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.
