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.

This is one of my favorite sea creatures. They're so graceful, flying through the water.

currently at:  Northwest Point, Mayaguana
current date: 16 March 2005

This is my least favorite part of cruising. No, it's not a tricky reef entry, nor a breakdown of some critical bit of equipment. It's saying goodbye.

When it comes down to it, cruising is all about the people you meet. It's probably not a coincidence that our best times and most enjoyable memories center around places where we were with people who had become good friends. When we were traveling solo in the fleet - not when we were by ourselves alone, but among other boats we didn't know or didn't feel a connection with - we always felt a little dissatisfied, a little unhappy. It was better to be completely on our own, but even then we always looked forward to meeting other people and sharing the experience.

Traveling with Ithaka over the past month has been absolutely wonderful. Douglas and Bernadette are like us in so many ways, from our outlook on cruising to our outlook on politics, and yet their backgrounds and experiences are so different from ours that we can always learn something new from them, and they from us. We'll greatly miss the wide-ranging conversation that took place almost every evening in one or the other cockpit. We'll miss Bernadette's delicious cooking, and Douglas's gusto with a pole spear, and most of all their willingness to explore with us all these rarely-visited anchorages that we've been enjoying together.

Ithaka and Windom finally left Samana together a few days ago, transiting the complex reef break at mid-day when the visibility was good and moving a few miles to what's called the "Columbus Anchorage," which is a sandy shelf just west of the anchorage we'd been in. It's not particularly protected, but the winds were light, and the point was to be somewhere we could leave safely to begin our passage in the middle of the night. After some excellent snorkeling along the deep reef separating the sandy shelf from the other anchorage area, we had an early dinner and set the alarm; at 2:30 am we were lifting anchor and underway for Mayaguana.

The wind had shifted to westerlies so it was a downwind sail; in the morning as we approached Mayaguana we could see the wind-driven waves battering the island's west coast. We pulled in to Abraham's Bay and spent a few days there, recovering from the abbreviated night and snorkeling the reefs. As the wind shifted to the southeast and then fell off to nearly nothing, the seas diminished, and on Monday we motored back out and up the west coast to Northwest Point, a remote and rarely-visited lee anchorage. The water here's the clearest we've seen, turning the sand Bahamian turquoise, and even though we're anchored in 30 feet we can identify the fish that hover near the tufts of soft coral at the bottom.

The snorkeling here has been lovely. We found one area of tall coral heads and ridges bordering a sand channel, filled with grouper and snapper and jacks and lobster. (A couple fewer of them, now that we've been there!) The formations on top of one of the heads resembled a bit of chain...nearby there was an odd sort of circular formation...after poking around, Britt realized we'd discovered an ancient shipwreck. The various relics were so encrusted by coral they were difficult to identify, but it was clear that they were parts of a ship. Britt retrieved one encrusted granite ballast stone - we collect so many rocks from the tops of mountains we climb, it seemed appropriate to grab one from the bottom of a trench!

Douglas, Britt and I have been gleefully hunting the raw materials for seafood dinners. Last night we hosted a big gala farewell, as it were: lobster rumaki appetizers followed by stir-fried lobster with ginger and carrots and orange juice, atop the marvelous basmati brown rice that Douglas makes. Along with us and Ithaka, Simba is here; Frank and Lynda are friends of Douglas and Bernadette's, and they made a beeline here to meet up with them, as they're all traveling to the Turks and Caicos, and then Jamaica, and then Panama.

Not us. We're turning back west and north again, staying in the Bahamas; we have friends coming for a visit in less than two weeks. We'll head for George Town, where we can refill our propane tanks, buy fresh veggies, and do laundry, then cruise the south-central Exumas with our Colorado friends.

But we won't forget our new cruising friends. It's so great to meet people we really click with, and we don't give them up easily. When we left Windom in Florida to head back to Colorado, our road trip took us from one cruising friend to another, from Maine to Ontario to Michigan; one couple visited us in Colorado last summer, and several others (you know who you are!) have open invitations. So even though it's depressing to say "so long" - we know it's only until we meet again.

Sailing wing and wing (the mainsail is out to port, the jib is poled out to
starboard) approaching Mayaguana after having left about 2:30 am from
Samana. Britt's waving - I'm off watch asleep below. (Photo by Douglas
Bernon.)

--
NOTE: My email is sent and received through a VERY SLOW link. Please DO NOT
quote my message back when you reply. Please DO NOT include attachments.

currently at: Samana Cay, Bahamas
current date: 7 March 2005

Just a quick update to cover a few "administrative details." First, I should point out that we do get the comments made to our log, but we can't reply to them unless you include an email address. (So Mike: thanks very much, and more details about this anchorage will be coming soon. And Jeff - this must be Whish Jeff, right? - ha ha we have lobster and you don't! Why don't you splash that boat and come join us?) If you don't want to make a public comment, you can email us instead at windom[at]windom.netrack.net.

Second, you may have noticed that we've begun including the "current date" at the top of each entry. This is because the software that takes our emailed logs and puts them on the web sometimes hiccups, posting an entry long after the correct date. (This is why it appears that we went to Chub Cay, to Allan's Cay, and then to Chub again - two log entries were posted in reverse order.) We hope this will clear up any confusion about where we are!

We've also decided to participate in the position reporting that our ham email system incorporates. Each time we do email, we'll update our reported latitude and longitude, along with a text comment about where we are. (I'll try to keep it current - I don't have enough ports on my computer to have it automagically grab the information from our GPS!)  

There are two ways of accessing this information on the web. Winlink, the ham email system we use, has a website at http://www.winlink.org/aprs, and the Maritime Mobile Service Net (another amateur radio organization) has one at http://mmsn.techmonkeys.net. In either case, you enter my (Ilana's) ham callsign, which is KG4EYP. Both sites show map views of our most recently reported position.

We hope you find this interesting and useful!

currently at:  Samana Cay, Bahamas
current date: 10 March 2005

We've been at Samana Cay for over a week now. One day a catamaran pulled in late in the afternoon and left early the next day, and another time a powerboat that looked like a dive boat did the same, but other than that it's just been us and Ithaka. Although oddly, yesterday we saw someone walking on one of the beaches, but saw no boat and no dinghy. Maybe he was a ghost, walking the ruins of the settlement that used to be here in the 1950s. We took one small hike among these ruins and found the local deacon's gravestone (1906-1966), numerous decayed stone buildings, and sisal plants growing in what must once have been neat rows.

We've also combed the beaches for interesting debris; among the plastic motor oil bottles, random shoes, and fishing-net floats, we found two small fenders in fairly good condition. We walked through the currently-empty fishermen's camp, and made one aborted attempt to bushwhack across the island. Our daily snorkeling expeditions have fed us well on lobster, grouper, and conch. There's a lot of dead coral here, unfortunately, but the surviving elkhorn formations are stunning, and the coral heads form interesting canyons and mazes that usually hide tasty fish.

Yesterday we took Douglas and Bernadette aboard Windom and motored down along the uncharted south coast to the detached cays on Samana's eastern tip, looking for a possible break in the reef that we thought we'd spotted from the top of a small hill on one of our walks. As soon as we left the anchorage, we were in the wilderness, as none of our charts of the island show any detail at all outside of this one small area. What a spooky feeling, sliding along a reefy coast, watching the water, watching the depthsounder. There's some evidence that Samana was Columbus's first landfall in the New World; perhaps he sailed the same route we took, scanning the reef as we did, but he had no charts at all, no GPS, no electronic depthsounder, no engine. Just taking our little step off the chart was scary enough. (We didn't find any other entrance or other anchorage - I think you'd have to explore from the inside in a small boat or dinghy with a portable depthsounder to really check out the coast safely.)

It's not an unalloyed paradise, though, because this is one of the rolliest anchorages we've ever been in. Our strategy has been to move from one part of it to another, choosing our meager protection depending on the wind, while Ithaka stays serenely anchored in the middle, splitting the difference. Perhaps we roll a little less than they do for our efforts, perhaps not. Last night the wind built out of the southwest, and by this morning it was a steady 20-25 knots; we had anchored close to the offlying Propellor Cay, and as the tide dropped and the surrounding reef became exposed, the protection improved. But as we ate lunch (fresh triggerfish sausage and the last of the broccoli I'd bought in Staniel Cay) the squall heralding the frontal passage hit us, and we moved into the cockpit with our plates, watching the reefy edge of the cay approach as Windom swung around to face northwest. The pair of ospreys that we'd watched with binoculars the previous afternoon cawed angrily, as our boat got too close for comfort for both them and us, and with the first drops of rain our engine was on and we were lifting anchor, moving back to join Ithaka. If the windshift to the north persists - our forecast sources differ - we may move even closer to the beach on the Samana side. If it switches back to south, back we'll go to the Propellor Cay side. Or maybe, whatever the wind, we'll head on out and go somewhere else. We've got just over two weeks before we have to be back in Staniel to pick up guests, and there are still more islands out here to explore.

Ilana, Douglas, and Britt show off their catch. (Douglas's fish is a yellowfin grouper.) Picture taken by Bernadette Bernon, s/v Ithaka.

The shallow bay near our anchorage is used occasionally by fishermen from Acklins Island who camp in shacks along the beach there. There are also ruins of stone structures from the 1950s, when this island was farmed and used as a more regular fishing base.

Discarded conch shells left on the beach at Samana slowly become buried in the sand.

Currently at: Samana Cay, Bahamas
Current date: 4 March 2005

The title of one of our Bahamas guidebooks, by Steve Pavlidis, is On and Off the Beaten Path. (A book we recommend very highly!) The first section covers the island chains that are frequently visited by cruisers; the second describes places where few yachts venture. The Jumentos Islands, where we spent two wonderful weeks in 2000, whetted our appetite for more destinations "off the beaten path."

Here at Samana Cay, not only are we off the beaten path, we are just about at the far end of the lightly-treaded path, nearly into wilderness. This nine-mile long uninhabited island lies far from the usual cruising routes, about 20 miles northeast of Acklins Island, another rarely-visited destination. The only anchorage is gained by a narrow and intricate unmarked passage through the hazardous reef that encircles the island. Our other Bahamas guidebook, the Yachtsman's Guide, says:  "We advise against including Samana as a port-of-call." Which, of course, only convinced us that we really wanted to visit!

We'd been talking with Ithaka about making an overnight jump from the Exumas to Acklins. The wind, which had been out of the south, was expected to swing around to the northwest and then slowly to the north as a cold front passed, but with relatively light winds; our course would be east to clear the northern tip of Long Island, and then southeast, a nice broad reach all the way if the forecast held. As we looked at the chart, our eyes couldn't help straying to Samana. The expected light north wind would give us a perfect flat sea for entering the anchorage on its south side; both we and Douglas and Bernadette came to this realization at the same time, and with only the barest bit of discussion we changed our plans, re-calculated our routes, and set off for Samana.

It was a pleasant sail, a bit rolly but never rough, and although the wind varied from 22 knots (in a squall that saw one 30-knot gust, but which thankfully passed quickly) down to under 8 knots, we sailed every bit of it until we drew close to Samana, 144 miles and 26 hours later. The water in the lee of the island was indeed flat and calm, and with the sun high overhead the reefs were plainly visible. When we reached the waypoint given by Pavlidis, we took down the sails, switched on the motor, and did a slow pass parallel to the reef, looking for the way in.

There it was, right where the guidebook had indicated - a path of light blue-green sand between the yellow coral banks. Britt stood on the boom for a better view of the water, giving me hand signals; I drove Windom slowly through the channel, which was perhaps 50 feet wide and 1000 feet long. Calling it a "channel" is probably overstating the case; it's a winding, irregular affair, meandering from side to side, and navigating it reminded me of nothing so much as shooting a rapid on a western whitewater river, dodging around obstacles left, right, and center. But although it certainly required our full attention, it was not, to my mind, significantly harder than driving among the tightly-packed piers of a marina, or negotiating the bends of the dredged canal where we stayed at Key Largo - and if we made an error here, at least we'd only damage our boat!

That said, I should point out that both Britt and I are skilled at reading the water (he more so than me, as he gets the bird's-eye-view while I man the wheel), and we had overhead sun, no seas, light wind in our face, and a very small current with us - nearly perfect conditions. (Hopefully we'll have equally perfect conditions on the way out - or we may not be able to leave!) Pavlidis's sketch chart and waypoints are right on, and they are invaluable for anyone attempting this entry.

As we anchored we watched Ithaka negotiate the passage, and soon they were anchored by us. It's an odd sort of harbor; we're protected on the north by the main island of Samana, and on the south by the offlying Propeller Cay, but to the east and west only the reefs break the seas. Swell curves around and comes in over the reefs, making it a bit rolly even in the calmest weather, and today a low pressure system nearby brought 20-knot winds, making our anchorage as bouncy as the passage had been! But we're reasonably well protected from anything big, and there's not another human being within 20 miles or more. A beautiful, remote island; good friends to share it with; a long beach for walking; a reef teeming with delicious fish and lobster, and grassy flats covered in conch - I suppose a flat calm harbor would be too much to ask for!

Though one of our guidebooks claims that the uninhabited, remote island of
Samana Cay has "no provisions available", we found a well-stocked grocery
reef. Britt and Ilana each caught a lobster, and Douglas speared an
enormous yellowfin grouper.

Currently at:  Samana Cay, Bahamas
Current date:  2 March 2005

On the BASRA (Bahamas Air-Sea Rescue Association) weather net every morning, boats reporting weather conditions also include a count of how many cruising boats are in the harbor with them. With the Cruiser's Regatta a little more than a week away, George Town has nearly four hundred; counting every anchorage in the Bahamas, from crowded Marsh Harbour to little-visited Mayaguana, there are probably over twice that many - say 1000 yachts, give or take. A nice round number. Sounds like a lot of people, doesn't it?

I know that there are boats we never see, people we never meet. But from our perspective, it seems like we are always hearing the same names on the VHF and SSB radios, seeing the same familiar boats island after island, swimming in a very small pond. That in itself isn't surprising, as most Bahamas cruisers ply only a small subset of the hundreds of islands. What has surprised us is the sheer "networkiness" of the cruisers' web.

We drove Windom out of the anchorage at Big Major's Spot and pulled up to the little anchorage closest to Staniel Cay to pick up our laundry (and get some wireless internet access) before moving to a more protected anchorage just to the north. While there, the dinghy from Cantaloupe Island pulled up; "You're the friends of Heiner and Marleyne on La Buena Vida!  We heard so much about you!"  (We spent quite a bit of time with La Buena Vida in the ICW and Bahamas our first winter, and visited Heiner and Marleyne in Kingston, Ontario on our RV trip back to Colorado.)  A few days later we jumped south to the Leaf Cay anchorage by the Caribbean Marine Research Center on Lee Stocking Island and met Siqqittuq and Varuna 1, both also friends of La Buena Vida; then at a cocktail party on Varuna 1 we met Ted and Beth on Plankton, and it turned out that we'd met Ted's father on his boat Windsong (which is also a Caliber 40 like Windom) in Titusville, our first year.

So there may be a lot of cruisers out here, but it seems to us almost like an extended family, a whole bunch of people who are all tenuously related to each other. And like any family, we're all very different. A Montreal salesman, a Newport magazine editor, a Baffin Island banker, a Colorado meteorologist - what could such disparate people have in common?  Nothing except our "family" - our shared connection through cruising.

But cruising is self-selecting; we've met people we love and people we are merely polite to (sort of like a family!), but we've met very few real jerks. All of us are adventurous, willing to try new things, interested enough in the real world around us to do without television and shopping malls for a winter or a year or a lifetime. We're all intelligent enough to learn the skills needed to live and travel on a small boat. And we have that in common - when all else fails, we can always talk about spearing fish or anchor selection or navigation. But we've found that boat talk makes up only a small part of our cocktail party conversation, because just about everybody seems to have interesting lives and unique stories.

For now, though, we've left just about all socializing behind, other than with Ithaka, with whom we continue to travel. After an overnight passage from Leaf Cay, we are now at one of the most remote and least-visited islands of the Bahamas, Samana Cay. But that's another story...