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We have been anchored off of Hilton Head Island for 10 days, spending time with Bill’s sister and her family. It was great fun catching up in a place that has so many happy memories collected over the last 50 years.

We have been waiting for the last few days here at anchor in Calibogee Sound for the weather to shift. Winds have been blowing out of the southeast to southwest, making a trip further south problematic. That changes early tomorrow afternoon when a cold front drops down through this area. After a cold front passage, the wind switches from south west to northwest, usually very quickly. This weather pattern will continue for most of the rest of the week.

We expect a fast sleigh ride with the wind mostly behind us, the trip taking about two and a half days down to Fort Lauderdale.

Unusually for us, we have a couple stakes in the sand on our calendar over the upcoming weeks. Next Monday Harmonie will be lifted out of the water for renewal of her bottom paint. We expect to be out to the water for two weeks getting her ready for an extended season of cruising. All of the usual stuff, with the addition of a professional survey for our insurance underwriters. If all goes to plan, we will be back in the water on December 6.

While in Florida we will be running around doing some medical stuff and other life logistics. Bill is scheduled for the exciting (?) experience of a wisdom tooth extraction.

Once we get done with all this, we are headed back out to the Bahamas, and then down the Caribbean.

You are the crew on a luxury superyacht. You find this EMPTY box:

What do you do?

1. Leave it there, it’s not your job to clean up after the gallery staff.
2. Toss it in the trash.
3. Take it to the gallery and dump the rest of the washing up tools in it so everything is organized in one place.

The correct answer is actually #1. The box is an original piece of “art” by Andy Warhol, and is worth $3,000,000.

The actual crew on the yacht made the wrong choice (They threw it in the trash bin). Oooops.

Harmonie’s Plan

We have been at anchor at anchor in Charleston, South Carolina for the past few days with some unusual neighbors in the anchorage:

Within a few hours we will ride the ebb tide out of the harbor here and head south again. This time our destination is about 12 hours away, Hilton Head Island. We’ll spend a week there, catching up with Bill’s sister and her family while they are there on vacation.

From there, we will make our way slowly further south toward Fort Lauderdale. We are going to have Harmonie out of the water for about 2 weeks at the end of November. During this time, she will get her bottom painted and a few other projects will be attended to.

One trip up the mast, and we got our sail put back where it needed to be. After a night’s sleep at anchor, we are off again! Pretty much back where we expected to be 24 hours ago. Right now we are blasting along at 8 to 9 knots on a beam reach, the temperature is moderate, in the low 80’s, and mostly cloudy. Overall a fast and comfortable sail.

Weather allowing, our next stop will be the weather buoy located 125 miles off Cape Canaveral to see if we can’t put some tuna in the freezer.

Speaking of fish…

We had a pair of strange visitors last night. We had the flood light on off the back of Harmonie as we frequently do to see what we can see.

Getting a photo of a fish underwater at night from the deck of the boat is not easy, and rarely are great results obtained, so apologies.

Fish with the body size of about a silver dollar, and long fin filaments off the top and bottom stretching almost 2 feet in length.

Hampered by these exaggerated appendages, swimming was slow and inconsistent. Strange creatures.

What they are is juvenile African Pompano. Normally at this stage of life they are pelagic drifters, and not seen inshore. The adults are big, tough, mean looking members of the Jack family.

“Bill, the sail fell down!”

Not the best way to wake up. We were making good time on a comfortable broad reach sailing with just our genoa and our mizzen. The genoa had come detached at the top of the mast, and was quickly settling down into the water.

It wasn’t going to go anywhere, it was still attached at the bottom, but it is a very big, heavy sail that gets REALLY heavy when it full of water. It took about 20 minutes to drag it all up on deck, and get it tied down safely.

It seems the lashing that holds the head of the sail to the swivel had come undone. The good news is I had not tied it on, the crew in Martinique did that as they were reassembling things after the work they did. The bad news is that without the weight of the sail, the swivel is stuck at the top of the mast until I get up there to pull it down. To do that, we are headed into a calm anchorage. We are motorsailing in that direction now, and hope to be there late tonight.

Tomorrow we’ll get the sail back up, and be on our way.

After a little more than a week anchored off the uninhabited Plana Cays in the Bahamas, it is time to move on.

What does one do for a week on an uninhabited island? You hike miles of beaches with no footprints in front of you. You explore all kinds of interesting things the ocean has tossed up, seemingly just for you. You catch fish. You bird watch. You are surprised one morning when you wake up to a sister ship to your boat anchored a few hundred yards away, and discover they are old friends we haven’t seen in several years.

But like all great things, this great playtime comes to an end, and we had back to the coast of the USA. We lifted our anchor this morning, and set a course for Brunswick, Georgia which will be our base for a month or two while we get some boat projects done on Harmonie, and on some client’s boats.

We are now sailing in easy comfortable weather through the Bahamas. It will be about 4 or 5 days before we make landfall in Georgia. Right now we are under a full moon that is sliding in and out of the clouds. Winds from behind us at about 14 knots. Seas calm and comfortable.

If we believe the weather forecasts, the trip should be mostly just like this. Time will tell!

Not a lot of places can claim to be truly “unique”, and actually one of a kind. Our current location, Hogsty Reef, is one of those. It is the only official atoll in the Atlantic Ocean. It has been on my list of places to see for some time, but to visit the weather has to be pretty stable and cooperative. Finally on this trip, we got here.

Our trip here from Great Inagua was straightforward, and uneventful. 45 miles in 8 hours, mostly motor sailing through somewhat contrary winds.

An atoll is a central lagoon surrounded by a coral barrier reef. In the Pacific Ocean atolls are more common and are most commonly produced when a volcanic island sinks beneath the waves, and the coral grows faster than the land subsides, leaving a ring of coral around a lagoon. Hogsty Reef has a different origin story. A couple dozen feet higher, and it would have been a typical Bahamian Island, but as the water levels rose after the last ice age, the upper surface ended up below sea level, and the coral grew in a ring of reefs around the submerged land in the middle creating a lagoon about 4 miles across.

A least one blogger has pronounced it as “the most isolated place in the Bahamas!” Nice headline, but not true. It is only 35 miles from two other islands, and there are Bahamian islands with more space around them than that. But is does FEEL remote for sure, and visits are rare.

There are two “permanent” patches of land, Northwest Cay, and Southwest Cay. We are currently anchored off the larger of the two, Northwest Cay.

We will not be going ashore here because the terns are still nesting on the island. Certainly one of the smallest places we have ever anchored at. This is also a marine protected area so we will not be fishing or collecting here.

If the weather holds as forecast, we will be spending another day or two here, and hopefully have a chance to get you some more photos from above and underwater.