Windy Roatan Requires Attitude Adjustment
22 February 2014 | Caye Harbour Lodge Dock, French Cay Harbour
Beth / 30 and mucho windy
We’ve had an odd kind of a week – weatherwise, attitudewise, timewise.
The East wind has been blowing like stink for the last 6 days and it looks likely to blow for 2 more days. Chris Parker says Roatan is centred in the middle of a 100 mile wide, stationary band of wind.
Since we couldn’t go comfortably east, it seemed like a good idea to come back here to French Cay Harbour to reprovision. And then it seemed like a good idea to tie up to the dock at Caye Harbour Lodge. But it has all resulted in frustration, fatigue, aimlessness, and headaches.
We tied up here on Monday, thinking it was just for overnight, but the wind is blowing us hard on the dock, there are shallow areas all around us, and getting off is not as easy as just untying the lines and powering up. We knew the wind would build for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and we decided we might as well stay here as get out into the anchorage and worry about our anchor holding in 25 kt winds. Part of the reason we are feeling a little skittish about going there in these winds is because that is where we had our “re-anchor 3 times in one night” experience last year. And the harbour has emptied out – only 7 boats there when it can hold triple that number. It is just not a good wind for this harbour.
Around at the back of Fantasy Island and at Brooksey’s Point, it is pleasant with just enough wind to keep the bugs away, but we used up a fair bit of the cruising kitty allotted to dockage when we were here before. We haven’t put the dinghy in the water because we don’t want it slamming around the dock, and it’s too rough to put the motor on and off every time we lower and lift it on the davits, and we aren’t sure enough of their stability to raise the dinghy with the motor on.
We are frustrated with not being able to go east like we wanted. We are immensely tired of the wind that bounces us on the dock, makes our mooring lines creak and stretch and groan, makes the wind generator roar (although we have no power worries, that’s for sure!) crunches our fenders so that I’m surprised they haven’t burst. We are irritated with our inability to move and questioning what we might have done differently. Our heads ache from the endless blowing, and we feel salty again within minutes of showering. We are really tired of this! And we wonder if we will ever get to Guanaja or if we should forget that whole idea and go east and/or north to Belize where we explored last year.
So it is attitude adjustment time!
Jim and I are both tackling little jobs everyday – laundry, checking lines and electrical connections, cleaning floors and decks (although salt spray in the air makes short work of that brief freshening up), sorting lockers, reviewing charts and entering future waypoints – so that we feel like we’ve accomplished something. We go for a walk everyday – to Eldon’s grocery store and the barbershop at the Megaplaza, to Jack’s Grill at Roatan Yacht Club for lunch (and that place is empty now with so many boats gone elsewhere) and yesterday over to Brooksey’s Point Marina to watch the Olympic men’s hockey game with the play by play in Spanish. Rah! Rah! Yeah Canada!
We go up to the bar here each evening to buy a glass of wine (“payment” for our dockage) and look over the harbour, and chat with anyone who happens to be there. Tim and Patsy (Sound Spirit) come by regularly and we’ve enjoyed meeting them, and Donna, the owner is a sweet young woman who tells us we are welcome to stay on the dock at no charge as long as we want.
We remind ourselves of our decision to go where the wind blows, and its counterpoint – staying still when the wind requires that. We remind ourselves that we still have another month and a half of cruising time left in our season, and we have no destination that we must reach. We remind ourselves that it’s not raining or snowing! We are getting good exercise by walking, and we aren’t spending much money.
We’re not sailing or exploring right now – the parts of this lifestyle that we really love - and we aren’t where we wanted to be. But we are safe, dry, and remembering (or trying hard) to embrace the present and not fret about the past or future. And that’s not a bad thing. (and this iguana doesn't have too much to do with the writing - except he lives in the neighbourhood and I think he's pretty good at adapting!)