The plan was to spend two weeks leisurely cruising the Abacos with Britt's dad Gene. We'd concentrate on the uninhabited islands with nearby reefs, snorkel and fish and read, drink rum and watch sunsets from the cockpit, and eat fresh fish every night. Well, it was a good plan, and we'd made a good start on it, but unfortunately circumstances snuck up and whopped us on the head -- or more precisely, poked us in the eye.
When we were in Florida installing the autopilot and the watermaker, back in January, Britt accidentally scratched his cornea with a plastic ruler. (Gory details in the 1/20 log.) It seemed to heal fairly fast, but it's bothered him on occasion over the last four months, so we had suspected it hadn't healed completely or properly. At Manjack Cay it started hurting a lot more than usual, and when it didn't get any better by the next day despite eyedrops, we decided to head back to Marsh Harbour and find a doctor.
The bad news is that Britt's eye had gotten a lot worse -- the original scratch had reopened and pulled a big flap of tissue with it, so he had what amounted to a big gouge right over his pupil. We needed to stay in Marsh Harbour for several days of treatment, which is also bad news, because we'd rather be out among the less crowded islands. If we hadn't needed to return to Marsh Harbour, we'd have been able to get a little farther out in our exploration of the Abacos.
But the good news is that the clinic doctor here is great. He spent far more time with Britt than the specialist in Florida did, at less than half the cost. While the Florida doctor looked at it once, told him "it'll get better on its own", and sent us on our way with nearly $50 of prescriptions, this doctor inspected Britt's eye each day for three days, putting ointment in it and taping it up with gauze. On the third day, he pronounced it completely healed. We're hoping that he's right!
When we left Marsh Harbour for the second time we picked up where we left off, sailing to Powell Cay, an island just a few miles beyond Manjack Cay. With the wind out of the northeast, we had a smooth ride behind the barrier islands. We dropped anchor just after 5:30 pm; Britt had to dive on the anchor to hand-set it in the grassy bottom. After drinks and dinner, we sat in the cockpit to watch the sunset.
The sunset, unfortunately, was spectacular. Unfortunate, because what made it so spectacular were several large forest fires on Great Abaco which have been burning for the past week. Directly across the Sea of Abaco from our anchorage, near Cooper Town, great plumes of smoke spilled into the clouds, casting deep purple-brown shadows across the reddening sky.
The dry season in the Bahamas always brings the risk of fire, but this has been the worst year for fires in recent memory. 20% of the forest in Abaco has burned so far, in a series of fires which have also consumed several houses. There is a lot of worry here about the boost to the desertification process in the wake of the fires: rain tends to fall over vegetated areas, and the islands are in desperate need of rain at the moment. The locals are also painfully aware that tourists come to the Bahamas expecting a certain "tropical experience", clear water and trees gently waving in the breeze, not ash-clouded bays and blackened sticks.
The fires have been attributed to a number of causes. Everything from broken glass along the roadway magnifying the sun's rays, to the practice of setting fires to "smoke out" wild pigs from the woods for hunting, has been blamed. We've been seeing (and smelling) smoke for a week, ever since we got north of Marsh Harbour.
The
next morning we motored to Moraine Cay. It was so calm that the
water's surface was totally flat and transparent, every blade of
seagrass and clump of coral clearly visible. Windom's bow
broke the pale green into foam, which rapidly coalesced as we passed
through, becoming glass again in our wake.
The anchorage at Moraine Cay hangs out in apparently open water, but it's protected on two sides by extensive coral reefs which rise from 30 feet or so right up to the surface. Open corridors snake here and there through the dense structure, sometimes forming big sandy pockets surrounded by reefy walls, sometimes dead-ending into coral caverns. The colors and shapes are incredible, but unfortunately the visibility was poor, as tidal currents churned the water into a somewhat murky deep green.
Britt spotted a large snapper lurking in one of the caverns, and stabbed it with his pole spear. As he drew it out, he saw that it was a very big snapper, three feet long. It was still thrashing around despite its wound -- and it thrashed itself right off the spear. The fish was hurt badly, though, so it couldn't do much more than swim in erratic circles for a few minutes while Britt repeatedly tried to stick it again. Finally he got it, lifted it (with some effort) over his head, and swam slowly back to the dinghy.
I had been watching the drama from a few yards off, but once the fish was recaptured I turned my attention to a huge school of large chub that had been swimming around the area. Some of those chub were enormous. In fact...that wasn't a chub, it was a shark! I quickly moved away from the chub and toward the dinghy, figuring that the predator was after the school, but the shark followed me instead. It was a big, broad, powerful-looking shark, probably a bull shark, and he was a little more interested in me than I wanted him to be. When I looked back at him he veered off, then circled back toward me. Then I saw a second shark. At that point I stuck my head up and waved somewhat frantically toward the dinghy, where Britt and Gene were already getting the anchor up. I encouraged them to hurry.
I carefully swam toward the dinghy, trying to make good speed yet not look like a thrashing, wounded, scared piece of food (the death throes of the not-quite-stabbed fish had no doubt attracted the sharks in the first place) and I did not look back. When I flopped myself over the side and looked back into the water, there were the sharks, circling below. Snorkel-time was clearly over.
Alas, when we got back to the boat and looked up the monster snapper in our fish guide, we discovered that it was a cubera snapper, and there was a good chance it was ciguatoxic. We decided not to risk it, but to cut it up for bait and try line-fishing for something else. Britt and I grabbed the rods and some tackle and headed back out to the reef.
We anchored the dinghy near where we'd been snorkeling, because we'd seen some yellow jacks and yellowtail snappers, and hoped one of them would bite. We rigged up some small hooks with big hunks of cubera snapper and dangled them over. Nothing. Britt cut up a few more hunks and tossed them overboard for chum. I angled the look bucket to watch them drift down and see if any of the fish looked interested.
"I wonder where those stupid sharks are," said Britt idly. Just then, a dorsal fin flashed across my look-bucket field of vision, and I gasped involuntarily.
"I think I found them...or they found us!"
Of course the fish vanished as soon as the shark showed up. But we saw another shark, and then another. In addition to the bull shark that had chased me back to the dinghy, there were several blacktip sharks, and a small nurse shark on the bottom, vacuuming up the scraps that made it all the way down. They circled the dinghy exactly like they do in New Yorker one-panel cartoons. Suddenly, my fishing rod bent as the line went taut.
"I caught one! Oh no, I think I caught a shark!"
"Go ahead and play it. Since we don't have steel leaders, it'll just bite through or break the line."
It was over in less than a minute, but it was a lot of fun. It was so much fun, in fact, that Britt decided he wanted to hook a shark, too. After that, well, um, I'm embarrassed to say that we indulged in quite a bit of catch-and-release shark fishing. One of us would watch the bait with the look bucket and warn the other, "ok, it's a big one...no, he just bumped it, wait, he's coming back, get ready, NOW!" We never made much progress in reeling them in (for which we were thankful, because we sure didn't want to land one!) but we'd usually get a little back-and-forth before they broke the line.
I felt a little bad about leaving all these sharks with hooks in them, but Britt assured me that since we were using small and cheap Wal-Mart hooks, they'd either rust out or work themselves out reasonably quickly. After all, the hooks were smaller than fish bones, and sharks deal with those all the time. We also assuaged our consciences by tossing out liberal handfuls of un-booby-trapped fish hunks. The sleek forms of the sharks flashed and shimmered just below the surface as they glided back and forth, snapping up pieces of fish.
Finally, we tossed out the still quite fleshy cubera carcass, and the shark crowd went wild. They tussled over it, bumping each other with their snouts, and bumping the dinghy bottom as well. I hope we haven't taught these sharks that yummy goodies come from dinghies, since we really broke the "don't feed the animals" rule, which we usually scrupulously obey. On the other hand, a lot of those yummy goodies had nasty sharp hooks in them, so maybe the lesson is mixed.
The anchor chain was wedged in a crevice, but there was no way either of us would jump in and free it by hand! Fortunately, by driving across the crevice we were able to free the anchor and reel it aboard. We dinghied back to the big boat, hoping the sharks wouldn't follow, but none of us felt much like going swimming anyway. We had burritos for dinner that night.
The following afternoon, we fished from the boat, using some snapper we'd saved from the day before, and caught half a dozen saucer-eye porgies. While we were fishing, the sharks showed up; they could have been attracted by the fishes thrashing, or by the smell of the bait, or because a man on a trawler near us had cleaned some fish and tossed the scraps into the water in the anchorage an hour or so before. The porgies were curious but wary of the predators; if a shark wasn't in the immediate vicinity of the bait, they'd all rush to bite. When a shark came near, though, they all scattered. After a while, we had three blacktip and five nurse sharks swimming around our boat, and the little fish disappeared for good. Britt cleaned the porgies we'd caught and fed the sharks the scraps. (Ordinarily he dinghies out and dumps the scraps well away from the anchorage, to avoid attracting predators, but they were already there.) Then we moved to a less sharky island for the night.
At
Green Turtle Cay we slid into the Black Sound anchorage at high tide
with very little room to spare under our keel. It turned out to have
been a good decision to enter the almost landlocked harbor, as late
that night a big thunderstorm blew through. Finally, enough rain to
wash all the salt off the boat! It wasn't enough to put
out the fires, though, because the next day they still burned.
The next morning, high tide wasn't until nearly 1 pm, and we were anxious to get moving again so that we'd have time to snorkel. It happened to be approximately halfway between a full and new moon, so the tidal difference was relatively small (a low high tide and a high low tide), and we risked leaving at 11:15. I saw depthsounder numbers as low as 5.2 -- usually, that means we're aground -- but we never bumped the bottom as we slid out the narrow entrance. The bottom in Black Sound is dense, dark grass (that's what makes it black) and I guess we just creased the underwater lawn.
We had a short but pleasant sail and anchored near Guana Cay in the lee of an island which was created out of the spoil from dredging the cruise ship channel and basin by Baker's Bay. As usual, our snorkeling trip took us to incredibly beautiful reefs, although again the visibility was only 60 feet or so, and Britt stabbed several fish for dinner.
After returning to Windom for our evening cocktail hour, Britt and I went ashore on the not very poetically named New Spoil Bank Cay. According to the guidebook, it's a great place for shell collecting. There were certainly a lot of shells -- in fact, the entire beach was covered with them. But after looking at the beach for a moment, we realized they were all moving! Every single spiral-type shell was occupied by a hermit crab, and it looked like we'd arrived just at hermit crab rush hour. Since we didn't want to make any of those poor crabs homeless, we forbore collecting shells and just watched them scurry this way and that across the beach.
After Britt's dad catches his plane, we'll look for the first good weather window to sail back to the US. We've had calm weather lately, but we're hoping for a bit of wind so we don't need to motor the whole way; we can sail faster than we can motor, and we're planning to do a long offshore leg this time.
If conditions permit, we'll go all the way to Beaufort NC, about 540 sailing miles from Abaco. It's sort of counterintuitive, but Beaufort is actually northeast from here; the coastline between Cape Lookout and the Georgia Florida border runs almost as much west as south. However, since we're going north, we'll go northwest to where we can pick up the Gulf Stream, then follow it northeast. The current will give us a big boost which more than makes up for the 70 miles this adds to the route. It should take us 3 to 4 days. If we either lose our wind or get into bad weather, we'll make for Charleston SC or some other port along the coast.
I'm looking forward to this trip, our first longer-than-overnight ocean passage. Maybe it's because I'm too inexperienced to dread it properly, maybe it's because it will be a new experience, and will give us a better idea of what we can handle. Maybe it's just because I'm hoping that when we're out of sight of land, we'll be well out of range of whatever stupid pollen is triggering my allergies.
In our spare time (snorkeling, reading, and napping takes up so much of the day!) we've been getting Windom ready. Cleaning the bottom was a major task which took us both two hours of hard work. Our speed under power has been about 0.8 knot slower than it had been on the ICW, and we know why. Dark red grassy growth carpeted nearly every bit of the hull below the waterline, and although it came off easily with vigorous scrubbing, there was a lot of hull to scrub.
Scrubbing the bottom of a boat while it's still in the water requires a special technique. I would gulp air through my snorkel, then dive to the bottom and hold on to the keel with one hand, scrubbing with the other, my feet braced against the curve of the hull to keep me upside-down and in position. As I ran out of breath, I'd let go and let my upper body drift up, scrubbing as I went, then finally kick against the hull to propel me to the surface for a heavenly breath of air. I always had to float for a few moments, panting, before descending again. It was quite a workout!
We also sanded the prop clean, and replaced the zinc on the prop shaft. We'd last replaced the zinc just over three months ago, but it was already corroded almost to the point of falling off the shaft. We're going to need to haul out sometime this summer to repaint the bottom, this time with something that will handle the soft growth of the tropics. (We had used Pettit Trinidad, which did a great job keeping barnacles off but didn't seem to slow down the slime and grass.) Hopefully, the new zinc will last until we can replace it during the haul-out, because we're not going to be in nice warm clear water until next winter.
While we worked on the hull, we noticed that our waterline has really changed over the winter. The Caliber design makes it more logical and easier to install systems and run cables on the port side, so we have a slight list to port. To counter this, when we loaded up with supplies in Florida, we stored everything heavy -- cans, bottles, and so on -- on the starboard side. Now that we've used many (although by no means all!) of our stores, we're showing a lot more waterline on the starboard side. We'll try to even things out again by moving some things around so we won't feel like we're heeled over at anchor!
Well, with luck the next web update will be made from back in the good old US of A. Wish us good weather and winds on our quarter, no seasickness and plenty of mahi-mahi!