Heading to the Bahamas

Our longest passage yet…at least by ourselves. When we crossed the Atlantic, that was 15 days at sea and we had two crewmen on board to help with the workload. Maggie and I are now setting out on a 6 day passage by ourselves from Sint Maarten (the Dutch side spelling) to Long Island, Bahamas. Long Island is partway up the Bahamas and so quite a bit further than we would go if this was not in the time of covid. Long Island is one of the Bahamian immigration ports that accepts international travelers, so we need to go there.

So 6 days at sea by ourselves! We will consider this a successful passage if we are both still on the boat when we arrive! The first couple of days the wind was pretty rockin! It was coming from behind and right, a point of sail called Broad Reaching. It is a nice, comfortable and fast way to sail. This being the edge of the Atlantic, with the wind coming from out over the ocean, the waves/swell was fairly substantial. The prediction was calling for 2m swell, but I figure we had 3m for most of the first couple of days. With the waves coming at us from behind, we would surf down the face as they passed under us. Our speed was really good doing this. A few times we saw 11kts on the through-the-water speed sensor. Adiona gives a little bit of a hum when she goes faster than about 10kts.

On the second day we caught a couple of fish, and lost them all…dammit. The first one was a tuna. My god they are feisty. The hook was about 200ft behind the boat, and that tuna was leaping high out of the water and thrashing about madly. He managed to spit the hook after 30 seconds or so. That would have been a challenge to land. The next hit we got was a swordfish. Again, fairly feisty. Did not get a really good look at it, but a couple of glimpses before it got away sure looked swordfishy. It was a pretty good size too, about 4ft. And then we finally landed one. A 32in long barracuda ended up filleted in our freezer.

I am really noticing how crappy our main batteries are right now. Part of this is that we have not been on shore power since on the hard in Grenada, so our batteries have never been completely topped off since. Part of the problem with the AGM lead acid batteries we have is that charging them is kind of like trying to fill a 50gal drum with a straw. We need to run the generator, or one of the main engines about 3hrs a day during passage to just barely keep up with our electrical use. On passage, the autopilot adds a significant electrical load to the system.

And I can’t imagine trying to do this without an autopilot and just two people. That would be so exhausting. Fortunately our autopilot is behaving well (knock on wood), although for some reason the compass connected to it was showing a reciprocal bearing instead of the direction we were going. So one of the last things we did in Sint Maarten was do an autopilot fluxgate compass calibration which involved us doing donuts with Adiona in the middle of the bay.

On the first couple of days the wind shifted to almost straight downwind at 30kts. With the boat doing almost 10 most of the time, that gave us a nice comfortable 20kts of wind behind us, so we poled out the jib opposite to the main and went that way for almost 2 days.

On the 4th day the wind dropped to 15, so we put away the jib and dug out the spinnaker. We went all day, all night, and through to noon on the 5th day riding the spinnaker and main.

Then the wind dropped to barely moving at 8kts, so we are motoring for a few hours until the wind comes back. Also take that opportunity to charge up the batteries more than we have been able to in a while.

On the fifth day we entered Bahamian waters. We are sailing/motoring along the north coast of Mayaguana Island, and Long Island is about 24 hours ahead of us if we can keep up this pace. It will be hard to do unless we motor because the wind is expected to only come back to about 12kts. This time it will be on the side, so time to switch sails and try out the Code D sail (a huge, lightweight sail designed for this kind of condition).

So far on this passage we have broken a couple of things. My adventures with the cooling water pump on the generator are continuing. Last year in Saskatoon I had a replacement shaft manufactured for it, and it was working great! All my water flow problems seemed to be solved. Unfortunately it seems to have been made of the wrong kind of stainless steel, as it is corroding away at a furious pace already in the hot seawater, and is losing suction again. So I think we will just bite the bullet and get a new pump (they don’t sell just the shaft). Also, the freezer is giving us a little grief as well. The compressor never seems to shut off. It cools, but never stops. I still have not figured out why. It is also a serious strain on our electrical power, so we have taken to turning it off and on manually.

The wind has died, and we have to motor for 10 hours to make it in to Bahamas before our covid deadline is up. We have heard that they are forgiving of cruisers coming in later than the 5 days they allow, but we don’t want to test them if we don’t have to, and we are kind of tired. By motoring we can get in before dark and not have to wait offshore until the morning. Do NOT want to go into an unknown bay, with lots of dangerous shallows without being able to see them clearly.