamas was worse today than yesterday. It was either leave today or wait for at least ten days. So Sam cancelled the Delta flight out of Marsh Harbor and it was up-anchor and on our way. We motor-sailed northward through the Sea of Abaco retracing our track past Great Guana Cay, over the top of Whale Cay, past Treasure Cay to port with it’s beautiful white sand beach that seems to stretch forever, past Green Turtle Cay to starboard, and onward to Manjack and Crab Cays. The winds for today were forecast to less than 10 knots, so about the time we got to Manjack Cay, we furled the headsail, put out the spinnaker and had a nice sail for about an hour. Sam took this opportunity to climb the mast with his GoPro and get some amazing photos and video. While at the top, he also took the opportunity to control the autopilot with an app on his iPhone via the wifi built into the chartplotter. Amazing! Before we this morning, a decision was made to continue on past Crab Cay, Spanish Cay, and on to Allans-Pensacola so that tomorrow morning we will be ready to head just a little further north before heading to the west. By sundown tomorrow we will be leaving Bahamian waters and doing the Gulf Stream crossing overnight, arriving in Fort Pierce sometime tomorrow morning. Sam and Dawn have spent two wonderful months in the Bahamas and I have been here with them for two weeks. Each of us is a little sad to be saying farewell to the beautiful Bahamian islands, but they will return next November and I have such wonderful memories. And who knows . . . I might find a way to return.
When we reached the anchorage here at Allans-Pensacola Cay, Sam headed to shore with Piper in the dinghy and Dawn took off on the paddle board. I really wanted to try it, but I was afraid that I might fall and twisted or break something. With an overnight passage tomorrow, that just didn’t seem like a smart idea. So I declined the offer. But I got a real kick out of watching Sam take Piper out on the board. We are now getting ready to eat another of Dawn’s fantastic dinners. Tonight it is pork chops simmered in chicken broth with spices and then with the addition of sour cream, almost like beef stroganoff. Sure smells good and I’m sure it will be delicious.
by Judy Handley | May 1, 2017 | 2017 Life Logs |
2017 Life Logs, Day 121: Hope Town to Marsh Harbor
Date: Monday, May 1, 2017
Weather: Mix of Sun and Clouds; Winds SE 15-18
Location: At Anchor in Marsh Harbor, Great Abaco Island, Bahamas
Due to wind direction, we motor sailed instead of sailing across the Sea of Abaco to Marsh Harbor on Great Abaco Island. But before we did that, Sam listened to Chris Parker’s daily (except Sunday) weather forecast and afterwards announced that we might have a change in plans. Sam has a 9-day flying stint starting on May 17. That gives Sam and Dawn two weeks to get the boat back to the US coast to a marina where Dawn will feel secure while Sam is off flying between Atlanta, New York City, London, and Amsterdam. But the wrinkle in the plans to see me off tomorrow and then do a leisurely trip through the island of Abaco before returning to a US port between Florida and South Carolina. They were hoping to get the boat to Little River in South Carolina, but Fort Pierce in Florida was the back-up. Well, the weather forecast this morning basically said move now and arrive somewhere by Thursday afternoon or be prepared to wait for two weeks. If we get the same weather report in the morning, Sam and Dawn decided that they are going to head to Fort Pierce immediately. They will sail from Marsh Harbor to Crab Cay tomorrow and then leave Crab Cay early on Wednesday morning arriving in Fort Pierce by 11 am on Thursday. I have been debating just how to get home using the Delta buddy pass that has already been purchased. But flying on a buddy pass is flying stand-by and although it looks like there are still seven spots available on tomorrow’s flight from here to Atlanta, the flight from Atlanta to Boston is filling up. Soooooo . . . I just might hitch a ride on Windbird to Fort Pierce, hitch another ride south to the airport at West Palm Beach, and fly home on Thursday evening from there. Sam and Dawn promise me that I am welcome as a crew member on the passage back to Florida and my sister-in-law Sue and her husband Brad say they are happy to drive up from Boynton Beach to pick me up in Fort Pierce and deliver me to the airport in West Palm. My niece, Lynn, from the Boston area will down visiting with her parents, and I’ll enjoy seeing all of them even if it is just for a few hours. However, the final decision won’t be made until tomorrow morning right after the weather. If the weather window for the passage has narrowed, then I will still try to fly out of Marsh Harbor tomorrow and Sam and Dawn will leave here and make their way through the islands with the hope that there will be another window for the passage to Fort Pierce next Sunday-Monday. If we do decide to leave in the morning, I will post a quick log to let you know because it is doubtful that we will have internet again until we reach Fort Pierce. Stay tuned.
After listening to the weather this morning and discussing the quick change of plans, we headed into two to the coffee shop to use their internet to search for flight alternatives for me if I do make the passage to Florida. Dawn and Piper walked to the pink sand beach to get a bag of pink sand for to take home while Sam and I did our searches. When Dawn got back from the beach, we got in the dinghy and rode across the harbor to the dock at the lighthouse. Dawn sat with Piper since she had been to the top of the lighthouse before and Sam went with me to the top. The views were spectacular and I loved seeing the inner workings of the rotating kerosene-powered fresnel lens. It is the only lighthouse like this in the world that is still manned by a lightkeeper. After the lighthouse tour, it was back to Windbird to secure her for the passage to Marsh Harbor. Marsh Harbor is the third largest town in the Bahamas behind Nassau and Freeport. It certainly doesn’t have the appeal of quaint little Hope Town, but it has a huge grocery store called Maxwell’s and a fleet of Sunsail charter boats. When we arrived we headed straight to the fuel dock at Conch Inn Marina / The Moorings to fill up with fuel and then found a place to anchor in the somewhat crowded harbor. Sam stayed on the boat to work on a temperamental bilge pump while Dawn and I went to buy provisions at the huge grocery store called Maxwell’s. According to the 2014 Guide to Abaco, Maxwell’s is the largest supermarket in all of the Bahamas. When we came home, Dawn made granola for the passage and right now we are waiting for her no-knead bread with habanero pepppers to complete baking before we go ashore to have dinner. This was supposed to be my farewell dinner, but Sam and Dawn just might not get rid of me that easily!
by Judy Handley | Apr 30, 2017 | 2017 Life Logs |
2017 Life Logs, Day 120: Great Guana Cay to Elbow Cay
Date: Sunday, April 30, 2017
Weather: Mostly Sunny; Strong Trade Winds E 20-22
Location: On a Mooring in Hope Town, Elbow Cay, Bahamas
Today was a sailing morning . . . tacking down the Sea of Abaco to Hope Town. The afternoon was spent ashore exploring on land in the most picturesque Hope Town. I’ll get to the description of Hope Town, but first I’ll go back to the morning. We had a delightful sail most of the way and then had to motor sail the last bit. We still have strong easterly trade winds blowing, and due to wind and current, if we had gone in a direct line from Fishers Bay on Great Guana Cay to Hope Town on Elbow Cay, we were going to have to motor. So, Sam and Dawn decided that they would set a course to sail by tacking our way there. Doing this doubled our mileage but was probably as fast as motoring into winds and current. We didn’t arrive before high tide, but we did get to the entrance to Hope Town just after high tide and had no problem with the shallow entry. As you head toward the channel leading into Hope Town Harbor, the candy-striped lighthouse built in 1863 greets you. It is still lit by a kerosene-powered mantle that fuels the rotating fresnel lens. You can visit the lighthouse from 9 to 6 on any day but Sunday. We didn’t know that and when we went there to see the sunset, the grounds were closed. So, we’ll go back tomorrow morning before our noon time departure for Marsh Harbor on Great Abaco Island. We need to leave here at high tide as there are 5 and 6 foot spots to transit. Today, coming in just after high tide, we saw nothing lower than 7 foot 3 inches. That gives Windbird a foot to spare. So, we will try for a successful repeat of today’s entry on our way out tomorrow.
There is no room to anchor in the harbor here, so we picked up a mooring ball. We no sooner anchored than Dawn served a lunch incorporating various left overs. There was taco salad, kabobs, and grouper and rice and beans from last night’s dinner at Nipper’s. Fat and happy, we dinghied to the Lower Town Dock. Sam took Piper for a walk and returned her to Windbird while Dawn and I walked the “road” to the Upper Town Dock to meet Sam. I put “road” in quotes as it is just a double-wide sidewalk serving walkers and golf carts. And since almost everything in Hope Town is closed on Sunday, we basically had the sidewalk to ourselves. There are little shops, bed and breakfast type places to stay, a couple of restaurants, and a sprinkling of private homes. Each and every one is painted in sherbet colors of pink, yellow, blue, orange, and white. Everything is crisp and clean and multi-colored flowers from Bougainvillea bushes drip over the edge of every fence. Sam joined us at the Upper Town Dock and we kept walking. We had read that there are pink sand beaches on the ocean side of town and we wanted to compare them to the ones we saw on Eleuthera. Ever since Dawn and I saw the pink sand ornaments and bowls on the Eleuthera island tour, we have both wanted to try to make some of the things ourselves. I did collect a gallon bag of sand, but today Dawn brought three bags to collect some for her projects. The beach we found on the ocean side of Hope Town did not disappoint. It was immediately pinker than the Eleuthera beaches, so we bagged it up. That meant we had to carry it in our backpacks the rest of the afternoon, but ‘crafty’ women don’t let a little weight stop them. We continued walking the beach and Sam noticed a bar on the hill above the beach that was open. As we walked up the hill, Dawn and I stopped to take photos of hedge with beautiful red seed pods. I’d never seen this tropical treasure before and would love to know what it is. And while we were admiring the local flora, Sam went ahead and was shooting baskets with a kid at the Hope Town School. Finally, we found the Reef Bar & Grill at the Harbor Town Harbor Lodge. We enjoyed a cool drink while soaking in the beautiful ocean view and talking to a particularly ‘lively’ cruiser who bought his catamaran in France and sailed it to the Caribbean and on to Florida. He now spends his winters in the Bahamas, sails the boat back to Florida and then summers in West Dennis on the Cape. On the way back to the dock, we discovered that there is an upper “road” and a lower “road”, so we walked to the end of the lower and return on the upper making a stop at Munchies to pick up some conch salad for dinner. We went back to the boat to drop off the heavy sand-laden bags and took our sundowners in the dinghy to go visit the lighthouse. As I said previous, that didn’t work out, but on the way home we stopped to talk to some cruisers from North Dakota and Punta Gorda, Florida. Mike on Fair Winds, the Lord Nelson from Punta Gorda, also flies small planes and has a brother who is a commercial airline pilot, so Sam and Dawn enjoyed talking to him. We ended the day with grilled steak for dinner and are spending a quiet evening reading, writing, and making plans for tomorrow.
Almost forgot to mention dinner at Nipper’s on Great Guana Cay last night. We all had grouper and it was great. Nice spot with beautiful ocean views. I’ll post photos when I get home.
by Judy Handley | Apr 29, 2017 | 2017 Life Logs |
2017 Life Logs, Day 119: Arrival in the Abacos
Date: Saturday, April 29, 2017
Weather: Sunny; Strong Trade Winds E 20
Location: At Anchor in Great Guana Cay, Bahamas
The 132-mile passage here from Eleuthera took us exactly 24-hours. I was able to sleep on my off-watch time, but Sam and Dawn were not as fortunate. They did sleep some, but the rowdy conditions didn’t make for peaceful rest. I have the gift of being able to fall asleep no matter how rough the conditions, so last night’s romp across the Northeast Providence Channel and up the east side of the Abaco islands was no different. But we all felt like a nap was in order this
afternoon to catch up on lost sleep. Sam and Dawn are still napping, so I took this opportunity to write today’s log earlier than normal. We will be going to shore for dinner and hopefully I can post it then.
I enjoyed last night’s passage. The sliver of a moon set early, so I had no moonlight on my 10 pm to 1 am watch. I prefer moonlight, but last night there was nothing to “watch for” on my shift. Not a creature was stirring except for the brilliant stars in the sky and the fairy-like sparkles in the water from the phosphorescence. Sam’s 7 pm to 10 pm gave him a challenge, however, when the AIS showed a Carnival cruise ship on a collision course. But seeing that early on the chartplotter screen gave him time to quickly change course to get that situation under control. For the non-sailor’s out there, AIS allows you to see other registered vessels right on your chartplotter or radar screen. The Garmin chartplotter and AIS capability are new additions to Windbird and they do make navigation easier at night. But Sam and Dawn are very disappointed with their new Garmin wind speed instrumentation. The wind indicator on the top of the mast is supposed to send a wireless signal down to the read-out panel in the cockpit, but it only works half the time. So sometimes you can see wind speed and wind direction and half the time you can’t. Last night this affected the actual time of day readout and when the wireless system was working it showed the true windspeed anywhere from 20 to 500. Those were new issues that surfaced last night. But the chartplotter still shows the accurate position of the boat, so the issues were more an aggravation than a problem. Sam and Dawn will have to wait until they are back in the US to talk to Garmin to work out the problems.
So hopefully I will get to send last night’s log and this one to the website when we go ashore tonight. We hope to move to Hopetown tomorrow morning and will be in Marsh Harbor on Monday afternoon as tides require us to enter and exit Hopetown around noon on those days. If the Delta ‘buddy pass’ thing works, I’ll be flying home on Tuesday. Flying that way is cheaper, but you are on stand-by. If that doesn’t work on Tuesday, I’ll buy a regular ticket to Nassau on Wednesday morning and on to Atlanta and Boston via stand-by.
The update I heard from my sister on Thursday on my brother-in-law Joe’s recovery from his knee surgery was good news. He is now home and doing well. But today I got news from my good friends Ed and Lynne in Nyack, NY, that Ed fell on Thursday and broke his hip. So I sure hope Joe is continuing to do great and I’m sending all the positive energy I have to Ed to help him with a speedy recovery from the hip surgery. Hopefully both Joe and Ed will be back on the golf course sometime this summer.
by Judy Handley | Apr 28, 2017 | 2017 Life Logs |
2017 Life Logs, Day 118: Overnight Passage from Eleuthera to the Abacos
Date: Friday, April 28, 2017
Weather: Sunny; ESE Winds 18, Turning E 20
Location: Northeast Providence Channel
So far, so good with this overnight passage to the Abacos. Most of the day we were sailing dead downwind as we sailed from east to west from Rock Sound on Eleuthera to the Fleeming Channel. We just got through the channel and are now headed northward in the Northeast Providence Channel. The first part of the day was a rolly downwind sail and now that we have turned we have 20 knots of wind on the beam. The seas are a choppy and once in a while we get a big wave that throws us a bit, but we are flying toward the Abacos. We will have an early dinner, so I can sleep from 7 pm to 10 pm while Sam is on first watch. Dawn is going to stay up with him until the sun goes down and then she will try to sleep as well. My watch is from 10 pm to 1 pm and then not again until 7 am in the morning. So other than a bit of a lumpy ride right now, all is well on Windbird.
Saturday Morning, 11 am: We made it! We are at anchor behind Great Guana Cay in the Abacos. It is much more upscale here than the Exumas or Eleuthera. It looks more like Florida than what I have seen of the Bahamas. We do not have internet on the boat, but we will go to Grabber’s bar onshore this afternoon and try to use their internet to send this log. Life is good.
by Judy Handley | Apr 27, 2017 | 2017 Life Logs |
2017 Life Logs, Day 117: Rock Sound to Governor’s Harbor
Date: Thursday, April 27, 2017
Weather: Crazy Weather Day–Early Morning Squalls to Changing Wind Directions
Location: At Anchor in Governor’s Harbor, Eleuthera
Today was a crazy weather day. I woke up sometime during the middle of the night to thunder and psychedelic lightening. I tried to convince myself that this was not going to result in rain, but I finally succumbed and got up to close the open hatches. Rain had not been forecast this far north, but we all know about weather forecasts. It was hot and humid, so closing up the boat was not a first choice. But waking up to pouring rain inside the boat was also not a first choice and I made the decision to button up everything and went back to bed. Sometime later when the pouring rain woke me up, I was very glad that I had closed up earlier. When we all got up at 6:30 am, Sam was listening to the morning weather report from Chris Parker. Chris was not on today, so his substitute was forecasting. And indeed, the squalls that had been forecast yesterday for much further south were upon us and wouldn’t be subsiding until mid-day. Since it was windy and rainy and leaving in that kind of weather just wasn’t what we wanted to do, we decided to turn a negative into a positive. We went to the laundromat to do a final wash and rinse of the cockpit cushion covers without having to use any more of Windbird’s water supply. Washing those cushions became a ‘must do’ yesterday when we returned from shore and found that a split in Piper’s paw had become worse and he had bled all over the cockpit cushions. Since we were having guests for dinner, we simply took off the cushion covers and Sam scrubbed the spots with Shout and put the covers in the shower stall to soak overnight in Oxi-Magic. But rinsing them was going to take a lot of water and the laundromat seemed like the best option since we had some time to kill. A couple of hours later, we returned to the boat with clean clothes and clean cockpit cushion covers. And as soon as we got back on the boat, we were off for Governor’s Harbor. We left with SSE winds in the 10-12 range and with our angle to the wind, we decided it was a perfect time to put up the spinnaker with the pole out. The first problem arose when the spinnaker pole attachment to the mast broke. Thankfully it held until we were able to lower the pole. Sam and Dawn got the pole down on the deck and then we raised the spinnaker. By this time, the winds were down to 4-6 knots True, but with our angle to the wind, we were going along just fine. THEN . . . the wind shifted from 145 degrees (SE) to 80 degrees (just north of E) which put us instantly on a close reef at 7 knots. We got that under control, took the spinnaker down (broke a shackle in the process), and then the winds slowly backed to 112-120 degrees, so we put the headsail and the staysail out and had a great sail until we got closer to our destination. We finally had to use the engine to get into the anchorage. It was a challenging sailing day due to the weather and “equipment’ failures, but still it was a good day on the water.
Tomorrow at 10 am, we will leave here headed to the Abacos. For some reason, we don’t have a internet tonight, but hopefully that will be fixed by the morning and I will be able to post this log before we here. If not, it will be Saturday afternoon before I can post again if we have internet on Great Guana Cay. If not, we will be in Hopetown on Sunday night and we should be back in the land of internet by then. So no worries if you don’t see a log for a couple of days.
