Crossing the Gulf Stream turned out to be fairly easy; the wind was too much on our nose to sail, but we motorsailed at a good clip all day. Neither of us got sick, but the swell made it pretty hard to actually do anything strenuous (such as, say, standing up. After making sandwiches for lunch, I needed a good 20 minutes rest). We didn't have much to do anyway, since Bob -- our newly-installed Robertson AP21 autopilot -- handled the steering chores. (There was a temp agency in Boulder that ran radio ads with a guy calling his boss and apologizing for being away from the office an extra day, and his boss says, "Oh, no problem...now that we've got Bob! Heck, take an extra week off!") We crossed onto the Great Bahama Bank at Great Isaac Light around 5 p.m. The shallower water of the Banks quieted the wave action, and shortly after dark the wind clocked around into the south enough for actual sailing.
We kept our speed down since the guidebook said that the Northwest Channel Beacon area (where the Bank gives way to deep water again) "should be transited with utmost caution" -- the light tower that used to be there was hit by a boat a few years ago, and the ruins are not very visible and still dangerous. There are also rocks at some distance away, so we wanted to go through this area with daylight. In retrospect, our GPS waypoint turned out to be just fine and there was a lot of room between the marker and the rocks, so we could have done it easily in the dark. This would have saved us from...The Squall!
The weather started getting rainy and windy around 5 a.m., so we stopped and anchored (in the middle of nowhere) and got a little sleep. The next morning, things weren't too much better, but we got moving again around 10, motoring into a stiff headwind and bucking-bronco seas. At 11, conditions went entirely to pieces. The wind increased from 15-20 knots to 25 and higher, and it started raining again. Britt went forward to drop the anchor so we could wait it out; the boat was bucking so much that he should have used a snorkel! The anchor chain jumped the roller and he had to work to get it in position. By then, the wind was blowing over 30 knots. He quickly dumped the anchor and a whole lot of chain overboard, and we both went below to wait it out.
We bounced around like a carnival ride, but the waves weren't scary-big, and we could see by our GPS that our anchor was holding us in position. (Not that it mattered; there was nothing around to hit for miles.) The top windspeed our instruments recorded was 44 knots. Later, when we looked at our weatherfaxes, we could see that we should have known this was coming. However, we didn't get the faxes that showed these winds until 7 pm that evening, after we were already across the Gulf Stream and on the Bank, and we couldn't have done much about it anyway, other than continuing as fast as we could rather than going slowly and even anchoring so as to pass our marker in the daylight.
Other boats had seized the same weather window we had, and some of them had much rougher conditions during the squall. Nautilus had passed into the deep Northwest Channel early that morning. They got 55 knots, since they were completely out of the lee of Andros Island, and much bigger waves, because of the deeper water. Seatrek had an even worse experience. They had just passed into the deep water, and the strong winds pushed them north so they had to fight to stay off the rocks and reefs at the edge of the Bank. They took on a lot of water, and later discovered that they had gotten water into their transmission fluid. We were all happy to get into the protected marina at Chub Cay. (Although, to be honest, the only place I got scared on the whole trip was the Chub Cay entrance! Rocks and reefs to the left, breaking waves on a spit to the right, and a barely-visible range leading us into a sharp right turn through a rock-walled channel only a little wider than the boat. Yikes!)
We stayed for the next several days while it blew like stink. We cleared customs and then retreated back into the cabin, where we worked on little projects. It was too cold to go snorkeling, too cloudy to lie on the beach, and too windy to think. When the wind finally quit howling, the marina emptied completely as one sailboat after another slipped their lines and headed out.
Of course, after having too much wind for days, the day we left was almost too calm to sail. We managed to sail most of it, though, since we were only going the 40 miles to Nassau and didn't need to make tracks. The deep water was a luminous blue; we trailed a lure, but nothing bit. We dented our budget yet again by choosing to stay at a marina. Nassau has a reputation for poor anchorages and dinghy theft, and we knew that a marina could direct us to the services we needed most immediately: a marine store and a dentist. In Chub Cay we'd discovered that the dunking our bow pulpit had endured during the squall had knocked the lens from our navigation light off the boat, so we needed a replacement. Britt had a crown that had come loose as well, although fortunately it hadn't floated off the boat, and he wanted to get it recemented.
It was easy to fix both boat and Britt in Nassau. This place is a bustling city, thronged with tourists that come on humongous cruise ships. You can get anything you want here, although it's likely to cost about 50% more than what you'd pay in the US. We hiked around town and visited a few small museums and the ruins of Fort Fincastle, but the highlight of our stay was a visit to the Atlantis resort, a true monument to what can be accomplished with ridiculous amounts of money. The resort's centerpiece is a beautifully designed aquarium, where fish swim lazily around jars and pillars and other artifacts of a lost civilization. For a mere $300 a night, you can take a room there for the night, entitling you to lounge on their beach, swim in pools surrounded by gardens and sculptures and temples, slide down waterslides, and hike their carefully-designed nature trails. Gambling in their casino, however, is open to all. All visitors, that is; Bahamians are not permitted.
I'd gotten a little bit blue in Chub Cay. Several boats we'd been socializing with crossed the same day we did, but none of them crossed with us; Ariel had left Lake Worth directly for Freeport, and Effie and Arcturus had gone down to Miami and crossed to Cat Cay, near Bimini. It seemed like everyone else in Chub Cay had gone over together, and although they weren't intentionally excluding us, we felt a little bit like outsiders. Combining that with the lousy weather and the crummy marina, I was feeling a bit short-changed by Paradise.
We got a bit of a lift when Flirt, a boat we'd seen on the ICW, came into Chub the day before we left, and we all got together for dinner. Then, a few minutes after we tied up at the dock in Nassau, we heard our friends on Gratitude, who we hadn't seen since Fernandina Beach in early December, calling Harbor Control on the VHF. Flirt made it to Nassau later that evening, and Odyssey showed up a few days later. We met a few more people on other boats (including one couple on a Caliber 38, which is almost identical to our 40), drank a few beers in pleasant company, and the weather even improved a bit, so pretty soon I decided that cruising wasn't so bad after all.
Nassau has been an interesting place to visit, but we're getting itchy feet again. We'll head next to the Exumas, which reputedly have some of the finest cruising in the world. We are looking forward to snorkeling in this clear water, maybe catching a fish or two, and lying around and doing not much of anything.