Day 152, Year 10: Windbird’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Date: Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Weather: Sunny and Windy, Winds SE 20-25
Latitude: 24 10.828 N
Longitude: 076 28.353 W
Location: Anchored Near Staniel Cay, Exumas
From the subject line of this log, I think it is pretty clear that this was not a good day on Windbird. It started out just fine, windier than our weather guru predicted, but the ride wasn’t terribly rough. We were motor sailing with the main and staysail and were able to fight our way forward. Without the motor, we would not have made any headway, but with it, we were able to maintain a speed of three to five knots. Then, as our English friends would say, things went pear-shaped. Mark decided to go a little off-course so that we weren’t motor sailing directly into 20 to 25 knots of wind. He turned away from land to avoid shallow areas, but this put us out on the Exuma Bank with absolutely no protection. The seas went from one foot to two to three to four to five. When I started seeing seven foot seas, I suggested that we tack back toward land. The captain differed, so we continued on. Finally at about 2:30 pm, he agreed that turning back toward land might be a good idea. So we tacked, and almost immediately the engine stopped running. We assumed we were out of fuel in one tank, so Mark went down to switch tanks. We tried and tried to start the engine with no success. Mark stayed below working on the problem and I stayed at the helm going nowhere. Mark did all of the things that you are supposed to do when you run out of fuel and in doing so, he discovered that our fuel filter was really gunked up. Since there was not much fuel left in the tank, the gunk that settles to the bottom of the tank was getting mixed in thoroughly with the fuel in rough sea conditions. Long story short, we had to change our destination for tonight to someplace closer and we had to sail for five and a half hours to get there. In order to reach an anchorage by dark, we had to sail with all sails up full and that heeled us right over. We were running with the toe rail almost in the water and since we had to tack back and forth, everything in the boat went flying from one side to the other. Normally we would have been reefed down in these conditions, but we needed the speed today. By the time we were close to an anchorage it was after 8 pm and very dark. So we picked a place close by to the western anchorage on Big Majors Spot island and hope that we will get the engine started tomorrow so we can go on into the anchorage. Big Majors Spot is the easy go-to anchorage close to Staniel Cay. There are other anchorages just off Staniel, but none are known to have the good holding that Big Majors has. With the winds that we are predicted to get over the next couple of days, good holding is very important. Thus, Big Majors is probably packed and that’s why we anchored way off. We didn’t want to try sailing into a crowded anchorage in the dark. Thankfully we made it where we did safely. Mark is exhausted and my nerves are on edge, but hopefully a good night’s sleep will fix things.
We are disappointed that we couldn’t make it to our original destination at Black Point on Great Guana Cay. We were really looking forward to seeing our friends Ed and Lynne of Constance. But we are close enough to be able to talk to them on the VHF radio, so at least we were able to tell them that we weren’t going to make it. But we weren’t able to talk to Lee and Lynda on Sea Turtle for most of today. At the start of the day, a boat named Pearl was hailing Sea Turtle on the radio. Sea Turtle didn’t answer, so we called them to tell them they were being called. They never could hear the other boat and this is when we discovered their radio issue. Then as the day progressed and we got further apart, they couldn’t hear us either. They can transmit just fine, but they have a very limited distance for receiving. Since we were having so many issues, we wanted to be able to tell them not to expect us in the anchorage, but it just wasn’t possible. We had talked to them off and on enough during the day to know that they were changing their destination to Big Majors Spot, so we headed there as well. Once we got close to where we were going to anchor, we finally re-established contact. They made it in one piece but they also have some repairs that have to happen tomorrow. So I suppose we will be here for at least one day. We would still love to make it down to Black Point to see Ed and Lynne, but that will depend on how successful we are in getting our motor running again. And, of course, it depends on the weather.
