Challenges, part 2
Tim ended up spending eight days in the hospital in Nassau. He was well cared for, and the doctors were not going to mess around with the intensity of infection he presented. I ricocheted between the hotel and its surroundings – spring breakers in their teensy thongs, getting their hair braided; horrifically enormous cruise ships vomiting up mounds of shot-glass-seeking tourists; all juxtaposed with the tightly run ship of the hospital, where I had to suit up with gown and booties to visit Tim.
I stayed in Nassau a couple of days, but we decided I would be more useful looking after the boat, while the medical staff pumped Tim full of antibiotic cocktails. So, on Wednesday back to Flamingo Charters, back to Black Point, back to Billy. Tim’s sister Monica and her husband Charlie Jennings flew to Nassau on Thursday to clap eyes on Tim, then flew to Black Point to help me move the boat.
The Jennings have made multiple excursions to the Bahamas on power boats, and Monica, of course, grew up on the family sailboat with Tim and their parents in the 1980s. But I don’t think they would call themselves sailors. They arrived on Friday, a week after Tim’s fever began, and I had prepared by making room for them on the boat, taking the gigantic pile of laundry to the laundromat by dinghy, returning with that and what provisions I could gather from the store. I was happy to have things to do to keep busy.
Billy Pilgrim, and a fellow traveller, taken by Monica from the airplane into Black Point.
Lorraine got someone to pick up Monica and Charlie from the tiny Black Point airstrip. I was so relieved to receive them. Our plan was to head north to Nassau so that Tim and Billy could be in the same location. We tucked away their stuff – they brought delicious treats from the US, as well as their dive gear. (Monica is an avid diver, adept at getting lobsters and spear fishing; she may well be part mermaid). We settled in and started moving.
Tim had arranged for his friend Melanie Neale to help us onto the fuel dock at Staniel Cay so that we’d start the trip up north with a full tank. For some time Melanie and her entourage had been intending on a Friday arrival in the Exumas, and Monica had previously sent her some items we needed: some paperwork, a replacement for our failed satellite phone, and some other necessities. So it was ironic that Monica got to me first. We met Melanie in Big Majors Spot – she navigated the trickeries of current and wind at the dock, we tanked up and were on our way.
Charlie stood fast at the helm—learning the idiosyncracies of our 34-year old diesel sailboat’s steering and throttle, a far cry from the gasoline-powered, bow thruster-type boats he’s used to driving. We headed to Cambridge Cay, a place that Tim and I had visited, so there were breadcrumbs for him to follow left on our electronic mapping software. Cambridge Cay is the start of the Exumas Land and Sea Park, which specifically prohibits any kind of fishing, but it’s a very protected place to spend the night. All their mooring balls were spoken for, so we had to anchor. It had been a long day, and Charlie and I hadn’t yet developed our communication skills for the anchoring process, so it was a little stressful when our first attempt at anchoring dragged. Once we turned off the engine, Monica dove down to check that the anchor was buried in the sand. Taunting her while she was down there, she saw some plump park-protected fish and a lobster she was not able to get us for dinner. It was a little rough on her soul.
Charlie at the helm
The weather report told us more big winds were on their way. We had to weigh being in Cambridge Cay, a fairly protected spot with spotty cell service, but on an anchor (which can drag) or heading to Warderick Wells, deeper in the park with no cell service, but the possibility of a mooring ball. Without a mooring ball at Warderick, we’d be more exposed to the winds coming from the north. We decided, somewhat nervously, to gamble on leaving Cambridge Cay the next day, making it safely over some very skinny areas. Monica, having spent some nights aground on the boat of her childhood, was vigilant about announcing depths when we got to the shallow spots. As we headed north the wind increased and we breathed easier when we were able to spot some empty mooring balls through the bobbing binoculars.
A mooring ball is a float that has a pendant (pronounced pennant) or strong rope attached to it which is attached to a chain, attached to a large permanent weight on the water’s bottom. A boat’s anchor is just a hook of one kind or another wedged into sand or mud, and if the boat is moving vigorously up and down in big waves, it is possible the anchor could work loose and you would be floating free. When you’re attached to a mooring ball, however, you should be staying where you want to be. So we were happy to have one, but by this point the seas were pretty feisty, making it a challenge to hook the pendant and tie off. Monica and I got it on the second try, but only on one side. The real key is to have one rope on each side of the boat threaded through the eye of the pendant so that if one rope were to fail, you’d still have the other one. So we lowered the dinghy, and Charlie, with the longest arms, stayed on board so we could hand things back and forth. As the dinghy bucked and leaped, Monica and I were able to get the job done, although there were moments it looked like the dinghy was going to smash us upwards into the bow anchor on deck!
Monica and Charlie head ashore for some terra firma.
We breathed a sigh of relief once we were all on board Billy again, safe and sound. Even though the wind howled all night, causing my homely DIY bimini top to flap and rattle all night long, we slept much better on the mooring than we had on the anchor the day before. We spent two days at Warderick Wells to wait out the high winds, a beautiful place with many wonders to explore. Monica and Charlie decided to take a little time off the boat on Sunday, so Charlie could feel the earth under his feet for a little while. Readers may remember my previous post about Boo Boo Hill, where visitors leave a token as an offering to Poseidon. I told Monica to look for ours but wouldn’t tell her what it was or what it looked like. While the Jennings were taking their walk, I was able to install the satellite phone replacement, so we were able to communicate with the outside world even without cell service. Tim was relieved to know where and how we were from his lonely hospital bed. When Monica and Charlie came back from their land excursion a few hours later, she was frustrated: they had looked and looked but never found Billy Pilgrim’s offering. She left a penny next to the offering she gravitated to most. When she showed me the photograph, I nearly fell over. It was right next to my Ode to Poseidon!
Coincidence? I think not.
Sadly, it may be that Poseidon felt underappreciated by the penny. Although the fancy satellite phone gave us the latest weather updates, and Monday’s wind was meant to be lively but not too much so, yet as we headed out into deep water in order to go north towards Highbourne Cay the winds were more than the 15 knots predicted. Rain spit down upon us, perhaps the first I’d experienced in our five weeks in the Bahamas. The boat pitched and rolled. I rolled out the staysail to help smooth our ride, but it was a bumpy one. We’d get going and then hit a big wave which slowed down our speed way down. Eventually we changed direction to get to our destination, Highbourne Cay, and when we did, the staysail was not so helpful. In pulling it in, the furling line snapped right off. I stared with shock at the frayed rope in my hand. Now we had a sail out with no simple way to put it away. The boat lurched, the wind howled, and waves were crashing over the bow. With the satellite phone we were able to consult with Tim in his hospital bed, and he had two alternatives: a) go up on the bow and try to roll the sail up by hand (against the force of the wind), or b) find the halyard (the rope that holds the sail up at the top) and drop the sail. But, he warned: be sure to drop the staysail halyard, NOT the genoa halyard, which would introduce another problem altogether. Tim was pretty confident the staysail halyard was the one farther back. In either scenario, the two sheets (the ropes that control the sail) if loose in the hard wind, could really whip around and cause some damage to whomever was up on the bow. Neither option sounded terribly appealing.
View of another boat sharing the abundant winds with us
I took a deep breath and suited up and clipped in and went up to the bow to look at the situation. Waves crashed over me now and again. I went up there three or four times to see what I thought of the plans. If I turned the staysail furler by hand, how could I hold it in place as I went? If I used a wrench there was the threat of it flying off and whapping me in the face. It was hard to imagine how to make it work. But the idea of releasing the wrong halyard, or dealing with the flailing lines didn’t sound great either. Charlie steered so that the staysail would be useful as long as he could, but eventually we were getting toward Highbourne and would need to turn to anchor. We couldn’t do it with the sail up—it would prevent Charlie from being able to adequately control the boat. So Charlie steered into the wind to release pressure on the sail, while I went up to the bow again and bit by bit turned the furler so as to roll it up. Monica joined me (also, of course, lifejacketed, harnessed, and clipped in) and we got it completely rolled. Monica released one of the sheets so that we could wrap it around the sail and tie it tight. We were so relieved and excited! Until…whap whap whap, the top of the sail loosed itself and caught the wind and was a power unto itself. We tried different ways to get control of the sail back but to no avail. Monica and I were brainstorming as fast as we could, she said “We’ve got to call someone who can help us!” But there was no time to call or for someone to come. It was time to, as we were referring to it, defuse the bomb. The staysail halyard runs inside the mast, so you can’t see that the red rope with the white flecks belongs to the staysail and the white rope with the red flecks is the jib. Tim thought the aft line was the one and I took a leap of faith. As I let out a little bit of halyard, I could see indeed the top of the staysail was lowering on the red line. Bit by bit we were able to lower the sail, enough to stuff it into the hatch as we went, so that Charlie, who’d been steering the boat all day, could finally get us into the lee of Highbourne Cay and we were able to anchor. (Anchoring had its own complications, but we eventually got it done, and Monica dove on it and we felt confident it was going to hold).
Fun times
Phew.
Tuesday awoke sunny and clear with a gentle breeze. We were on our last leg—Highbourne to Nassau was something more than 30 miles, some of which cross the Yellow Bank, not terribly deep and punctuated with coral heads. Compared to the adventures of Monday, slaloming around coral heads you can see in the crystalline waters seemed like a breeze. We were headed to a marina Tim and I had been to previously, Palm Cay. It’s a lovely spot, but the entrance to the marina is shallow and narrow and winding and the dockage is also very tight. I knew our little team, even though tightly forged by our recent experience, was not qualified to navigate that tight entrance.
A moment of peace for Monica on the last leg of the trip to Nassau.
Fortunately, Tim is friendly with a lot of people in the boating world, and one of those people is Erin Minner, Charter Manager for the Americas for Dream Yacht Charters. In the Bahamas, Dream Yacht Charters runs out of Palm Cay Marina. So, again, from his hospital bed, Tim was able to coordinate with Erin to have a Dream Yacht Captain come out to meet us and safely bring the boat in. We were just supposed to let them know when we were close and they’d come out. We wondered among ourselves, how would the transfer work out here in the open water? We told them we were a few miles out, and when we were about a mile away we saw a center-console boat speeding toward us, but we figured it was a fishing vessel. But they came right at us, pulled up alongside while we were both moving, and off stepped Ray, our captain, with no ropes, wearing Adidas slides on his feet, with socks no less! An impressive beginning. Ray took a minute to assess the situation, and took us in through the winding slender shallow entrance to Palm Cay, brought the boat gently onto the fuel dock, and then afterward elegantly pirouetted us into the cramped slip. It was a thing of beauty.
I can’t express how much we appreciate Ray.
So happy and relieved to be tied up at the dock, we walked toward a celebratory lunch and I got a text from Tim—he was being released from the hospital that afternoon, a day early! His parents had gotten us a hotel room for his convalescence. Monica, Charlie, and I went to the restaurant and had a delicious frozen drink and toasted our experience. We’d been through an awful lot together in the past few days, even if, as Charlie said, the three of us together did not make up one Tim. But we did it. And now? Our plans now are to work on getting Timbeaux back on his feet.
