18 hour passage through the Bahamas
Days at sea: 4
Days remaining: 21
We spent the day in Andros, the largest Bahamian island, drinking with some friends we made first thing in the morning. Immediately after making land on our dinghy around 11am I saw a couple coming out of a seaside bar. I asked them how to get to town and they offered to take us. We wound up spending the day with them, getting a tour of the island and drinking at a bunch of local establishments.
I’ll try and write about that tomorrow.
Now, I want to quickly talk about our passage from Bimini to Andros. I am not sober, so this will be brief as I need to start to make tacos and watch a K-drama I’m addicted to, stat.
Yesterday we left our anchorage deep inside of Bimini Island at 7am, right as day was breaking. After all of the necessary preparations we were heading down the channel with a barge carrying a crane right behind us, slowly passing the seafront cottages of the town.
I was on the bow eating fruit with granola, taking in the pleasant daybreak scene, when all of a sudden I heard the engine die. “Matt! Can you get back here? The engine died. I need your help,” came the call of the captain.
We began to troubleshoot as to why the engine might have died mysteriously. I really wanted us to solve this problem quickly for two reasons. One, we were without power and slowly floating into a field of coral, where we would eventually ground. And two, we need to get East fast as I needed to get to a specific island with good internet from which to attend an online conference in a couple days.
As we were discussing the potential issues a large fishing vessel pulled up along side us. “Hey Cap! You’re losing diesel out of one of your vents!” they yelled.
It turns out Ben had set the tanks to circulate in such a way that one was overfull and forcing diesel out of a ventilation shaft. Easy fix!
Once we got to the open ocean we turned the motor off and played around with sailing in rather low wind. The eta to our destination was 12 hours later, 8pm. We were trying to make it to “The tongue of the Ocean,” an area of the Bahamas where the depth plummets from 20 or so feet down to 5,000 in a very short order. Apparently you can anchor on the 20 foot part and there’s a novelty of being on the boarder of these two ecosystems.
Long story short (forgive me for fast forwarding) we got there at 10pm and the waves from the open ocean were too intense so we decided to power forward to Andros, which had been our destination for the next day, although our ETA would then be around 2am.
I made some coffee, heated up some meat for tacos down below, and we charged it into the pitch blackness.
I wish I could convey to you the feeling of sailing in the dark in the middle of the open ocean. We listened to music and stared at the stars as our giant vessel hustled along at around 7 knots, tilted and cutting though the water towards our destination, still hours away.
Gazing at the stars, I realized I hadn’t done that in years, largely due to being in New York where there are only about 8 stars. Not quite worth contemplating. The night sky stimulated my thinking and surfaced issues that I needed to process. I tried to feel grateful. I tried to wrap my mind around the unutterable novelty of being on a sailboat in the middle of the sea with nothing around but black water, faint white caps, a distant blinking red buoy with the glow of some distant, anonymous island behind it, infinitely remote in the black sea.
Clouds rolled in that were only visible as they obscured the stars. Large thunderheads, three imposing towers of them from the east. In the distance in front of us lightning ignited the sky every few minutes. Would we hit that storm? Would it become a squal in the middle of the night?
We passed large yachts on the channel heading back toward Bimini and probably the United States. Ships in the night. We passed strange barges in disrepair going from where and to where is anybody’s guess. Off on the horizon a collection of immense white buildings floated, glowing atop the placid sea. We decided they must be a fleet of cruise ships, out there together in the middle of nowhere for some unknown reason.
Shooting stars shot by. Satellites pulsed. There was a feeling of eternity.
We pulled in to our anchorage at 2am, beat, listening to our tenth album of the night which happened to be Coldplay’s Rush of Blood to the Head. I got out on to the bow with a flashlight and navigated us around a buoy and into a safe anchorage that would keep the swell down for the night.
Due to the exhaustion of the present day, I can’t offer better representation for this long passage. But It was beautiful, memorable, and other-worldly. I hope we get the chance to do it again.
