Wacky Weather
Plus: Solo mooring drama, and learning to live in the shallows.
Well, a pretty great run of decent weather is coming to a close, with lots of strange wind directions and fronts all around. I spent the last two nights at Hawksbill Cay in a south and then southwest wind and a nasty wraparound swell that kept Laughing Gull bouncing around and making noise (I have unsecured wires inside the mast and they make their presence loudly known when there is any roll going on). So not very comfortable. On the plus side, since this location is not favored with these conditions, I mostly have the spot to myself (which I guess could also mean that I am not very smart).
I have no complaint, though. The Exumas are a paradise when the wind is anywhere in the northeast to southeast quadrant (which is where the prevailing winds blow from). And that’s where they have been for almost 10 days, the longest stretch since I arrived. It was only a matter of time before the dreaded “active weather” pattern re-asserted itself, and started pushing fronts through again. The fronts, some of them stalled and without direction, mean lots of wind directions other than Northeast to Southeast. And winds from anywhere with a “west” in them open most of the anchorages to swell. There are a number of places you can hide when fronts mess with the prevailing wind directions, but most of them involve snaking through sometimes shallow channels and dealing with strong, switching currents, when you are anchored. The choices are especially limited if you have a 6.5’ draft, like LG. It’s all just a reminder that nothing is for sure, and the weather gods will do as they will.
I made the most of the good times while they lasted. Since leaving Staniel Cay and stopping in Sampson Cay last week, I have been exploring the Exumas Land and Sea Park. It is a series of beautiful, undeveloped cays, which have pristine beaches and lots of trails. There is no anchoring outside designated areas, and the entire park is a no-take zone (no fishing of any kind). That means an abundance of wild- and sea life. I saw sharks, turtles and wading birds every day. The contrast to all the other places outside the park, where cruisers are hauling fish, lobster and conch out of the waters at a wanton rate, is striking. I can’t help imagining what all the Bahamas, indeed all the oceans, would be like if we just stopped strip-mining them and let them thrive.
I started my exploration of the Park in the Emerald Rock area, and gently pushed into the mooring field on a rising tide to see if there was enough water for me. No charts in the Bahamas are particularly reliable so you have to revert to 19th century sailing and figure water depths out for yourself. I made it to a mooring but there was, barely, 8 inches of water under my keel at low tide. Normally, that would be a cause for discomfort. Down here you get used to it.
Emerald Rock was beautiful, but the northern mooring field near the park headquarters, which is situated in a narrow channel surrounded by shallow sand flats, was even better. I had put myself on the wait list a few days earlier (there is high demand and you can only go in if the park warden has assigned you a mooring ball) and was given the go-ahead to relocate there on Saturday.
I have to admit my heart was a bit in my mouth as I brushed by already moored boats on one side and sand flats on the other, and wondered how I was going to nail the mooring pickup solo with both wind and current pushing LG around. I’m not sure if I was reckless or complacent to even make the attempt. But you do what you have to do.
My usual solo mooring procedure is to set up a line on the bow, with an already-extended boathook alongside. Then I try and lay the bow alongside the mooring ball and pennant, stop the boat, race forward from the helm (hopefully without tripping or stubbing a toe), pick up the pennant, thread the line through the eye and bring it back to a cleat on LG…all before wind or tide start to push LG’s 17 tons away from the mooring. If the line is not secured to a cleat by the time LG starts to put her weight on it, there is no way I can hold it. Well, I can try, and have tried, and it hurts.
So far, this has worked well and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. And if I do miss I can always just circle back and try again, with an updated understanding of how wind and tide are pushing on the bow. But this mooring was high risk. If I missed I would have to race back to the helm before the wind or current pushed LG onto the shallow sand half a boat-length away…AND then manage to turn her 50 feet around within her own length without plowing into the sandbank on the opposite side of the channel or another boat. No pressure.
Going toward the mooring ball I surveyed everything carefully. Wind, current, boatspeed, depth. My brain absorbed and considered the data, crunched it around, and transmitted instructions to my hands on the throttle and helm. The bow closed with the mooring ball. “Just don’t miss, just don’t miss,” I whispered to myself over and over.
I missed. There was more flood current than I anticipated and it pushed my bow too far from the mooring ball and pennant by the time I got to the foredeck. No chance to grab it. I did an abrupt 180 and sprinted back to the helm. I gunned the throttle and put the wheel hard over to kick the stern around. The engine roared, prop wash gushed from the transom. LG’s bow slowly started to turn and I prayed I would get fully turned around without the nightmarish crunch of keel hitting the bottom or boat hitting boat.
My prayers were good ones, apparently. I made it, barely. Disaster averted. Momentarily. Now I just had to do it all over again. So I completed the circle and lined up for Take 2. That is when I saw the guy in the trawler moored nearby hop into his dinghy. Please be coming to help me pull this off, I implored all the gods I don’t believe in. Sure enough he zipped alongside and offered to lend a hand. I asked him to take his dinghy to the mooring and grab the pennant. I laid LG’s bow alongside his dinghy, and he grabbed the line I had ready on my foredeck, threaded it through the mooring pennant eye as I came forward, and handed the line back to me. I quickly cleated it. Done. Easiest mooring pickup ever. I can’t begin to adequately describe my relief.
I thanked him profusely. He answered, “No problem. As you went by I slowly realized you were on your own and couldn’t really believe you were going to give it a try. So I was ready.” That is the spirit and culture of the cruising world in a nutshell. Any skippers nearby are on the alert and ready to help. No questions asked. And no compensation needed (I did offer him an ice cold Sands Bahamian lager as I was certainly headed for one or two myself).
It was only after LG was settled in that I fully realized how tight things were. As low tide approached LG lay perpendicular across the channel and her 50 feet put her transom almost onto the sand bank. I hoped the park ranger knew what she was doing when assigning me this mooring. Just in case, I put on a mask and snorkel to go take a look. I was about to hop in when a dark shadow swam slowly from underneath the LG. A 5-foot shark, possibly a lemon shark, was apparently also interested in my mooring situation.
I let the shark swim off a little ways and then dropped into the clear blue water. LG’s rudder was about a foot off the sand and it wasn’t yet low tide. Hmm, this would be close. Back on board I shortened up the mooring pennant as much as I could to pull LG toward the center of the channel and away from the sand flat. I extended and marked depths on a boathook. Whenever I needed reassurance I’d stand on the transom and push the boathook to the bottom to see how much water was under me. The lowest depth I saw was just around 6.5’, which is LG’s draft. Not a lot of water to spare, but good enough. I had achieved Full Bahamas Chill, not sweating things as long as there is at least a few inches of water under the boat.
All the trouble was worth it. The north mooring field was spectacular. Flat water, good paddleboarding, good swimming (when sharks weren’t passing by), and trails on land to stretch the legs. I stayed three nights, and would happily have stayed longer. But the waiting list is long and I didn’t want to hog a mooring beyond what is reasonable. It was time to move on.
It is easier to release a mooring solo than it is to pick it up. But I spent a lot of time thinking about my departure, worried that by the time I got back to the helm after letting the mooring ball go the annoyingly stiff wind might push me backwards onto the sand. There was only one way to find out. I was just about to go for it, when a couple passed by in their dinghy. This time I asked for 2 minutes of help, and they happily indulged me. While I remained at the helm they released the mooring for me and returned my bow line safely to the deck. I powered ahead right away, full of gratitude and with only a slightly elevated heart rate (I still had to thread my way past all the other boats without hitting one or running aground).
That departure brought me to my current spot—Hawksbill Cay. Very pretty, and superb beaches, but the protection is not great with the wind almost in the south so there is constant rock and roll. There is plenty of water, or at least it feels like plenty of water: a full 9 feet at low tide. And space to swing when squalls roll through. That’s a reasonable trade. So I have been bouncing a bit, cursing a bit, and watching lightning storms pass by to the east, while rain clouds drift by to the west. Not every day out here can be sunny and pleasant. Which of course makes it all the sweeter when good conditions return.
News Worth Noting:
Boo! Wrong Answer: Scientists decline to declare officially that we are in the Anthropocene Era:
Is it time to mark humankind’s transformation of the planet with its own chapter in Earth history, the “Anthropocene,” or the human age?
Not yet, scientists have decided, after a debate that has spanned nearly 15 years. Or the blink of an eye, depending on how you look at it.
A committee of roughly two dozen scholars has, by a large majority, voted down a proposal to declare the start of the Anthropocene, a newly created epoch of geologic time, according to an internal announcement of the voting results seen by The New York Times.
By geologists’ current timeline of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history, our world right now is in the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago with the most recent retreat of the great glaciers. Amending the chronology to say we had moved on to the Anthropocene would represent an acknowledgment that recent, human-induced changes to geological conditions had been profound enough to bring the Holocene to a close.
Whatever bureaucratic BS and over-analysis led to ignoring reality, here’s a good summary of all the ways in which humans and human activity are changing Earth.
Undoing Human Impact: The root of the problem—abandoned and discarded fishing gear—goes unaddressed. But these rescuers are doing what they can (click on image to watch some beautiful videos).
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Thanks Tim, you got my heart rate up as well
Good post. See you soon! I'll help with the mooring, of course!. Safe travels,