A Great Sail to Great Sale
08 April 2012 | Great Sail Cay, Bahamas
Wiley
It is (we are told) common for sailboats to sail across the gulf stream, and then anchor at Memory Rock. Although Memory Rock is a small speck of nothing which offers no protection whatsoever to anchored vessels, we are sure that in calm seas, this probably works out fine.
The problem was that by the time the sun began to show its influence upon the darkness the seas were anything but calm. Waves ran at 4-6 feet, and when I went forward to pull the anchor in, the pull of the boat on the rode was so great that I couldn’t pull the line in at all. This meant that we had to get the anchor in by having Merry at the helm, using the boat’s engine to drive the boat up to the anchor, while I pulled in the anchor rode (we have 200 feet of 1” nylon 3 strand line and 60 feet of 3/8” chain) and stuff it into the anchor locker. This is common practice for sailors but after an experience getting the anchor rode tangled around a prop years ago I am hesitant to use this method. For only the second time on our journey we wore our geeky “marriage savers” - microphone and earphone sets that enable us to hear one another over the noise of the wind, waves, and engine. I would say, “go port” or “go starboard”, “more power” etc. and be understood. The whole thing went amazingly well. In minutes, the anchor was up and secured on its roller, the anchor rode was packed in the locker, and we were off to the races!
Winds were out of the SW at 10-15 knots - a broad reach - after we turned to head for Great Sale Cay. The seas were such that there was no prospect of our being able to locate dolphin, anchor the boat, go over the side to swim with them, and then spend a second night at anchor on the Little Bahama Banks. We did head north toward White Sand Bank, but only to get a deeper channel to navigate to the east. We motor sailed with the jib up all day. We averaged six knots - a fast passage for Les Miserables, or any other 30 foot sloop. We had been anxious about whether we could get to Great Sale Cay before nightfall, but we made it with time to spare.
Since the wind was mostly from the south as we approached Great Sale Cay, we decided to anchor on the NW side of the island. As we anchored, we saw a big (45-50 foot) Hunter sailboat anchored with is furling mainsail out, and it soon became evident that they couldn’t get it to furl into their mast as it is designed to do. They struggled with it for perhaps an hour before they fixed whatever was wrong and finally got it furled up inside the mast. It could have been a very bad problem for them if this had happened just before the onset of a storm, when it is important to “shorten” sail. Our lazyjacks, an inexpensive, simple system for flaking the mainsail back onto the boom looked like a better deal than the expensive and complicated mast-roller furling main on the big yacht sharing our anchorage. Simplicity often rules - especially with sailboats.
The sea was calm in the lee of Great Sale Cay, and I used mask fins and snorkel to once again “dive the anchor”, finding that our Bruce anchor was well buried in a sandy bottom. It started to lightly rain and we went to sleep confident that we would have a quiet night.