currently at:  Dollar Harbour, near Long Island, Bahamas
current date: 18 March 2005

Maybe our four uneventful transits of the complex Samana reef entrance lulled us into thinking we were skilled Bahamas pilots. Maybe we were tired after the overnight passage from Mayaguana. Maybe it was just mistake piled upon problem upon error - which is, I suppose, always what's at the heart of mishaps, whether at sea or on land. Windom is sitting safely in Dollar Harbour now, with a little less bottom paint and a few more gouges, but it sure wasn't fun getting inside.

It was a bouncy ride west from Mayaguana with the wind howling behind us. Although sailing downwind requires a bit of wind, 20-25 knots with occasional higher gusts was a little much, especially since the seas rapidly built into big rollers that slewed us around every time they caught our stern just right. It wasn't uncomfortable, but it was noisy, as blocks groaned, lines vibrated, and stowed objects shifted positiong back and forth. Britt, with perfect timing, was offwatch and sleeping while we were in the lee of Acklins and Crooked Islands, while I went off watch just as we poked out into the Crooked Island Passage - Wham! Roll! Bounce! As the wind shifted south and we tucked in behind Long Island, things smoothed out again, and I finally got some sleep.

Dollar Harbour is an unusual strip of deep water between shallow sandbanks that dry at low tide. Although its entrance is between two small cays, it's the shoals rather than the land that provide the protection. Access is over a hard bar to a deeper channel, followed by another sandbar to be crossed before arriving at the actual anchorage; both bars are a little higher than our draft, which meant we needed the help of the tide.

We arrived at the south edge of the bank stretching from the tail end of the Exumas to Long Island at about 11 a.m., about half tide rising by our calculations - which turned out to be about an hour off, but this wasn't really critical. More critical was the route we had entered; Britt had taken the points from the indicated path on Pavlidis's sketch chart, rather than using his single indicated waypoint which lay a bit to the east of that path. The sun was high, which normally would have given us good visibility, but the water was peculiarly milky as we came onto the banks, rather than clear as is usual in the Bahamas, and judging the depth was impossible. We could still see the dark spots of reefs, but the color of the water was a uniform thick, pale blue as our depthsounder told us we were going from 20 feet to 10, and we didn't see any obvious deep water ahead past the shallows. Finally, we had the wind behind us, though at this point we put the sails down and had the motor on for control, and although the swell was not large it was most definitely there, pushing us in and obscuring the features of the already hard-to-read bottom.

Well, we read the bottom all right - by Braille. The depthsounder readings dropped, dropped, and WHAM! so did we, right on the bottom, coming to a dead halt. We were lifted by a wave, and dropped again, WHAM! I screamed in surprise and fright and pulled back on the throttle; Britt yelled at me to power through it, so I pushed the throttle again and WHAM!

It pains me to admit this, but I'm a terrible person to have around in a crisis. All I could think of was, here we are, miles from anybody, and our boat is WHAM! pounding itself to pieces WHAM! on the bottom WHAM! and we are so, so, so in trouble. It wasn't clear to me that powering onto the shoal was going to get us anywhere other than higher and drier, and it was all I could do to listen to Britt and keep the engine revving and not think about the important boat parts underneath us getting smashed to bits. I think I was about two inches from dissolving into a puddle of tears and terror. Britt, on the other hand, kept his cool, looking around trying to spot the deeper water, and when he saw a patch of slightly darker blue off to our right we both became a lot more hopeful. We rolled out the jib as fast as we could, to heel the boat and lift the keel, and not a moment too soon we were in the channel and not smashing against the bottom any more.

Then came the second bar, a curving sandbar that stretched completely across the space between the two islands. We decided to take this one a little more carefully. We anchored and dropped the dink, then took our lead line to sound out a possible path. There wasn't even five feet directly in front of us, but near one end of the crescent the white edged to a pale blue, and that sounded at greater than 7 feet. We returned to the boat, passed over the bar at the place we'd found, and continued in to the anchorage.

After we'd had lunch and relaxed a little, we went for a swim. The water was still thick with sediment, reducing visibility to only a few feet, but it was sufficient to check out the damage to Windom's bottom. Much to our relief, it did not look bad at all. The prop and rudder were unscathed (damage to either of those would have been very, very serious); the bottom paint under the keel showed where we'd hit and slid, and we saw a few small dings and one fairly nasty one, exposing the fiberglass mat, which we've temporarily repaired with a marine sealant and will have to fix properly when we get hauled out. But we are both very thankful that we have a solid boat that can put up with our mistakes and our mistreatment. Which we will try not to push too hard; we have to make it out of here, but now that we know where not to go, hopefully we can figure out the correct path, and not leave any more scrapes of blue bottom paint in our wake.