Turn the [Boat] Around – Sailing Windara

The day started with a muted but beautiful sunrise, and we hauled anchor around 0830. We had a warm, sunny day but barely any wind so we found ourselves motoring most of the way up the Sea of Abaco. I would have loved to be able to stop at Allans-Pensacola or Powell Cay, but there was no time. As we always do on offshore passages, we sent our float plan to our families and to Jamie Gifford, who would be helping us with weather routing once again.

We checked weather throughout the day, and conditions continued to look good. We knew there were storms rolling off the Florida coast, but all the models showed them moving north and breaking up as they got offshore. It wasn’t an ideal forecast, but we’d had a few weather chats with Jamie during the week and we all agreed it was a good window once we got past the storms. After that, the window shut down again for several days. We checked in with Jamie but didn’t hear from him most of the day.

Chris made an awesome eggplant parmesan for dinenr, and crew spirits were high. As sunset came on, we could see the thunderstorms in the far distance as the sun sank behind the clouds. I took over the watch shortly after sunset and Chris had me slow down as he checked again to see if we’d heard from Jamie. He came up and simply said, “Melissa, turn the boat around.” I didn’t hesitate. Jamie looked at the way the system was developing, and the window was no longer there – the storms were growing and as he put it, the lightning in the Gulf Stream was “apocalyptic.”

The closest anchorage was Little Sale Cay, about 30 nm back in the direction we’d come from, and while it quite frankly sucked to turn around and retrace that much distance, the alternative was far less palatable. We kicked up the engine and ran before the storm, which was now getting visibly closer. When I came off watch, I tried to get some rest, just in case another opportunity didn’t present itself. I could see constant flashes of lightning as I drifted in and out of a fitful rest. I came back on deck as we approached Little Sale, and things had quieted down. We dropped anchor just after midnight, and it turned out we weren’t alone – the light that we first thought was the charted light at the tip of the island turned out to be a small trawler at anchor.

Once we got the anchor down, we all crashed hard, exhausted from a long day and the mental fatigue of preparing for a passage and finding ourselves instead running from a storm. When I said I wasn’t ready to leave the Bahamas, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind!