A work in progress
I haven’t blogged since our last sail back from the Bahamas. This is a restart. I’m getting the band back together: me, Greg, and a boat named Lemonade.
Stranger Things
The day we left Nassau my computer suffered “an electrical event” – at least, that’s what the guy at the Apple store said. “You mean like in Stranger Things?” I asked him, assuming that an uber geek like him would also picture the flashing multi-colored Christmas lights from the Netflix hit series. He was not amused. In trying to diagnose the problem Greg had taken the back of the machine…
Ready or not, here we come
After over two months on the run, we are making our way back west.
Convergence
Our last anchorage before Nassau was nestled between two privately-owned cays, and although we knew we could not go ashore, we couldn’t have been more pleased as we pulled up and dropped anchor. The water was a dusty blue and, for a while, placid as a pond. Though we were hoping to have it to ourselves, and the books all said it was barely big enough for one boat, a catamaran…
Unadulterated Isolation
From Great Harbour our plan was to head south toward Nassau over a six-day period, stopping at a few secluded anchorages along the way. If we had halcyon days during the trip, they were spent hopping down the Berry Island chain. “For those who seek unadulterated isolation, the small unfrequented anchorages behind the cays offer a great appeal for those seeking such a unique location,” says one of our guides.…
Golden days
If, like me, you are attracted to the melancholy of places that time has left in its wake, then you might like Great Harbour. Looking back, halted there as we were by the winds, it feels like we were trapped in a kind of still life, cast in the mellow glow of a 70s postcard. We made friends with a young couple from Montreal and toured their boat. We walked across the island to a long, white…
Marooned
We spent our first day in the northern Berry Islands sleeping, mostly. But late in the day we rallied. Chris and Gabe inflated their pack rafts and we put the engine on the dinghy and trolled over to a limestone rock rising out of the sea bed about 50 yards off. As we pulled up we scared a 4-foot nurse shark and it scurried away. Greg found a bunch of…
Wishful Thinking
So it did not take us 16 hours to get to the Berry Islands. It took almost twice that; 32 hours exactly from the time we pulled up anchor in Nixon’s Harbor but 30 if you figure that we really left from the Bimini Sands Marina where we stopped to get water and ice. When I uploaded my last post, minutes before my cell coverage died and land disappeared from…
Sailing east
For almost a week the north winds howled. When the wind blows at 30 knots it seems to follow you everywhere, whipping at your clothes and hair. Wind like that gets in your head; you have to turn the volume up a little higher than usual on the radio and raise your voice to be heard. Gabe told us about friends of theirs who live in the Aleutian Islands in…