at anchor in Crab Cay, Abacos, March 21

photo: rain at Crab Cay


[Hilde's log]





I haven’t set foot out of the cabin all day. After a ripping seven hour sail yesterday, I found that I was simply exhausted today. We had talked about sailing the 20 miles to Green Turtle Cay, where our friends Dick and Libby, aboard Tarwathie, are anchored, but I just couldn’t face it. Even now, after resting and/or napping the entire day, I am tired just from making dinner.

Raven sailed from Great Sale Cay to Crab Cay yesterday, a distance of about 40 nautical miles, in about 7 hours. She boot-scooted along at over 6 knots the entire way, most of the time between 6.5 and 6.8, rigged with the yankee and staysail. The wind was from the south almost the entire trip, at 15 to 22 knots, and once we turned the northern corner above Great Sale, we sailed on a single starboard tack the entire way, varying from our course only a few degrees with a gentle nudge or two to George’s wind vane control lines to correct our angle. Raven rocked along like a hobby horse, and other than being covered in salt spray and buffeted by the wind all day, it was an easy trip. However, I found that I came the last few hours on adrenalin, because once we anchored, I just collapsed on the settee. I roused once when an enormous black cloud rolled in with a cold front from the north about an hour after we arrived, dumping rain which washed Raven’s salty decks and cooled off the air ten degrees. We had beans and Rice o’ Roni for dinner, and I had to drag myself up to make that and clean up. David fell asleep on the settee about 8. I had promised myself a bath, so I slopped around in the head for 30 minutes and he never stirred. He woke briefly to shut off the anchor alarm and join me in the v-berth, where he promptly fell back asleep and I lay there, too exhausted to sleep, watching the full moon break through mottled black clouds out the starboard porthole. I finally donned my earphones and listened to my sole CD, a weird little Tony Bennett disc of duets with other famous singers that I picked up for free at a sailors’ exchange. It put me to sleep by the middle of the disc.

We had tried to make the same trek from Great Sale Cay to Crab Cay on Wednesday (the day before our successful journey) but turned back about two hours into the trip. We had anchored on the NW side of Great Sale, alongside a beautiful beach, and enjoyed gently lapping water and blue skies. David forgot to set his alarm and missed the 6 a.m. forecast, but the weather looked okay, so we decided to give it a shot. Alas! The wind was from the East, and once we turned into it north of Great Sale, it blasted us with 24 to 28 knots, setting up such a violent motion that the starboard settee (which we had neglected to pin) slid completely out into the cabin passageway, blocking the head (major catastrophe, necessitating the use of our bucket in the cockpit), and the printer did a back flip out of its home by the nav station and landed on the galley floor. David wrestled with the sails, I wrestled with the helm, both of us swore at the chop, and when we discovered that we could make little headway to our course and were mostly tacking back and forth, we gave up and bumped our way back to our little cove, chastened. Back at the cove, we had blue skies, 12 knots of wind, and gently lapping waves – because we were protected from that strong east wind.

David tried and failed to get the noon forecast (someone was sending a fax over that frequency!!) and the 6 p.m. forecast as well because Iron Mike broadcast the forecasts out of order. (Iron Mike is the computerized voice of NOAA for offshore weather broadcasts; Perfect Paul is the NOAA’s voice for coastal reports – who thinks up this stuff?) I was astonished that it was possible to miss three forecasts in a row. David wrote up a lovely, concise description of the whole misbegotten trip, including lessons learned, that I hope he will post. We decided to chalk the whole thing up as a learning experience and it certainly put the following day’s sail in a perfect light, tiring or not.

So here we are, waiting for the beautiful weather forecast for tomorrow, when we plan to chug down to Green Turtle and enjoy the benefits of civilization, which we hope include email access and another pina colada.