Bloody Hells, Spanish Wells
What a night. The thunderstorm started around 1am. And continued on and off until around 5am. And this time it was close.
All is well for us, though none of us slept well. We know someone much further south that saw 62 knots of wind. That's almost category 1 hurricane force! Super scary...
Other friends (not too far south of us, the new owners of our old boat) had more intense lightning than we did, but thankfully they came out of it OK.
We checked the weather in the morning, as is our routine, to make sure that tomorrow's planned departure is still OK. It was, so we finished breakfast and coffee/tea.
It took minimal time to prepare for the short motor trip north to the town of Spanish Wells, where we dropped anchor a comfortable distance from other boats.
We needed to go to customs to check out of the country, and to acquire the important departure clearance paperwork that Bermuda will need in order to check us in. While there, we planned to drop off some trash and do some opportunistic grocery shopping.
The dinghy ride in to the bay was splashy. The forecast called for no winds and flat seas, and we were experiencing exactly not that.
Once we got past the entrance channel to the bay, things calmed down nicely. We still had a number of dry spots on our clothes, but we would save those for the return trip back to the boat.
The town of Spanish Wells is lovely. There was some heavy construction going on to expand the dock frontage. As is typical in the Bahamas, homes and buildings are painted bright colors. People are driving on the road that parallels the waterway, many in battery powered golf carts, some in gas powered cars and small trucks, and a lone man driving a gas powered scooter.
It took us a little while to locate the dinghy dock, and a little longer to tie the dinghy up to the dock so that it wouldn't get pushed under the dock and damage the engine.
The customs office was a short walk from the dock. The Bahamas uses an online system for checking in and out that is called "Click2Clear". It's terrible, confusing, and very error prone. And you still need to go in to the office. Also, in this case, it wouldn't work because the people who are supposed to process the entry from February (when Andira entered the Bahamas) hadn't done so. The state was still "being processed".
We showed up at the customs office, and the officer asked if we had done the Click2Clear thing. We showed him that we tried, but there was a problem. He looked in the system, found our information, chuckled, and said "Yeah, that happens."
They made a call and got someone to finish the process. He said give it 10 minutes and come back, so we went to a nearby grocery store to see if they had anything we might want. They did have a few odds and ends, but nothing great. Still, we got what they had.
With our small bag of groceries, we wandered back up the road in search of some shade to check the online system and see if we could finish the process on our cell phones. Thankfully, it worked!
We stumbled our way through the web pages (my vague recollection of the process from years ago helped), added me as crew, and got it submitted.
Another short walk back to the customs office had us interacting with the officer again. He confirmed that everything was in order, and asked if we had paid the $75 fee online. We confirmed that the system wouldn't let us, to which he smiled and nodded - this, too, is a common occurrence. He made a few calls to get the payment system working, and finally everything was complete. The office handed us the departure clearance form.
Aside from the online system issues, the process wasn't too bad, and the people we interacted with were very nice and helpful.
There is another grocery store farther north in town, but we decided that we'd had enough fun for the morning, so we went back to the dinghy and back to the boat, arriving not completely soaked, but a far stretch from damp.
Before raising the dinghy, we had one task to perform. The liferaft on Outremer boats is located up front, in a cradle at the rear of the trampoline. It's not uncommon for a big wave to hit the liferaft and break the straps holding it in place. We know of at least 3 instances of this happening, one being yesterday.
Two days ago, we had installed a rope to act as a backup for the straps, and we needed to secure the rope at the bottom of the cradle to ensure that a wave wouldn't knock it out from under the cradle.
With this job done, we raised the dinghy, raised anchor, and set sail west toward Egg Island, where we would spend the night before launching for Bermuda in the morning.
Or so we thought...
The anchorage is beautiful, the waters turquoise blue. The sea state was a bit rolly, but not too bad. I swam around the boat to check that the anchor had set properly, to look for potential shallow obstacles that the boat could hit if we swung around on anchor, and to clean the "speed log", a sensor that detects how fast the boat is moving through the water. All was well.
Then we checked the weather forecast. It was completely different. Utter garbage. Not even a little bit like what we saw this morning. Or yesterday afternoon. sigh
I can't really describe the range of emotions we were feeling. Anger, denial, frustration, hopelessness, distrust, incredulity...those kind of scratch the surface. Even worse, what will the forecasts say tomorrow? Or the next day?
I feel like we evaluated our options for hours. At the end, we've decided that while the forecast tomorrow looks very different, and isn't great, it's "not great" in the slower and safer direction. We can deal with this.
Most likely, we will check the forecasts in the morning, and if things continue to look "not great" in the safer direction, then we will go. Even if they look very different from both updates today, safe and slow is OK.