fetchinketch

Time: 1320 local
Lat: 26° 20.1’ N
Log: 076° 47.3W

After several weeks bouncing around the Sea of Abaco, and enjoying all the many places we stopped there, we are off exploring again.

We are currently underway headed southeast toward Cat Island, one of the larger “Out Islands” of the Bahamas. It is a bit less settled, and a bit less visited, and the a reputation for great fishing.

Right now we are experiencing the very picture of “smooth sailing.” Deep reaching with reasonably steady 10 knots of wind, 4.5 knots of boat speed, and calm seas. We will be sailing overnight, and coming to an anchorage near our destination in the morning.

Weather here in the Bahamas is a mixture of Caribbean tropical and North American Temperate.  That means we get “normal” tradewinds blowing from a generally easterly direction, punctuated periodically by the tail ends of continental cold fronts.  In the 48 hours before a cold front approaches, the wind slowly clocks around from the east to the south west, usually increasing in slowly in strength.  Clouds thicken.  Rain starts suddenly, sometimes accompanied by thunder and lightening.  After a relatively short period of heavy rain, the wind switches suddenly to the north and blows hard for a few hours, then slowly tapers off as the rain fades away.  The wind continues it slow swing around the clock, and soon everything is back the way it started. These days it is all very predictable,  We know, for example, that a front will be passing through in the afternoon two days from now.

For boats anchored out here, this presents a challenge.  There are very few places here you can anchor which will give you protection from winds from all of those directions.  This means you have a couple of options. You can crowd into one of the few protected anchorages.  You can move the boat from one spot to another as the wind changes.  Or you can grab a slip in a marina.  For this frontal passage, we are going to wimp out and do the marina thing.  Once that passes, we are on the move again…

When the dinghy looks like this…

….you know we have been grocery shopping. We are loaded up again for a trip a bit away from civilization for a while.  Here are our plans for the next few weeks.

We are heading about 120 miles southeast to Cat Island, hopefully to enjoy some of the great fishing there.  We will then be back up a little further north to Eleurthera to pick up my friend Alicia in mid May.  Then the last week in may we are joined by Alicia’s friend Annie and–with a full crew–we head north. We are really looking forward to an offshore passage with a crew full of sailors!

Where we will touch land on the east coast is still a bit up in the air.  But our ultimate goal is to get further north than we did last year, at least as far as Nova Scotia before the advancing winter chases us south again.

If you haven’t had the chance, go back to our previous post: Eat Snail  I have updated it with some fun photographs now that we are connected again…

Grand Cay

Now THAT”S waterfront property!

The Grand Cay waterfront.

We have hooked WHAT?

Last night, we had settled in at a comfortable anchorage near Grand Cay in the Abacos.  Shallow water (8 feet), mostly clear sand bottom, breezy (15 to 18 knots) but not anything out of the ordinary.  The last thing we expected was a problem with the anchor .

As part of our normal bedtime routine, I set up the anchor alarm program on my phone.  A few minutes later, the alarm is sounding. Sure enough, we are dragging downwind.  Slowly, but definitely.  In the pitch black, before the moon rise, we get the anchor up and motor back to where we want to be.  Again we drop the anchor.  This time with a LOT of chain out.  At first, it looks good, but a gust of wind, and off we go again.  This is really strange.  I am beginning to have fantasies of replacing this anchor, forgetting that it has held us 199 times out of 200.

One more time, up the anchor comes.  After it clears the water, Karen gets a good look at it with the flashlight.  Ah-Ha!  Stuck on the point of the anchor is… an outboard motor! She manages to get the debris free, and this time the anchor sets down into the bottom like it was bolted down.

Now THAT’S a Wreck!

Off one of the tiny islands surrounding Grand Cay is a huge pile of metal.  From a distance it is not at all clear what it is, but close up, we could see it was the remains of a work barge.  The three tall pilings could be driven down into the bottom to lift the barge out of the water and provide a stable work platform for… whatever.  We haven’t had a chance yet to get the scoop from one of the locals, but a good guess is it was parked there

to ride out a hurricane…  which it didn’t.

An irony… googling the name of the barge–Jim Gibson–turns up a famous English photographer from the Cornish coast who specialized in… yep… shipwrecks.

It has been some time since we have been so far off the grid I needed to post using the Satphone, but here we are!

As we approached Great Sale Cay yesterday at about 3 in the afternoon, the anchorage was empty. It is a well protected anchorage with good holding in deep sand, beautiful clear water, surrounded by a fairly large, yet uninhabited, island. We were approaching from the southeast. Meanwhile, from the west, an invading armada motored ever closer… By 6PM, there were almost 20 boats, mostly motorboats and catamarans, packed in.

It turns out this is frequently the first stop for boats coming into the Bahamas from Florida. Judging by the chatter on the radio many of the boats that arrived were traveling together, and had all likely been waiting for some time for calm weather to make the 50 mile crossing. By 9AM the next morning, they are ALL gone–on a beeline to the bars and social entertainments of Marsh Harbour. One boat pulled his anchor in the pitch dark at 4AM! Really?

It is not fair to expect everybody to cruise the same way, but this is such a beautiful spot, the weather is perfect, and there is so much to see and explore, that to blast through like it was room in a Motel 6 seems to very much miss the point of coming to the Abacos in the first place. Oh well… if we understood people we probably wouldn’t be out here enjoying ourselves far away from civilization on a boat.

This morning we took advantage of the calm conditions. We dropped our mainsail and re- repaired (correctly this time!) our mainsail leech line. The weather is as warm and steamy as anything we have seen since last summer. In fact it is warm enough we are hoping the shower we can see in the distance is coming this way!

Right now we are trying to decide if this afternoon’s excursion will be snorkeling at the blue hole or exploring on shore… Decisions, decisions.

OK, we are not blowing up a lot of things…  just the dinghy.

We do like our dinghy.  Karen has christened it “Rhythm” (to go with Harmonie, get it?) Our inflatable dinghy is our local transportation wherever we go.  Since we inflate and deflate it a lot, we have had a lot of time to work out what works best for us.

The normal air pump used on most dinghies like ours is a foot bellows pump. They work, but I find them awkward and uncomfortable to use.  Pumping at full speed, it takes about 10 or 15 minutes to inflate our little boat.  Not awful, but if it’s hot and sunny, it can be sweaty work.

When Amel built the Super Maramu boats, they included an electric dinghy inflator pump.  As far as I know, these all died an early death, because it is really hard to find a well made unit on the market.  So many of them are little more than toys, built for inflating other toys.

After an extensive search, we think we have found the right answer.  An Italian company named Scoprega has an extensive line of both manual and electric air pumps sold under the “Bravo” brand name. We have found some of these to be well made and highly functional.

Our dinghy needs to be inflated to a fairly high pressure, about 3.5 P.S.I., so our inflation process is a two stage operation.  First, is a high speed electric inflation pump, a Bravo OV10.

Our “fast” air pump, a Bravo OV10

Bravo OV10 Air Pump West Marine sells the same pump with in a store-brand box.  Note that the adapter required to inflate most modern dinghies is NOT included, but must be obtained separately.

This pump runs off our 110V inverter and it is also available in a 220V version. It takes about 3 minutes to have the dinghy nearly full. Although it does suck a fair amount of power (1000W) it goes so fast it has no real impact on our batteries. Other than the vacuum cleaner-like whine, is is an easy and pleasant process.

I say nearly full, because while this pump is really fast, it doesn’t QUITE get the tubes to the full pressure they need to be. For that we used another Bravo brand product, a Bravo 101 hand pump.

We liked this hand pump for a couple of reasons.  The tube that runs to the dinghy is attached to a fixed point on the pump.  On most similar products it is attached to the handle, and goes up and down as you pump.  It also has an easily visible pressure gauge.

Bill puts the final puffs into the the dinghy with our hand pump.

About 10 to 20 strokes on each side, and the dinghy is fully inflated and ready to go.

At least for now, we think we have the dinghy inflation process as close to optimized as it is likely to get.