After closely monitoring the weather, the forecast for big winds during the week moderated and Sunday looked like the perfect opportunity to head north in extremely light air. After returning from Harbour Island, we spent Saturday night anchored off Spanish Wells and got underway just before dawn. We had a gorgeous sunrise, and while we were sad to leave, it felt so good to be on the move again.
Chris has been itching for a chance to try out our spinnaker – I’ve been slightly more apprehensive. My experience with a spinnaker has been during racing (we flew the kite on our friend’s Leopard 39 a couple times, but I was at the helm), and I’m well acquainted with the “elegant chaos” that is setting and dousing when the spinnaker is flown from the hatch. Windara’s spinnaker is in a sock, which makes it much easier to deploy and douse without a full race crew. Given a 3-4kt breeze and gentle ocean rollers, I figured this was a perfect opportunity to overcome my discomfort and try it out. It turned out to be a lot easier than I’d feared. Even though it’s the “small” kite, it’s pretty massive, and we were able to do about 3kts in 4kts of breeze. I got in a little trimming practice and while I wouldn’t say my skills are race-ready, I at least started to get a feel for it.
We had to motor more than we’d like as the wind dropped to just about zero, but it was still a great crossing. In addition to getting the spinnaker out a couple times, we got to see four pods of pilot whales and a couple tropicbirds along the way.
We entered the Sea of Abaco through Little Harbour Cut, which was flat and calm as could be. There are 16 boats anchored up at Lynyard, which is way more than we saw last year. It will be interesting to see whether the rest of the Abacos are busier too.