Well to those of you who are familar with the sailing life know that even the best laid plans do not always happen exactly as you expect them to. We left Bimini Sunday morning at 10am planning to anchor on Mackie Shoals overnight and then make for Frazer's Hog Cay on Monday. All the weather sites seemed to agree, we were expecting 10 knots of wind from the south. Not so!
We got to Mackie Shoals around 3pm and it was waaay too rough to anchor there overnight. Our engine also seemed to be acting a bit strange, we believe running on only 2 cylinders so we turned it off and decided to sail overnight to Great Harbour Cay, the direction that the wind was blowing (SE). I spelled Brian for about 2 hours so he could get something to eat and take a break.
At dark everything started out quite nicely, the wind died to maybe 5 knots, it was so light we watched a movie in the cockpit and around 9:30pm I attempted to get a little sleep.
I woke up around 2am and we were rocking and rolling. The wind was almost due east and were blowing 15 knots and gusting and fluky from the S and E. Being on the Bahamas bank, the chop kicked up and the seas were maybe 5 feet. More than we normally like that's for sure!
We finally made it outside of Great Harbour Cay but because it was dark we could not attempt to go in until daybreak. We had to anchor in pitching seas which always sucks, but hey, smashing your boat into the rocks is a bad day. We actually slept for a little bit which is pretty amazing since we were pretty much on a see saw.
Anyway, finally at about 8am we pulled anchor and went into a narrow cut in the rocks into Great Harbour Marina, which is a nice and peaceful spot. We are planning to stay 2 nights and have a diesel mechanic listen to our engine and see if we can determine what is up. We aren't too worried about it anyway because really we only need the engine to get in and out of anchorages so if it can limp along we will go wherever the wind takes us. We also have our 15 hp outboard that we use on the dinghy that we can mount on the back of the boat and do like we did on Sponge.... ugh! It makes us mobile anyway.
This chicky is exhausted so no pictures tonight!!
Fair winds, Nicole and the crew
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