Coming over to the Bahamas with a few brand-new installations could be seen as risky. After all, if something's been put together incorrectly, it's likely to cause trouble pretty quickly, and it's easier to deal with equipment trouble in the land of plentiful parts and a West Marine on every block. So far, though, things are looking good.
The autopilot has been performing beautifully, and we wonder how we ever managed without one. It's so nice to be able to adjust the sails while on a solo watch and not have the boat wander off course. In strong wind, keeping the wheel hard over always required muscle and effort -- now we just let Bob do it. (Calibers have lots of weather helm, i.e. they always want to round up into the wind, so when sailing to windward, the rudder needs to be turned away from the wind. The stronger the wind, the more force is required.) The shielded cable and RF suppressors seem to work, or at least work enough so that the SSB doesn't interfere with the autopilot. The only strangeness is that sometimes when we're steering to GPS waypoints, Bob gets confused about which waypoint to go to, and will try to turn the boat around to go back to the waypoint we just passed. When that happens, we tell him to "autosteer" on a constant course for thirty seconds or so, and that usually gets us fully past the waypoint so that the next one registers properly.
We fired up the watermaker for the first time on our way from Nassau to Allen's Cay. It seemed like it was making water just fine...and then we heard a "pop". A hose connection had popped off, and we'd gotten water all over the settee storage area where the watermaker is installed. As I drove, Britt cleaned up the mess and then fixed the hose connection. Since then we've had no problems other than a few small leaks we can't seem to fix. The feed pumps tend to overheat after about 40 minutes continuous running, so we will eventually have to install a fan to improve the ventilation. We have two pumps on two separate circuits, so for now we just run them alternately for half an hour each. How nice it is not to have to conserve water! We still probably use way less than the average non-cruiser, but we're sure not hurting.
Another commodity that we're well supplied with these days is power. Much of the equipment we bought was chosen with an eye toward power consumption and conservation, but while we were in the ICW, motoring long hours daily, it was hard to assess how much we could minimize running our engine.
Thanks to the abundant wind here in the Bahamas, we have so far not had to run our engine at anchor at all. The longest we've spent in one spot has been our four nights at Allan's Cay, where the wind generator easily kept up with our power consumption. We did end up motoring one 5-mile day that we could have sailed, partly because our batteries were low, but also to heat water. At Allan's Cay it was sunny enough for us to use our solar shower to heat water for dishes and showers. We may end up wimping out and running the engine every once in a while just for hot water. If we don't need to charge our batteries, we can run the inverter and power the water heater, which will give us hot water much more quickly than the engine alone.
Having the wind generator is only part of the equation. Our big alternator makes a lot of power during short periods of motoring (we motor the last bit into and out of anchorages). We chose energy-efficient models of watermaker and refrigeration, and we have 12-volt refrigeration, with no freezer.
Probably the biggest power savings we have comes from a last-minute purchase at the North Palm Beach West Marine. I had often joked that our anchor light consumes more power than our refrigerator. The masthead bulb uses 2 amps, so if we turn it on at 6 pm and don't turn it off until we get moving sometime around 8 am, that's 28 amp-hours used. Depending on the air and water temperature, our refrigerator uses about 25-35 amp-hours each day, so it's pretty close! On one of our many visits to the West Marine, we noticed they had the Davis "Mega Light" for sale, and snapped one up. It's got a tiny but bright bulb, and a fresnel-type lens that magnifies the light so that it can be seen at the regulation distance for anchor lights. And it burns less than a tenth of an amp! We hang it in our cockpit, where it helps keep us from tripping over things at night as well.
We'd heard that anchoring in the Bahamas was tough, but so far we've had no problems at all. Our anchors set easily in the sand bottom. When we snorkel down to look at them, all we see is chain disappearing into the sand. Maybe we just haven't been to any of the places that are really scoured out.
[Well, it's two days after I wrote this last paragraph, and it must have jinxed us, because our last two anchorages put the lie to it all! The bottom's a thin layer of sand over hard stuff, and getting a good set has been difficult. In Compass Cay we put two anchors down at an angle to each other, and trusted in the weather forecast of light winds, and in Staniel we moved to a slightly better spot, and spent a lot of time getting our anchors to set well.]
When Odyssey arrived at Allan's Cay, we dinghied over and watched with our look bucket (a bucket with a clear Plexiglas bottom) as they set their anchors. It was interesting to see their CQR dig in as they powered on it -- it went straight down in a cloud of sand. Their Fortress wobbled back and forth as it was dragged through the sand, piling up sand in front of its flukes. The sand piles quickly became big enough to make the anchor stop and set.
We have gotten pretty good at anchoring with two anchors off the bow, one set forward and the other aft. It's called the Bahamian moor, but we first did it in Beaufort NC, and it's a great way to anchor in a reversing current or anywhere you want a minimal swinging radius. Some people set the second anchor from their dinghy, but we just let out more chain from our windlass and drift back until we are where we can drop our second anchor, then pull in the chain to pull us back to the center. We then set the second anchor with the motor in forward -- since we have 50 feet of chain on it, it's held down and we don't worry about line getting into our prop.
The only problem with anchoring this way is that sometimes the two anchor rodes get all twisted up when the boat swings around with the current and wind shifts. Our solution is to always put out our 50 feet of chain plus a little line on our second anchor (which is fine since we have been anchoring in 7-12 feet). The chain and line are joined with a shackle, so when we leave, Britt undoes the shackle and unwraps the rodes, then replaces the shackle. Now we have nice untwisted anchor lines, and we take them in one at a time, first the slack one and then the one we're hanging on.
We're still eating high on the hog, although the hog is canned ham rather than fresh pork chops. The fresh vegetables we bought three weeks ago are gradually being used up, but they're still all in good shape thanks to careful storage in "Evert-fresh" green bags in the fridge. Green bags are impregnated with some chemical which (I think) absorbs or neutralizes the ethylene gas that fruits and veggies give off. I wish I'd known about them back in our backpacking and river rafting days, because they are really great for prolonging fresh veggie life.
I'm glad that I didn't skimp on provisions, since we haven't been anywhere near a grocery store in two weeks. I'm also glad that we bought a lot of fresh stuff instead of relying strictly on canned goods; they sure taste better. Of course, the real test will be how we're doing after three months, not three weeks.
I had been worried that it would be too hot to bake bread, but the cold fronts chill things down to the point that we're happy to have any excuse to turn the oven on. I'm guaranteed at least two really good bread-baking days each week, it seems.
The other half of the provisions equation is trash, and we're doing our best to keep it from becoming a problem. We're separating our trash (organic, burnable, glass and metal, plastic) and trying to keep each pile as compact as possible. Food scraps go into a Rubbermaid container which is kept in the fridge until we are in open water and can feed the fish. Paper goes into a bag, and glass and crushed cans go into a bucket. Other cruisers suggested the trick of using a plastic bottle as a container and stuffing other plastic trash into it -- this works great. We were pretty conscientious about getting rid of as much potential trash as possible before we left, so we don't actually generate very much garbage. We use small plastic grocery bags as trash bags, and it looks like we fill about one a week.
So far this month we've spent exactly $65. Yes! Of course, it helps to be cruising mostly among uninhabited islands.
No phone, no e-mail, no mail, no television, no newspaper on our doorstep each morning. We're not completely out of touch, just sort of selectively informed. We get an AM radio station out of Nassau, and the BBC on shortwave, but for some reason the VOA doesn't bother broadcasting toward this area very frequently. So we know about the new landfills being constructed outside of Nassau, and about the status of the Mid-East peace talks, but we've got no idea how the presidential primaries are going, nor whether we've made or lost money in the stock market. (Although I imagine if the Dow totally crashes, it will at least make BBC headline news!)
The one information commodity that's in good supply is weather. (This is a good thing, because on a daily basis the behavior of the weather is much more important than that of the stock market.) We get our weatherfaxes twice daily over the SSB, and if we wake early enough we listen to the 7 am Bahamas Weather Net. The weather forecasts for south Florida and the Bahamas are also rebroadcast in the morning over VHF by various marinas and other shore stations. For the past week or so we've been within range of "Blue Yonder" out of Overyonder Cay, who rebroadcasts the weather at 8 am. She does a really great job, inserting helpful editorial comments and explanations; it's clear she used to be a cruiser.
A lot of singlehanders are the male halves of former cruising couples. Many aspects of cruising can cause tension between partners; of course, we don't have stress from long rush-hour commutes or worries about losing our jobs, so maybe it all balances in the end. We struggled with issues we'd never thought would cause problems, just like most other cruising couples, and had ridiculous arguments about whether to anchor here or there, and about who was really to blame for that last grounding. Our new life seemed like an awful lot of work without a lot of time for fun. But eventually, like most cruising couples, we got past our egos and insecurities and found a comfortable groove. And it's really nice to have gotten all those major projects finished, so that we can enjoy ourselves now that we're in the islands.
It's great to have a partner who shares the cruising dream. With those couples where one is enthusiastic and one is lukewarm, you just know there is trouble brewing. The people who seem to us to be enjoying themselves the most have partners who are equally enthusiastic and happy to be out here. Just like us!